What other career paths do you suggest for Software QA Analyst?

March 19, 2025 6:15 PM

What other career paths do you suggest for Software QA Analyst?

I have been working at the same company for nearly 13 years. Started off as a Jr QA Analyst to ensure product quality. Department was doing Waterfall software development life cycle in my first 5 years with focus in manual testing (functional and technical specs). Product was more like a desktop application (client-server).

Promoted to Sr QA Analyst after 5th years of service which motivated me to stay. Department went through challenges and adopted Agile software development life cycle. Sprint related work and heavily focus on quick software delivery to ensure customers get value. Product became web-based hosted on cloud platform.

Time flew by without realizing that it was my 10th year. Department went through another phase and my role changed with focus on 70% manual testing and 30% automated testing. This got me excited because it is a good learning experience.

Now, I am thinking about my future career. I feel like there isn't any opportunity to grow upward unless people above me resign. Anyone in a similar situation and was able to transition to something different or similar? At the same time, I am not interested in switching to another company and focus heavily on QA automation (other companies do like 80% QA automation and 20% manual).

Any suggestion on next career move (similar field or new field)? I'm willing to study part time at school but not full time. I am thinking about DevOps or Cloud operations related role. Can't think of anything else.

Also interested to hear other career success stories.

Thank you

posted by Mountain28 to Work & Money (7 answers total)

You can move up from QA to the development side- either QA support, like building testing tools or to the management side, ie: requirements engineering, and then architecture or project management.

I'd say it depends on what you like to do - actual coding or theoretical software design.
I made that move - I started in QA testing, moved to testing and coding QA tools, and had no interest in people managing - that's the top of the QA for my company.

So I moved to requirements. I miss hands-on developing tools for work, but still do it for home stuff. The pay is much better. That's nice. So are the hours. I don't really focus on requirements anymore, moved up many times since then, but still do them more than occasionally as our team has shrank so we each wear many hats now.
posted by The_Vegetables at 7:05 PM on March 19 [1 favorite]

BTW: many of the testers with me also moved on to things like school teaching, connected car testing, machine learning, team leading (they were ok being people managers), finance, and IT software auditing.
posted by The_Vegetables at 7:06 PM on March 19

If you enjoy having a deep understanding of a product and its capabilities/quirks, many B2B SaaS companies are not-so-secretly powered under the hood by folks with titles like Solutions Architect or Implementation Specialist or some other title. These are people who help figure out how to get the product implemented by the various customers and do behind-the-scenes tech stuff to make it happen. This might involve some lightweight scripting to make an integration work, or talking the customer through a decision between self-hosted vs cloud-hosted options, or understanding the way data gets imported or exported between systems and helping them set that up. This role isn't the main point of contact between the company and the customer, but may need to be on some calls with them. (I've never had this role, but I've worked alongside them as coworkers and I've encountered them when buying and implementing software from a vendor.)
posted by rivenwanderer at 10:04 PM on March 19 [2 favorites]

Some of the best software engineers I’ve worked with got their start in SQA. Designing and coding systems such that they are actually testable is a valuable skill.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 6:01 AM on March 20 [4 favorites]

In my industry (which admittedly may be rather niche) QA folks generally move up in one of 2 ways - product management, or project management. Basically, you start defining either the WHAT of the product (via product management) or the HOW (via project management). Within either of those paths there is a ton of career opportunity.

Another option is to lean on the automation / programming side of the QA position, and move into straight software development.
posted by cgg at 8:15 AM on March 20 [1 favorite]

I feel like there isn't any opportunity to grow upward unless people above me resign.

Do you actually want to have their jobs? I've been at the same small company for almost 17 years and I neither want to leave nor have any plans to do so. I have zero concerns about somehow needing to "grow upward" consistently. If you like what you do and are satisfied with your work life, ask yourself if you are inventing a problem where there isn't one.
posted by axiom at 10:59 AM on March 20 [2 favorites]

I think DevOps and Cloud are more like IT than QA (I have done some of both of these). If you also enjoy IT and have enjoyed working around IT people then that is a potential path, but if you haven't then you might want to spend some more time around IT people and ask them about their processes and daily work - it's a completely different way to work than QA.

I think some QA people (like me!) make good people managers as long as we can keep our detail-orientated mitts off of micromanaging people, and learn to embrace the big big picture, including all the bullshit that comes with management and without it despairing yourself or your team. We can also manage developers surprisingly well, I found that the ex-developer managers fell behind on their coding skills very quickly, to the point their senior developers joked about it and tried to keep them out of the high-level interviews and checking anything in, and I was actually the only manager to access the code review data in months (wanted to see how my team was doing at it) despite that being touted as one of the big benefits of managers with development experience. I think deeply understanding the products, processes, customers and quality really helps the non-people side of things.

You can talk to people in roles you are interested in, ask questions about open positions, maybe fill in for a manager who goes on vacation etc, but be a little careful of triggering the "Mountain28 is no longer happy at their job" clause - this might torpedo salary increases and small promotions etc as they will think you might leave soon. Use your charisma to affirm you are happy but wondering where you will be in 10 years or something like that.
posted by meepmeow at 12:01 PM on March 25