Could you please tell us about your background and your current role?
My career started in 2010 with a QA Engineer role in a software house. At that time, I was mostly searching for bugs from the end user perspective and validating the requirements compliance. With the time passing it became absolutely clear to me that the way I did testing was totally inefficient, so I began to dive deeper into test automation and at some point I switched completely to this kind of testing. I changed a couple of companies and projects before I realized that testing itself does not “assure the quality” while the processes do. From that moment I changed the focus from finding defects in the system to creating an environment where the probability of having those is minimal. I helped two startups to set up the Continuous Delivery process and reduce both the number of issues and the delivery time, which I’m very proud of. So I joined Idiomatic this January with the same goal — setup the quality processes and all the necessary automation. Starting everything from scratch on a live product is always challenging but very rewarding. We’ve made great progress so far in setting up the automated pipelines, improving static analysis tools and having the critical functionality to be covered with tests, which improved our delivery speed and the system quality. Inspired by the team support and the results, I’m looking forward to the next steps of increasing the coverage and moving towards the fully automated release cycle.
What do you like most about your job?
Green pipelines, automation of routine activities, and metrics showing how everything’s going. I enjoy setting up the process and watching how it simplifies day to day activities, as well as improving the areas people didn’t even know can be improved.
How do you like to spend time outside of work?
I love traveling. But even more than that I love travel planning. Long before the journey starts I plan every piece of it including the meals. In addition to the benefit of having nothing to worry about during the trip, it also brings the atmosphere of vacationing a couple of months before it starts. I usually spend a week or two carefully adding every step and comments into the application and then totally forget about everything till the day of my departure. That’s how for the long journeys the accommodation plans or attractions to visit might turn out to be a surprise. My most recent journey was a one-way road trip in Norway Fjords with an additional challenge of matching the ferries into the timetable.
As a QA Engineer, what’s an average work day like for you?
The work of a QA Engineer might seem boring and routine, but it isn’t at all. My daily activities vary from validation of new features and confirmation of bug fixes to code improvements and environment setup. And the favorite part of it is the collaboration with the team. We communicate a lot to make sure the product will not only match the user needs, but also will be an elegant technical solution, easy to understand, support, test and debug.
What’s your favorite Idiomatic feature and why?
I can see the parallel with my work very clearly, with Idiomatic helping our customers to improve the quality of their service. What I know for sure is that there is no single feature or approach that will be effective in every environment and every product. That’s why we have different setups, adapt to the needs of our clients and constantly increase the number of ways the insights can be received. That’s what I like the most! Everyone can find a solution here.
From your perspective, how does Idiomatic solve our clients’ challenges?
By processing large amounts of customer feedback data, we help our clients to embrace, structure and analyze their customer feedback. We help them to focus on the most important and valuable issues for their users/customers. Idiomatic brings the power of science to find the answers to some of the most important questions that every company has; especially aimed at reducing the costs and support time, and improving the customer satisfaction level.
