What it’s like being a QA at QuintoAndar
Working in a company that grows exponentially is one of the most challenging missions for any professional. This feeling only grows when you are responsible for ensuring beyond the growth, the quality evolution.
When we talk about QuintoAndar, it’s not just the evolution of the company that is a challenge, but the revolution of an entire market. Having said that, if there were a motto for the Quality Assurance analysts working here, I believe it would be: Revolution with Quality!
But after all, how is it like being a QA at QuintoAndar? How is the daily life, activities performed, integration with the teams? Where do they live? What do they eat? Don’t worry, we’ll comment on all of these below!
QA as part of the team!
At QuintoAndar our teams are organized by squads, which mostly consist of a product manager, a product analyst, a designer, developers, a tech lead, and a QA analyst. So QAs are 100% of the time within the scope of the team, acting as part of it! This in-team allocation has several benefits for teams and the product. The QA is present from the backlog prioritization to the moment of sprint retrospective, having a complete holistic view of the team delivery process. This integration allows QAs to have a better understanding of the context of the team and the feature they will test.
Working this way, we ensure that features arrive in production not only with fewer bugs but also indeed solving the problem that it proposes to solve.
QA and product definition
Being part of the team and participating in agile ceremonies and backlog prioritization from the start not only allows significant interaction with Product Managers and Product Designers but also enables our QAs to assist in the process of defining new functionalities, following the business definitions from the conception. The presence of QA allows the construction of something much more assertive and reliable since it acts from the beginning to the delivery of a project.
Additionally, there’s the opportunity to contribute with insights for features that are being designed, helping define a new feature more simply and safely for the development team and delivering something that brings real value to the end customers.
This QA involvement within the stages of product definition ensures a complete understanding of a new feature, such as its context, purpose, and expected results. This comprehension enables us to:
- Deliver quality beyond code;
- Contribute to business goals;
- Better understand business and application metrics and how they should behave after each feature reaches production
“I like to be allocated in a development team and being able to participate not only in testing but also in the early stages of projects.” — Patrícia Amaro
QA and the devs team
As with the product area, being integrated into all processes enables QA to contribute to the devs team and gather important information that can contribute to test scenarios. At QuintoAndar the QA is encouraged to participate in development discussions and decisions, such as contributing to a new service’s architectural solutions and thereby getting more input for their testing. Besides, the QA helps the development team to be more careful about potential issues.
“My favorite part is working closely with developers on the explorations for new systems and data architecture.” — Marianne Tine
QA, operations and customer experience teams
In QuintoAndar, development squads are usually allocated in a way where each is responsible for certain stages of our funnel. For almost every development team in a funnel stage, there is also an operation or customer experience team that acts directly in contact with the end-user, so bugs and improvements suggested by users often arrive through these teams. QA’s job here is to be in direct contact with these teams to identifying and prioritizing which bugs are being reported at high volume and most severely impact the end-user, also prioritizing possible improvements that would make life easier for our users and operations team. So after identifying and prioritizing those needs, the QA’s responsibility is to bring them to the development teams backlog. It is a clear demonstration that QA within QuintoAndar can add value to the product beyond just testing new functionality, but also identifying legacy issues that impact and lead to potential improvements for the product.
“As a QA I must be the voice of the customer in the company.” — Clauzira Manoela
QA, bugs, and improvements
As QAs in QuintoAndar, we have the role of managing and investigating reported bugs, finding the root cause of the problem and moving on to the developer team to fix them. But bug analysis here goes way beyond that; we also need to understand how much these bugs impact our conversion and scalability, we need to understand the volume of the problem, and also know how to prioritize which bug to fix or if it is worth investing our time in certain problems. As QAs we have to know how to make the decision even if sometimes it’s wiser to invest the time in new features or a new project than fixing something that isn’t working right, always thinking about what adds the most value in the long run. Here we are expected to investigate how much a bug or product definition is negatively impacting on an OKR, raising metrics that explain the impact, and finally suggesting bug fixes or functionality improvements. As a result, QA directly impacts end-product quality, helping us achieve company goals and increasing the productivity of our QuintoAndar teams.
Soft and Hard Skills
I’m going to say something that may be controversial but to be a QA at QuintoAndar, soft skills outweigh the hard skills. Have you noticed that so far we have not said anything about test automation? Although a lot of us love and contribute to our automated test suites, that is not a must for you to succeed as a QA in QuintoAndar. This reflects a lot of our QA Culture around here!! We don’t have a defined QA stack, we don’t need to master selenium or cypress, JMeter or Gatling; we are a self-organizing, autonomous and free QA team, and all QAs are expected to be proactive in themselves above all. Here we hope each QA can propose the use of new tools, new processes, and improvements, whether about the definition of new functionality, whether in development, testing, market research with designers or even internal processes as proposing suggestions in team ceremonies (daily, planning, retrospective).
QAs in QuintoAndar are analytical, display critical thinking, and know a little bit about everything: from product managing and web development to business, operations and customer experience, as well as UX and UI. And we know how to connect all these pieces of the much larger puzzle that is cross-company quality and how to reflect that to the end-user.
As I said before, we are revolutionizing a market and seeking revolution in quality too. We are not fans of bureaucracy and we love agile movements, so our soft and hard skills connect very well with the agile manifesto and agile test manifesto by Karen Greaves and Samantha Laing.
When we think about hard skills like debugging, front-end testing, backend testing and knowledge of testing methodologies, one of the most positive things about working here is being able to learn about it every day. You don’t have to know everything before starting your work here, as long as you acquire that knowledge as you go. Our passion is learning while doing it!
“A QA requires analytical insight, understanding of software engineering processes, and if you also know a little programming, it will help you a lot, but if you don’t know and want to learn, QuintoAndar is the right place to develop these skills” — Agatha Araujo
Confidence is the differential
The confidence placed in QA analysts at QuintoAndar is certainly the biggest differential in working here. We are expected to show autonomy and we have a lot of room to bring new work process ideas to the table. A great example of that is the cross-company projects our QA chapter is entirely responsible for, such as:
- Bugbash Settings
- QA Interview Process
- Quality metrics
- Automation Projects
- Knowledge Sharing among QAs
Finally, working as a QA for QuintoAndar means willingness to solve problems, taking on challenges, learning new things almost every day and, in the end, delivering great products and bringing our quality culture to the entire company.
“The good thing about being a QA here is having the opportunity to work with very good people who are always empowering you!” — Barbara França
If you like challenges and enjoyed this article, we are always looking for talented people! Join us in São Paulo or Campinas.
