Meet the team: Jose Carlos Tapiador Carretero

Q&A with one of our QA Engineers

You joined SwissBorg 7 months ago, how are you finding your time here?

I’ve had a fantastic experience so far at SwissBorg. The work environment and squad dynamics are truly remarkable. I’ve already had the opportunity to contribute to several significant releases, like new token listings, “Auto-Invest”, and parts of the $CHSB-$BORG migration that have made/will make a substantial impact. Overall, it’s been an incredibly rewarding journey.

Tell me a bit about your squad.

The “DIY” Squad is responsible for listing new tokens in the SwissBorg app, as well as the “acclaimed” feature “Auto-Invest”. The squad is composed of 1 Engineering Manager, 1 Product Manager, 1 Product Designer, 2 Mobile Engineers (1 iOS and 1 Android), 3 Backend Engineers and 1 QA. Every Monday morning we have a planning meeting to prepare the work for the week and every Friday we have a debrief meeting where demos are shown and we talk about what we have/haven’t accomplished during that week. The rest of the days, we have brief standup meetings to track progress and discuss blockers/impediments. We also conduct retrospective meetings (once in 3 weeks) and technical backlog meetings (every other week) to improve the way we work.

Have you learned anything recently?

Typescript is the language used in the main repositories owned by QAs for automated tests, and I come from a Ruby and Python environment, so I had to adapt and learn quite a few things (of course there are still plenty of things to learn along the way). Furthermore, I started using VS Code and I’m discovering how well everything is integrated (test creation and debugging).

How does collaborating within your squad work VS collaborating with the QA team?

In essence, for our daily collaboration, we are heavily relying on Slack and Jira (Kanban) both in my squad and the QA team, so it’s quite similar. However, within my squad, the collaboration is naturally more “intense” in the sense that we would like to have something “releasable” every week, which means more frequent collaboration to discuss new features (review designs, review stories, review Acceptance Criteria in stories/tasks, track progress/impediments, etc.), track bugs, etc.

What got you into QA engineering?

I got into QA by “accident”, back in the day (beginning of the 2000s) when QA was not very popular compared to what QA is nowadays. It was my first job after university and it was actually a difficult time for post-graduate students to find their first job. I had the opportunity to join a “brand new” software testing team back then and I decided to give QA a try… until today.

If you could give one piece of advice to your younger self, what would it be?

I would definitely tell myself to take more time and insist on learning things from the inside out.

Do you have any hobbies?

I love football in all forms: watching games on TV, training/playing with my football club, playing video games, etc.

I also make electronic music, feel free to check me out -> Tapiador on Soundcloud / Tapiador on Spotify.