Alex Hoffer on growing a distributed team

Dropbox engineer Alex Hoffer built the Quality Assurance team from scratch

Alex Hoffer was the first QA engineer at Dropbox when she joined just over a year ago. She’s built a team from scratch since then, and she’s continuing to grow it further.

Alex traces her interest in Quality Assurance back to junior high, when she started volunteering as a tester for shareware.

“It became a pretty big hobby of mine,” she says. “Some people want to become astronauts; some people want to become writers or scientists. I wanted to become a tester.”

At Dropbox, Alex advocates for context-driven testing, based on the perspective of testers like James Bach, in an agile context. From the start, she’s designed a decentralized QA team that’s distributed among product teams.

“We really want folks to become experts in a particular area of the product,” she says. “They sit with a product team and plan with them. It allows them to get the in-depth product knowledge they need to have a lasting impact.”

Working closely with a product team allows QA engineers to build a relationship with the team, understand the team’s QA needs, and determine how they can best help.

Depending on the context, this can mean everything from helping product engineers identify test cases to helping improve frameworks so they can write their own tests.

QA engineers from different product teams also come together to collaborate and solve problems across the company.

“We try to make sure that what we do is as leveraged and effective as possible,” Alex says.

In growing her team, she looks for people who exemplify the Dropbox engineering values that are particularly important in QA: focus on impact and ownership. These values prove to be especially important given the distributed nature of the QA team.

Going forward, Alex is working toward placing a QA engineer with every team that’s working on a mature product, as well as improving test infrastructure across all platforms.

As a lead, she splits her time between making sure her team members are as happy and effective as possible, understanding testing needs across the company, and growing the team.

“We’re building the best QA team ever,” she says. “That’s really the best thing about my job: to have the opportunity to do that.”

The Dropbox QA engineering team is growing. We’d love for you to join us.