Being System Analyst or Quality Assurance?

Less than 2 month after graduated, i got a job as Junior System Analyst. I’m so lucky to passed my interview. Let’s continue the story..

This was my first time i worked at IT Consultant Company. My office build some application for a lot of company and i got project on Nestle Company, the project name was Kitkat Chocolatory. I joined this team when the project already started for 6 months and i saw that the project was messed up. The flow wasn’t user friendly, plenty of bugs appeared, deadline from client was terrible.

This messed up things are tools that were used to be our main Point Of Sale System

Imagine that it should be done for one day before the client want to test the product immediately, oh my goodness! This problem happened because our developers were busy and we ask for help to another developer from outside colleagues and there were miss communication from both of us on developing this application. After our developer finished the task, then we switched the players. Finally they join us!

Our product was Point Of Sale system. There were a lots of vendors who were joined this event from Nestle. Both of them were E.O vendors, Press conference vendors and our team built transaction machine on cashier using web as we called POS system.

My job was to creating use case and architecture for this application. Likewise, we analyze what kind of problems and we have bug a lot. I took the picture of our notes on below this.

Lot of bugs list on white board

Of course i didn’t sleep along night with my colleagues. Two from our programmers were joining the party and i have responsibility to testing or ensure these bugs fixed and clear. Suddenly i realized that how great my colleagues when they solved many bugs. Each bug was resolved unless around 4–7 minutes. I thought that it will be difficult because i didn’t understand the logic to accomplished those bugs. Seems like they were knights for this war. Amazing *applause.

And finally our application was ready to presented on our client. They were appreciated us for the first time. Yes we did it for this project.

Happy vibes after through hard weeks

But on the next day or next week, i always got a task to testing another application. The project were from Telkomsel. Creating UAT or SIT document and testing the application were my daily activities though. Then i realized that is it System analyst job or Quality Assurance job? I’m googling some articles, there were a little bit task to testing for system analyst, but it seems pretty similar with quality assurance to testing, even though there are a lot’s of another task for System analyst job’s like create ERD, Use case, Sequence Diagram, Architecture etc.

Day by day i realized. Definitely System analyst jobs weren’t just creating model visualization case and flow etc. But they have to analyze with more specific to implemented IT as a solution. I think that System analyst have to know some logic knowledge from programming background. It will help their team when they try to analyze where is the part of their concern to fix or give some solution to accomplished development. This is the key. So when the programmer was stuck on technical, System analyst can give some solution with consider about the system flow and the technical.

I realized that i didn’t have a strong logic programming to helped the team. My team always asked me what kind of solution to solved the problem but i couldn’t answer because it was deep technically on Back end programming logic. I tried to learn programming skills but at the end i rather to chose testing team instead of System analyst because i like QA jobs. I like to find any bugs. The interesting thing for the tester is that we know the form of the application first before the client uses our application. We always try to have a good communication when we telling the story of where the bug is. Honestly it’s sounds quite sensitive for the developer, we know that developers have already accomplished a difficult task then you tell the bugs with mispronounce, is it arrogant speak or doesn’t polite when you speak. It will messed up.

Nowadays Quality Assurance mostly have to get experience on automating testing such as Selenium, Katalon, Appium, Jmeter etc. These tools will help us to testing a big case and we don’t have to always repeat our manual testing. Even if these tools need some programming skills, it doesn’t matter for me to learn something new again. This will be my homework then.

This is my story and some of my opinion. I hope you enjoyed the article and thank you for reading!