Noob question to the QA folks, purely out of curiosity: I often wonder if QA developers get space to innovate in their line of work. Often a developer has several ways to code a set of lines, or to develop a feature, or to achieve a use-case. There is decision making and brainstorming to be done. But a QA can either manually test a product feature, or automate it using one of the Selenium-esque tools. What kind of innovation do they get to make while doing this?

Not-a-QA (NAQA), But I guess the innovations would be mostly operational or with regards to Processes, won't they?

Aren't processes and operations traditionally managed by team leads and devops respectively? One might innovate by trying to use multiple tools available on the market for doing QA. But I am talking about innovation in day to day QA work.

They are more aligned to product, compared to developer

I agree, QA folks can be innovative by being more user focused