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The QA (Quality Assurance) career is one of the fastest-growing in the technology market. According to ITFórum’s report (2026), the IT market remains heated as the year turns, so professionals can and should pursue specializations.
Understanding the differences between seniority levels in this field helps beginners chart a clear path for growth, and also makes life easier for managers who need to build balanced teams. Let’s detail what’s expected from a QA at each career stage: junior, mid-level, and senior.
Junior QA
Those entering as junior QA are in the phase of absorbing knowledge and understanding how the software development cycle works. The main characteristic of this level is supervised execution: you’ll run tests, report bugs, and learn from more experienced professionals.
On the technical side, a junior QA needs to master manual exploratory and regression testing. This means navigating the system, trying to break functionalities, following test scripts, and documenting everything you find. Basic tools like browsers (and their DevTools), Postman for testing simple APIs, and SQL basics for querying databases already put you on the right track.
Writing clear test cases is another essential skill. A good test case has preconditions, reproducible steps, and well-defined expected results.
Soft skills make all the difference here. Curiosity to understand how things work (and how they can fail), clear communication when reporting issues, and genuine willingness to learn are more important than knowing how to code at this stage. According to a 2023 Stack Overflow survey, 67% of developers consider effective communication the most valuable skill in a QA, even above specific technical knowledge.
Day-to-day, you’ll execute tests created by more experienced QAs, learn company processes, and start identifying failure patterns. It’s the phase of building foundations.
Mid-Level QA
The leap from junior to mid-level happens when you gain technical independence and start automating tests. Here, the QA doesn’t just execute, they design scenarios, choose what to automate, and actively participate in quality decisions.
Automation becomes strong at this level. Frameworks and AI-powered automation platforms become everyday tools. You’ll write scripts that execute repetitive tests automatically, saving hours of manual work and increasing test coverage. Integrating these tests with CI/CD pipelines (Jenkins, GitLab CI, GitHub Actions) is also expected, after all, automated tests need to run with every commit or deploy.
Creating test strategies is another responsibility. Not everything needs to be automated, and knowing how to prioritize what brings the most value requires analysis. A mid-level QA understands which scenarios are critical to the business and focuses energy where the impact is greater.
On the behavioral side, proactivity becomes indispensable. You’ll propose process improvements, suggest new tools, and collaborate closely with developers to prevent bugs before they even reach the testing environment. Analytical mindset also evolves: you don’t just find problems, you identify their root causes.
Senior QA
Senior QA is the technical reference. They define quality strategies, mentor other professionals, and translate technical quality into business impact. The role here is less operational and much more strategic.
Scalable automation architecture becomes your domain. You’ll design frameworks that other QAs will use, define code standards for tests, and think about how the automation suite will grow without becoming a hard-to-maintain mess. This involves tool choices, repository structuring, and even infrastructure decisions.
Risk analysis and strategic coverage are daily tasks. You evaluate what can go wrong in a product, calculate the impact of each risk, and decide where to invest testing effort. Performance, security, and accessibility become constant concerns. According to data from the State of Quality Report, 56% of critical production failures could have been avoided with better risk analysis in QA.
Technical leadership manifests in various ways: mentoring junior and mid-level QAs, reviewing other people’s test strategies, participating in product architecture discussions. You influence decisions that go beyond the QA team.
Communication with non-technical stakeholders is fundamental. A senior QA knows how to explain to a product manager or executive why a particular test is important, how long it will take, and what the risk of not doing it is. You translate technical language into business language.
What’s common across all three levels
Regardless of seniority, some characteristics span all levels. Commitment to quality is obvious, and the ability to question and investigate as well, QA without curiosity won’t go far.
Adaptation to new technologies is constant. The software field changes quickly, and those who don’t keep up fall behind. Cross-functional collaboration is another common point: QA works with developers, designers, product managers, DevOps. Quality is a collective responsibility, not just the testing team’s.
TestBooster.ai: an ally for QAs at all levels
Each seniority level in QA has specific challenges, and TestBooster.ai was designed to support professionals at any career stage.
For junior QAs, creating tests in natural language removes the initial technical barrier. You describe what you want to test in natural language and the platform translates it into automated scenarios. This democratizes automation and allows you to contribute with real tests early on, even without mastering programming yet.
Mid-level QAs save time by centralizing existing automations. You stop dealing with fragmentation and can focus on creating complex scenarios, testing APIs with straightforward configuration, and integrating everything with CI/CD hassle-free.
For seniors, holistic vision is the major differentiator. Unified dashboards allow you to track quality across all teams and tools in one place, translating technical metrics into business impact. You can show non-technical stakeholders where the risks are, which critical journeys are covered, and how quality evolves over time. It’s the missing tool to connect QA to the executive board.
Conclusion
Evolution between QA levels is natural and happens with practice, dedication, and the right tools. If you’re starting as a junior, focus on learning the fundamentals and developing attention to detail. If you’re already mid-level, invest in automation and strategic vision. If you’ve reached the senior level, take on technical leadership and translate quality into business language.
Identify what level you’re at today and choose one or two points to develop in the coming months. Software quality is everyone’s responsibility, from the junior who finds the first bug to the senior who designs the strategy. Each level contributes uniquely to delivering better products to users.
