A Day In The Life of a Quality Automation Engineer — Andrei Dicusar

Intro: Take us through a typical workday — what does it look like?

Usually, my workday starts at 10:00 AM after some good breakfast and coffee with my wife 😄.

First of all, I prepare all needed links and my work environment on my laptop so I could start Automation Testing activities instantly.

After some time I have a daily meeting with my team (I make part of the iOS Mobile team) which includes developers, QA, and Product Managers where we see current progress and solve/raise any possible concerns, issues that may block my work. On some days I have the same daily meeting with QE (Quality Engineering) team where we can discuss our daily activities and raise any issues specifically related to Test Automation.

After the meetings, I take a task from the current sprint to automate test cases. When I am done, my colleagues from adjacent teams and the manager reviews them to see if everything is correct and maybe some improvements can be done. I do like this part because my colleagues not only look at the code but also offer interesting solutions which are not usually so obvious and it gives me additional knowledge.

In the remaining amount of time, I usually verify test results on our staging environment for apps that I’m responsible for and prepare everything to launch nightly tests after the latest changes.

In case when sprint ends I have Planning, Review, and Retro meetings with team members where we analyze completed/non-completed work and discuss possible improvements, pain points to be able to learn from them.

Questions

1. What do you do at Crunchyroll?
   I am a Quality Automation Engineer who makes part of the Mobile iOS team which develops Crunchyroll and VRV applications. During my workday, I test applications using UI automation tests and also develop new automation test cases for the new versions of applications. Aside from that, I am responsible for filing new bugs in the case when they were discovered manually by me or automatically by the tests (usually it can be discovered during the test development phase).
2. How did you become interested in Quality Automation Engineer?
   During my studies in the university, I heard about a lot of opportunities to begin a career as a Software Developer, Quality Assurance Engineer, or Quality Automation Engineer, and many others. On last year of study, I took part in an internship in a Quality Automation Engineer role and understood that I like that field of activity due to multiple challenges, creative way of thinking, and will to always dig deeper to the root cause of the problem.
   It could also be a consequence of me being passionate about gaming from a younger age as I like to discover, collect everything and look for more interesting details.
3. What skills and technologies are you the most interested in improving upon or learning?
   At the moment I am mostly interested in improving my skills in Mobile Automation including knowledge of Appium, Selenium frameworks, Kotlin language which I use, and also would like to improve my knowledge on side of CI/CD like Jenkins, Docker as they are strongly tied nowadays.
4. What inspires you about working at Crunchyroll?
   Working at Crunchyroll for me is a great opportunity and experience. I am inspired to see that I directly contribute to such a popular and demanding product with a huge fan base all around the world, it really makes you feel part of something bigger.
   Also from what inspires me, I can surely highlight my colleagues who are always eager to help and share knowledge which is super important to grow in all aspects and be able to help someone else.
5. What is Crunchyroll doing to help you feel a part of something bigger in these times?
   I become part of the Crunchyroll team as Quality Automation Engineer in March 2019 and after less than a week due to the pandemic situation began working from home. For me, it was my first experience working remotely, but thanks to the caring team and the company I could easily adapt to those conditions and my work performance was still great.
   In these times when many of us are working home, Crunchyroll helps to make the home workplace even better by providing all needed equipment like office chairs, comfortable tables with the possibility to lift them, and of course all needed hardware. Also what I found important is that for birthdays, anniversaries, and during holidays I and my colleagues get extra attention from Crunchyroll shown in pleasant gifts and team buildings. Especially fun and creative team buildings give the sensation of another holiday. Those are not all the benefits of working at Crunchyroll and everyone has their own favorites.