I had a very short experience in QA Testing and what I can say is: The proper documentation of a bug to make it extremly easy for a developer to fix something can take HOURS if the problem is complex.<br>A developer can find bugs themselves but the amount of time needed is the exact reason why this is outsourced.<br>You drive down the road 50 times and 1 time you car start hurling through the air. Even as a developer with the game running in debug mode it would be hard to find the source of that bug. As a tester it doesn't take less time to narrow it in what the cause is.,(reply>), @Test Test do you work in the field? because you confuse stuff here. I your QA Engineer it doesn't automatically states that you have access or you work with the source code. QA Engineer and QA Tester has the same main objective. Fancy words for same  scope. <br>"QA half of the time is not doing anything besides maintenance" , what?<br>What maintenance dude ? you mean regression testing, sanity testing, smoke tests, Exploratory Testing etc. ? <br>Qa Engineer has divers branches , some work with the code some don't because they can only see parts of the code but they cannot manipulate the source code.<br>But a root cause is not always to see the faulty code man, because that is the DEV's work.<br>Your work ether a QA Engineer or QA Tester is to test the product, to open tickets that contains all the information's that a DEV's need to fix the bug without any fallow up questions.,(reply>), @Siana Gearz it's all about your craft. Even if your wrong you will get it right at the end. Bye doing a mistake you learn and move on. But, to be a good at what you doo you need to fail in order to get good/better.,(reply>), @Sha Dow Random multi-megaloc veteran C++ dev here who got to deal with difficult to reproduce mystery bugs a little more than most. Fun fact, when you think you know the root cause of one of these issues, you probably have it wrong, but not to worry, the first 3 or 10 people whom the buggy code stared right in the face haven't caught it either. But also please keep doing exactly what you do, keep hypothesising and refining, because even when you're wrong, you're still probably pointing in enough of a vaguely right direction to be helpful. Any effort to find relationships between different behaviours and bugs and narrow down the repro is immensely helpful. We actually love you guys.,(reply>), @Sha Dow   "you don't work with the code my guy" you do, qa engineers have acces to code repositories and have at least a basic understanding of what's going on. You can figure out what the issue is most of the time and point it out. Simply seeing that from an e2e testing of a feature you have 2 issues and explaining them is something anyone that has basic cognitive skills can do. Everyone can point out that the game crashes when you do x action, throw the crash dump to the developer and pray for the best, why not analyse that crash dump yourself, try to gather as much information, have a look at the code and see if you can figure it out, working in an agile environment QA half of the time is not doing anything besides maintainance, be it for the automation test suite or checking dashboards for issues.,(reply>), ​@Test Test you don't work with the code my guy. You test, you look up the game logs you do repro steps, narrow down as much as possible. You not generally need to work with the source code to see what the hell is wrong there. There are tons of ways and yes sometimes you cannot find the right behavior. <br>"also if you don't have access to code, white box testing, how are you supposed to find the "root" problem ?"<br>If you go with the car on the road and suddenly blows up what you do ? You try to see what the cause of that right? <br>You repeat the steps see that if you hit the curb there, the game crashes. ok what is the cause? you look up the game logs and you can see  useful information in the logs. <br>You need to investigate a little not just to barf bugs. In many cases, ore maybe in all cases everywhere when you open a ticket you need to provide the game logs.<br>You can point out stuff by doing some research, making the DEV realize faster what he needs to repair if you say: ok, I checked the game logs and the game crashes because the GPU usage had an spike and Error xxx was generated when I hit the curb with the car.<br>And yes is difference between software QA Engineers and QA Testers, but the main objective is the same, you need to test and provide useful information as much as you can.