The Tools Used by Technical QA Testers vs. Design QA Testers

When it comes to website development, the goal has always been the same: delivering a high-quality and reliable product to consumers. While QA testers may have overlapping objectives, their focus areas and methods differ. Technical/Functional QA Testers and Design QA Testers complement each other but use different tools and approaches, concentrating on either functionality and performance or design and user experience.

In this blog, we will discuss a few different types of QA testing tools: their usages and how these tools help testers to work more effectively.

What Is a QA Testing and QA Testing Tool?

Before we begin, it is important to define what QA testing and QA testing tools are. Quality Assurance (QA) testing is a process used in website development for making sure that everything works the way it should, meeting project objectives, providing a good user experience, and having as few bugs or defects as possible.

QA testing tools are the types of software programs that speed up and simplify this whole process by automatically detecting the issues and contributing to overall quality improvement.

What Is a Technical-Functional QA Tester?

A Technical/Functional QA Tester is responsible for ensuring that a website performs as expected, both functionally and technically. These testers conduct feature tests to verify that all requirements are met and that everything is functioning correctly. Importantly, they also check for bugs or issues that could impact the website's performance.

This involves extensive testing, starting with basic functionalities like logging in and verifying form button responses

Testers check data storage capacity and ensure APIs are correctly connected and retrieving the right data. They will also test integration to ensure that everything is synced properly. They might also do some regression testing on top of that just to ensure that nothing's broken with updates.

What Is a Design QA Tester?

A Design QA Tester specializes in making sure that a website or an application aligns with the original design intent or specifications, maintaining visual consistency, and providing an optimal experience across all screen sizes and devices. These testers focus on confirming that the final product matches the design intentions set by the design team or stakeholders, ensuring that every element, including the layout, color scheme, typography, and imagery, appears as intended across different environments.

Their primary responsibility is to verify and ensure that your web pages, user interfaces, and other areas meet the specific requirements set by project managers, project owners, designers, or stakeholders. These testing tasks may involve a variety of criteria, which could range from functional performance to security, compliance, or other non-user-centric factors.

While they may also conduct usability testing to identify areas for improvement in the user experience, their main goal is to ensure the product meets the specific design and functionality standards required by the project team. Design QA Testers place more emphasis on meeting the established requirements and making sure the website or application functions flawlessly for the end user than they do on strictly adhering to user-centered design principles or predetermined design guidelines.

Check out our blog on the difference between UX, UI Designers, and Web Designers if you are interested in learning more about the differences between these various design roles.

Top QA Testing Tools for Website Functionality

Functional and Technical QA Testers are concerned with the testing of a website's functions, performance, security, and general behavior. They fit into either category mainly based on what website domain they belong to.

Their main goal is to make sure that everything operates as it should, whether that includes button clicks, logging in, or managing load when thousands of users access the system. The following are the major players in each tool category that they use:

Test Automation Tools:

• Selenium: Selenium is mostly used for testing web applications. It allows testers to programmatically simulate user actions like clicking buttons, navigating pages, or entering text into forms.
• Cypress: Cypress is ideal for testing modern JavaScript frameworks (like React, Vue, or Angular). It runs tests directly inside the browser and offers faster, more reliable testing compared to traditional tools like Selenium.
• Puppeteer: Puppeteer is a Node.js library that provides a high-level API to control Chrome or Chromium browsers. It's perfect for testing single-page applications (SPAs) and offers end-to-end testing capabilities.
• Playwright: Playwright is similar to Puppeteer but works with multiple browsers (Chromium, Firefox, and WebKit). It’s used for end-to-end testing, especially for dynamic websites and modern web apps.
• Jest: A popular JavaScript testing framework, Jest is great for testing unit tests and individual components, especially in front-end development. It's commonly used with React applications for testing UI interactions.

Performance Testing Tools:

• Google Lighthouse: Built into Chrome DevTools, Lighthouse tests your website for performance, accessibility, SEO, and best practices. It provides a detailed report with actionable insights to improve site performance.
• WebPageTest: WebPageTest is a web performance testing utility tool that tests whether the performance is like slow internet speeds, multiple devices, and different geographic locations using a tester's ability to simulate.
• GTMetrix: GTMetrix provides information on how well a site loads, such as page speed and loading time, and improvement suggestions. This is beneficial in optimizing the performance of a website. 
• Apache JMeter: JMeter can be used for load testing. This means that JMeter can simulate a lot of users accessing a site at the same moment or time to discover where performance bottlenecks lie in heavy traffic.
• BlazeMeter: BlazeMeter is the cloud-based load testing which runs with Apache JMeter. Websites and mobile apps stress test applications and help developers determine how these applications will perform.
• SpeedCurve: SpeedCurve involves measuring page load speeds, the experience of end-users in conjunction with other performance-indicating metrics, and providing insights into the way users experience the performance of the web. 

