Insights on the Evolving Role and Responsibilities of Test Engineers

Good Monday to everyone! Today we hear from Lv Chong’en, a test veteran with seven years of experience in the Technical Expansion R&D Testing Team, who shares practical insights from his testing career.

He recounts how a misleading advertisement about testing being a lucrative "sunrise industry" led him to choose testing over development, a decision that shaped his professional growth over the past seven years.

Several Changes

1. First change: Initially enjoyed finding hidden bugs, but realized manual testing alone could not meet extreme demands, prompting the adoption of testing tools.

2. Second change: Immersed in scripting and various testing tools, believing technology was the best way to solve testing problems; automation output was high but solutions were narrow.

3. Third change: Shifted focus to quality itself, aiming to improve quality before coding, i.e., defect prevention.

4. Fourth change: Re‑thought the responsibilities of a test engineer, emphasizing the role of helping projects improve quality .

Understanding the Responsibilities of Test Engineers

He breaks down the concept of "help" into several concrete actions:

• When product managers overlook user scenarios, test engineers should kindly point out issues and provide reasonable suggestions to aid design.

• When developers miss edge‑case scenarios, test engineers should highlight problems and propose solutions.

• When testing processes face delays or bottlenecks, test engineers should identify root causes, communicate with team leads, and suggest improvements.

• Providing solutions alongside problem identification maximizes the impact of help, as testing is the final gate in the development pipeline.

Improving Quality

1. Define quality from multiple perspectives: developers may view bug‑free releases as quality, while product/business teams focus on user satisfaction.

2. Quantify quality using metrics such as bug count and severity, bug convergence curves, automation time savings, coverage rates, and product metrics like DAU and PV.

3. Enhance quality through process optimization and technical guarantees; for detailed practices, refer to the team’s "Mobile Testing Pitfall Guide".

How to Fulfill Test Engineer Responsibilities

He suggests that delivering features on schedule without online bugs already marks an excellent test engineer, but to boost core competitiveness, one should pursue broader growth:

• Use product data (e.g., PV) to support arguments when important features are placed on low‑traffic pages, promoting data‑driven design.

• When upstream/downstream interface integration suffers due to bugs, improve integration quality by conducting smoke tests, participating in design meetings, creating mock tools, and fostering early testing.

Overall, stepping beyond pure testing tasks to engage with other stages of the product lifecycle leads to higher project quality.

Conclusion

The domestic testing industry started relatively late, giving rise to the "test development" role, which combines testing with development to boost efficiency and accelerate team transformation.

Key takeaways:

Identify efficiency pain points in business testing and address them with tools or scripts.

Learn technologies driven by real problems and apply them.

Technical sharing should follow a three‑step handshake: share, confirm learning, and confirm application.

Tools, like products, require continuous feedback and iteration to meet test engineers' needs.

Quantify the benefits of solutions to ensure successful adoption.