As a quality assurance analyst, I often feel handcuffed with the result of my findings and for multiple other reasons.
Time Constraint
What is the scope of my testing? I am often given low amount of hours to complete my testing for an iteration. Most often then not, a huge caveat prevent me from continuing testing. I have to wait for the fix from the dev team before resuming testing.
Scope
I rarely worked with complete specs, business rules. Even though QA processes put emphasis on participation in every stage of development cycle, I am briefed here at the end of the funnel when the project team has eaten all its available time and client is waiting!
Improving the process
I have had the chance to work with a mandate of improving development cycle process, particularly the testing process. I had 'carte blanche' and the director of development felt happy with my ideas. The bottleneck was to sell these ideas to the developers which were acting as the testers whenever testing was needed.
After a few years, thinking, as developers do, that anyone can be a tester, I realized Quality Assurance Analyst was a job of its own, and requires a specific mentality, great communication skills, capacity of resilience, diligence, above average organization skills, and many other attributes.
Software/Web QA Analyst in general is just starting to get recognition. The key is to keep focus and continue imagine better software and processes.
