> The difference between a really great QA tester and an okay QA tester is probably less than 2x. I did QA for about 5 years at a Fortune 100; my admittedly an

> The difference between a really great QA tester and an okay QA tester is probably less than 2x. I did QA for about 5 years at a Fortune 100; my admittedly anecdotal experience was that top performers wrote more Priority 1 issues that resulted in more fixes than many people combined. It depended on the team and the project, but for me it was closer to 6x. Beyond find & fix rates, there is the general quality of a bug, good QA understand the system well enough to quickly & correctly isolate where a problem occurs even without looking at any code. This can result in a ton of saved time for developers. Regression testing is a small part of QA, just because you have a focus area for a particular day doesn't shut down your capability to find bugs in issues unrelated to say, regressions. And for a final tidbit, regression testing (going through bug reports that have already been fixed, ensuring they are still fixed) probably has the lowest find rate out of almost any type of other testing in my experience (in terms of the original issue being 're-broken'), and it should be done by software, not people.