What is the role of a test engineer?
The role of the professional test engineer determines how to create a process that would test a particular product in manufacturing, quality assurance or related areas, in order to assure that the product meets applicable specifications. They are essential in the IT industry to ensure that an automated product is working according to plan. In short, they are responsible for ensuring that new products and design or production changes to existing products meet design objectives.
Engineers operate in a range of different environments, from testing plant and machinery to the testing of new electronic devices or software applications. Typical duties might include maintaining a safe working environment, designing prototypes, reviewing test solutions with partnering test engineers, analysing infrastructure requirements, managing, training and supporting operators, debugging and isolating problems and writing test procedures and plans. Other opportunities for test engineers are specialised fields within test engineering, usually on very large or highly specialised jobs, for example, software applications testing, quality test engineers, technical test engineers, communications test engineers, and production test engineers.
Test engineers need to be flexible, thorough, self-motivated and have good communication, IT and problem-solving skills.