Process vs Tools and Technologies - What should Sri lankan QA community be concerned with?

I have been thinking about discussing the matters related to local QA community in Sri lanka but never got a chance. Recently I was able to meet a lot of folks who are engaged in software quality assurance in various sri lankan organizations in one place at a quality summit. By listening to the presentations and talking with people, I came out with a few basic questions.

Some of them were;

what the biggest concern of software quality assurance in our country? are those processes or tools/technologies? Do we have the necessary trainings or knowledge sharing mechanism to overcome the issues which we face during daily QA tasks?

In my view, the biggest concern of QA in our country is, not having people with enough technical skills. By interviewing a lot of QA folks for the past few years, I personally have a good experience about the way people are approaching QA. Most fresh graduates believe that QA as a first step towards entering in to software industry! Some people joins QA merely to get some understanding about the product/project then move in to business analysis or sales.

Why is this? IMO, it is totally due to the perception of software QA in sri lanka. We, sri lankan QA community, must be responsible for drawing that image on people's minds about QA.

For the past few years, I never noticed any training (were there any?) for educating QA community about the usage of tools in daily QA tasks to be more productive or technical aspects such as performance/automation testing tools. Instead, whenever there is something about QA, it is about CMMI or process frameworks.

I'm not going to say that those are not important. BUT those are not what our teams need at the moment.

People struggle with configuring application server X on operating system Z. QA folks face in to difficulties when automating AJAX based UIs. How QA should be dealt with the frequent UI changes during UI based test automation? How can we be more productive using linux? Do we use any scripting language for automate repetitive configuration tasks? Are we doing continuous integration? Are QA people familiar with build tools such as Maven or Ant? Do we know about exploratory testing? Do we know how to use test coverage tools? Do we report bugs with the adequate logs and find the root cause of them?

I think these are the questions that most of the QA teams have. We should try to be more productive and be experts as a community. We should try to change the perceptive about QA by empowering everyone with the right set of skills.

If people are comfortable with the tools and technology they are handling in daily work life, educating them about processes and process improvements is not a big thing!