What QA Engineers do at Stuart
Making sure we deliver quality!
The Quality Assurance team in Stuart is currently composed of 7 QA Engineers within the Engineering team: Rafa Visa, Cristina Santana, Víctor Vargas, Lluís Casals, Jordi Girós, Raúl Rubio, Flavia Gramajo, Ronald Shelton and Valeria Pollastri. This dedicated group of people are the company leaders for implementing best product development quality practices. Our team helps others deliver the Quality level wanted at Stuart, keeping in mind our clients’ requirements resolution and satisfaction.
These are our main responsibilities:
- Advocating for testability: Participating in product development from a very early stage so each of us is aligned and involved (bug preventers instead of bug detectors). Each QA Engineer is also a member of a multidisciplinary product team called Ship. Inside those teams we have a close collaboration with every role involved in the product development, mainly within Engineering and Product departments, making key decisions on how the product should be tested.
- Defining Test Plans, documenting and executing exploratory testing tasks: Which not only will contribute to the product and code quality, but it will help to share knowledge within the QA team. This is to be able to help each other and reduce the bus factor.
- Verifying any new development requirements: As a team, we share the responsibility of taking care of any new development coming from any Engineering team to be verified in time, covering all requirements to achieve the quality we want at Stuart.
- Maintaining the test frameworks for different kinds and levels of CI tests like the E2E, UI and Integration tests of the public API, FE and Mobile applications.
- Adding tests in CI for recently added features, improvements or bug fixes to help improve any verification process.
- Fostering innovation: We foster innovation to improve our frameworks or our methodologies.
Each of us shares all the responsibilities above empowered by our own team spirit that helps us to make decisions and push for initiatives within an inspiring, motivating and psychologically safe work environment.
Stuart understands how important a QA team is, how it plays an important role inside the company, not just within the Engineering team. Traditionally the QA role was played in industrial manufacturing and after some standardised verifications, a quality seal of approval could be given. This role came to IT Software with a heavy Engineering background. At Stuart, QA Engineers do more than to give a quality seal of approval after driving some standardised and even repetitive verifications, imply different methodologies with different needs.
Regarding any task in relationship with each of the mentioned responsibilities, the idea is to not follow a procedure without having a clear global view and a critical mindset:
- On advocating for testability, all parts agree on how to deliver a testable product.
- When defining Test Plans, documenting and executing exploratory testing tasks, we make sure that all documentation produced is understandable by every team member and follow a common domain language, making any of us able to execute any set of tests for a certain feature, product or platform. We define test plans to share how a concrete functionality works, so any other team member can drive a verification process related to this functionality, even if they have not done it before.
- For verifying any new development requirements, we do not just focus on a task but we coordinate our efforts to tackle the whole QA team workload.
- As maintainers of the test frameworks, we investigate any potential bug or framework issue after CI builds failures.
- Also, adding new CI tests to ensure no regressions at any point could happen.
- To innovate we created a space to expose ideas, crazy ones are also welcomed. Those ideas are discussed within the team and can go from using a new test framework, to improve our logs, etc…
In summary, for the QA Engineers in Stuart, it is important to be active members during different stages of product development and so we take actions throughout the whole release process.
But there is also a really important part of what is written here that is to learn from each other and Have Fun! This procedural definition could be stressful if there is no place to enjoy working within a team, a team that will provide everyday space to share or learn something from. Our team takes care of each other and pushes to have any type of activity outside of this procedure. We love to have once a month an escape room activity (and we are pretty good at it :D). We also love to enjoy all team activities such as going to Port Aventura, a games night, our last Formentera offsite…
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