Bug Tracking & Management Tools: 

• Jira: Jira helps common projects as well as bug tracking, assign bugs to developers, and keep track of timely solutions. 
• Bugzilla: This is another one of those tools for bug tracking, that keeps together testers and developers as logs to track issues arising during testing.
• Trello: Trello is somewhat more visual and flexible in its management, helping testers with the organization of bug tracking and development activities. Trello works nicely for a small team or for those wanting a simple, very intuitive interface.
• Asana: Another task management tool, Asana well suits sorting bugs, managing deadlines, coordinating testing efforts among the development team. 
• Redmine: A flexible, open-source project management tool that is used for bug tracking, version control, and team collaboration. Workflow customization available to fit much better to particular demands. 

API-testing Tools: 

• Postman: It has a good organization for the API function check by sending a request. 
• Insomnia: A similar good REST and GraphQL API testing tool that offers code generation and response validation features along with another standard simple interface. 
• SoapUI: Another API-testing tool is SoapUI, which provides an excellent environment to test a service for the SOAP and RESTful Web Services to ensure that their service operates accurately. 
• Apigee: Apigee has built-in monitoring, security, and traffic analytics for API test usage. Very useful for doing large-scale API testing and integrations. 
• Paw: This is an API test application on Mac. It supports REST, GraphQL, and various other protocols. It has a phenomenal amount of features for formulating and testing API requests. 

These API testing tools bring the utmost assurance about making a website work according to expectations, perform under pressure, and provide a secure experience to the users. 

Tools for Design QA Testers

Design QA Testers concern themselves with whether the design on a website is as expected and whether that creates an experience that is user-friendly and visually appealing to users. Such tests confirm whether the user interface goes well all through across devices, browsers, and so on.

Here are some tools that QA testers mainly use for website design testing: 

Design Comparison Tools:

• PixelPerfect: It is a plug-in to a browser through which testers could compare the currently displayed UI with design mocks and make sure every element sits at its appropriate position and is designed perfectly for the web. 
• Perfect Pixel: Works like Pixel Perfect; overlaid 'original' design to the page that now has a developed page, thus showing misalignments between design and implementation.
• Browsersync: This accords real-time design testing via multiple browsers or devices as to how the design appears to them. This tool automatically syncs browser actions across different devices.

Screen Recording & Annotation Tools: 

• Loom: Loom makes it simple for testers to record their screen activities while scrolling down a website. It is beneficial to provide real-world feedback on design specifications and the overall user experience.
• BugHerd: BugHerd is a visual feedback tool that allows testers or clients to leave comments directly on a given website. It is a very good tool for capturing design problems and reporting the same to the developing team.
• Snagit: The screen capture tool with screen recording, it's perfect for capturing UI issues and annotating them with comments that illustrate the design problems.

Design & Prototyping Tools: 

• Figma: Figma is an all-purpose design and collaboration tool, but Design QA testers use the tool to assess prototypes to actual implementations. A good use case would be checking for the accuracy of design element implementation.
• Sketch: Like Figma, Sketch is a design tool that testers use to confirm that the UI of a website is in line with the original specifications.

Usability Testing Tool: 

• Hotjar: This usability testing tool helps testers understand how users interact with a website by providing heatmaps, session recordings, and feedback polls so that design testers can pinpoint usability issues. 
• Lookback.io: This tool allows for live usability testing, enabling testers to observe real users interacting with the product and provide feedback regarding its design and user experience.
• Crazy Egg: Crazy Egg is another heatmap tool that shows where users click, scroll, and spend the most time on a page. It helps identify areas that may require design enhancement. 
• UsabilityHub: UsabilityHub allows testers to obtain feedback about design concepts and website components (e.g., navigation, buttons) from a group of real users. It's great for testing specific elements of a website's design. 
• UserTesting: UserTesting allows testers to conduct live usability tests with real users, getting valuable insights into how users navigate the test site and where the friction occurs.

What Are the Key Differences? 

While both QA testers want to ensure a quality user experience, their respective tools serve fundamentally different purposes. On the one hand, technical testers use tools to help them test for functionality, performance, security, and automation. They really want to ensure that a website is functioning well. 

On the other hand, design testers use tools to evaluate the aesthetics and usability of the application. They only want to verify whether a website is functioning while still being attractive and easy to navigate.

Why Do These Differences Matter?

The difference matters, as it puts emphasis on the fact that the quality of any website goes beyond passing every test. It ensures products are user-friendly, visually appealing, and ready for real-world use. 

Both kinds of QA testers employ different perspectives and different toolsets to address the problems in their own domains of expertise. By allowing the organization to maximize its benefits through the appropriation of tools meant for Technical Quality Assurance testers and the Functional Quality Assurance tester's applied knowledge, the application developed thereby is delivered according to functionality and usability requirements.

Conclusion

Understanding the tools used by Technical/Functional QA Testers and Design QA Testers would give a clearer understanding of how the testing is implemented. Technical testing makes sure a website works fine, while the design tests and checks on visual and usability aspects. Both test roles become very much important when the outcome is expected to produce a high-quality website full of user satisfaction.

Beyond that, if you want further insights into QA testing or for assistance in improving the quality of your website, connect with us now to discover how we can help make your website its best.