Year Up's Quality Assurance curriculum provides students with basic skills in programming, databases, software development fundamentals and software testing and quality assurance. Students are exposed to problem solving techniques such as algorithms, flow-charts and decision trees; concepts and processes such as version control, Agile development, software development roles and environments, introductory programming, object oriented concepts, development of simple real-world applications, relational database terminology, and database design tools; techniques to create, update and query databases and quality assurance and software testing processes.

Skills Development at a Glance: What Students Learn

• Validate business requirements gathered with a focus on completeness and testability  
• Analyze, devise, and execute tests described by a list of test cases or a trace-ability matrix developed using project summaries, requirements, and Functional Specification Documents (FSD) 
• Evaluate system or user interface design to validate fulfillment of customer requirements  
• Verify software features and bug fixes against a functional specification, both manually and using automated testing tools
• Write clear, approximated, and detailed bug reports 
• Utilize software (such as JIRA) to track progress of software feature requests and bug fixes 
• Define automated testing, identify its purpose, and write automated test scripts 
• Understand operating systems, server and cloud infrastructure, frameworks, and libraries
• Understand programming concepts and where and how to apply them to build a basic software program
• Utilize an Integrated Development Environment (IDE) such as Eclipse, NetBeans or Visual Studio to write, build, execute and debug code
• Identify and analyze similarities in structure, syntax, and semantics of different coding languages
• Utilize software quality control processes such as peer code reviews, code refactoring and standards, code navigation in a debugger, and using comments for code documentation
• Utilize SQL to build tables, specify constraints, and apply indexes
• Utilize SQL to query tables using filters, calculated fields, sorting, aggregates, and joins

Specialty Training Focus Areas:

• Software Testing & Quality Assurance
• Programming
• Databases
• Software Development Fundamentals
• Year Up’s Standard Training  

Training at Work: Typical Job Tasks

• Use testing methods, tools, and techniques to verify and validate software releases
• Analyze and understand business requirements to ensure quality and completeness
• Develop automated test scripts to test software features and bug fixes

Path to a Career: Training-Enabled Role Pathways

• Software Testing & Automation
• Quality Assurance Analysis

Example Roles Filled by Graduates:

• QA Analyst
• Automation Tester