A Day in the Life of a Quality Assurance Engineer at Agoda
At Agoda, Quality Assurance (QA) Engineers are more than just testers; they play a crucial role in ensuring the delivery of high-quality products. They are the gatekeepers of quality, responsible for identifying bugs, improving processes, and collaborating with various teams to create seamless and error-free products.
In this blog, Arvinder Kaur, Lead Quality Engineer at Agoda, shares insights into her daily responsibilities, challenges, and the unique approach to quality that defines her role as a QA Engineer at Agoda.
My Journey in Quality Assurance
My journey in quality engineering began after graduating with a degree in Computer Science. I began my career as a QA Engineer at a financial firm, initially underestimating how engaging the path would be. To my surprise, I soon realized the critical role that quality engineering plays in ensuring better customer experience and streamlined products and processes. I thoroughly enjoyed automating tests, improving processes and products, and ensuring high quality product deliveries. This role made me passionate about quality engineering, as it directly contributes to a better customer experience and simplifies product maintenance and release.
Why I Chose Agoda for My QA Career
Before joining Agoda, my focus was primarily on designing test strategies, building test frameworks, and writing automation tests. However, working here offers me a broader scope that extends beyond traditional testing. I’ve learned to integrate quality into both business and technical processes, which has enhanced team efficiency, reduced support tasks, and lowered operational costs. Agoda’s holistic approach to quality makes it an exciting and dynamic place to work, allowing me to expand my role and make a meaningful impact.
Key Responsibilities of a Quality Assurance Engineer at Agoda
In my current role, I collaborate closely with multiple scrum teams. My primary responsibility is to equip these teams with the right processes, documentation, and tools to test features, investigate issues, and deliver functionality confidently. I pay close attention to the concerns and challenges faced by the teams, analyzing their impact and proposing solutions that ensure smooth and efficient workflows.
Collaboration is essential to ensuring product quality at Agoda. I’ve learned that it’s important to balance business priorities with quality concerns. I can effectively influence development teams and Product Owners to prioritize quality alongside business objectives by presenting data and demonstrating the impact of resolving quality gaps. This data-driven approach helps ensure that quality remains a central focus in our product development.
My Quality Assurance Process at Agoda
My quality assurance process is thorough and begins at the earliest stages of a project. This includes participating in design review meetings to provide feedback on testing gaps and potential risks. It’s important to establish a testing strategy that covers individual component testing, integration testing between components, and end-to-end testing as needed.
Establishing a safe release plan, which might involve experiments or a kill-switch mechanism, is also crucial to mitigating potential risks. This proactive approach helps ensure that quality is maintained from start to finish, extending beyond project deliveries.
Some Tools and Technologies Used by QA Engineers
At Agoda, we use a variety of tools and technologies to maintain high-quality standards. We use the Cucumber framework for integration tests. To manage test data and environments, we use Docker Compose, Devstack, Pinto, and custom mock servers. We have in-house tools to assist with end-to-end testing and issue debugging. We’ve also integrated tracing support into some applications to streamline investigations. Additionally, we use ACM for load testing, which contributes to the robustness of our testing processes.
Overcoming Challenges in My Role
There is a common misconception that only the quality engineer is responsible for product quality. In reality, it should be a shared effort by the entire team. While having a quality expert on the team is valuable, it’s crucial to avoid making them a bottleneck for all changes. Instead, fostering a culture where everyone takes ownership of quality is essential for overcoming this challenge.
A prime example of addressing this challenge was a project involving an old test tool used by both the tech team and business users. However, it often required developers to debug issues, and business users had to escalate problems to the developers. It also relied on users to provide accurate details and lacked sufficient information for effective debugging.
To tackle this, we decided to rebuild the tool from the ground up, collaborating with interns and a developer. We reduced the data points required from users, added a debugging dashboard, and integrated the tool with Agoda Extension to create a more seamless and efficient experience. This overhaul significantly improved usability and efficiency for both tech and business users, demonstrating the power of a team-wide commitment to quality.
What Motivates Me
My motivation as a Quality Engineer stems from the knowledge that maintaining high product quality not only prevents negative customer experiences but also reduces the time spent on resolving issues. The most rewarding aspect is witnessing the team’s growing confidence and independence in releasing new features without relying solely on Quality Engineers.
Balancing Work and Life
The key to managing work-life balance, especially during tight deadlines and high-pressure projects, is to plan for quality right from the start. By testing each small change as it’s merged, we can avoid a backlog of testing at the end. Additionally, it’s crucial that everyone on the team takes ownership of quality, ensuring that testing isn’t solely the responsibility of the Quality Engineer. This approach helps distribute the workload more evenly and reduces last-minute pressure.
Staying Updated with Trends
To stay updated with the latest trends and advancements in quality engineering, I regularly read LinkedIn posts from other QA Engineers and follow blogs focused on quality engineering. Additionally, collaborating with other QAs at Agoda helps me learn about new testing tools and processes.
Looking ahead, I believe the shift-left approach (pushing testing toward the early stages of software development) to testing will have a significant impact on quality engineering in the coming years, as it offers cost-effectiveness, quicker feedback, and more integrated testing. Additionally, AI-based tools are likely to play a major role in writing exhaustive unit tests more efficiently and effectively.
Best Practices and Advice for Aspiring QA Engineers
To maintain high standards of quality, it’s important to follow best practices that include early involvement in projects, continuous testing, fostering a collaborative culture, implementing safe release plans, and striving for continuous improvement.
For Quality Engineers looking to join Agoda, I recommend adopting a holistic approach to quality and think beyond traditional QA practices. Be open to learning new testing frameworks that Agoda uses, such as Mutation Testing, Contract Testing with Pact, and Devstack. Embracing these practices will help you advance in your career and make a significant impact at Agoda.
The challenges, rewards, and evolving landscape of quality engineering offer valuable lessons for those looking to advance in their careers or enhance the quality processes within their organizations.
