QA is not clicking buttons: it is the quality gatekeeper for the whole SDLC

QA gets stereotyped into a clicker-of-buttons role: open the app, walk the flow, file a Jira ticket when something looks wrong. That caricature is what junior QA looks like at companies that have not yet figured out what QA is actually for. The role at senior is something else entirely — the single person who owns quality across the full software development lifecycle, from the requirements meeting through post-deployment monitoring. The button-clicker is a subset of the role, not the role. I ru