The creative life of a QA Engineer

One word you wouldn’t naturally associate with quality assurance (QA) engineering is creativity; however it’s this particular aspect of the role that makes the function so important to a business. We caught up with our Lead QA Engineer, Meenakshi Choudhary to find out why. 

“Bugs are often hidden. And performing the obvious positive tests will only provide a few chances to find them. Hence, a QA engineer must use creativity to figure out all the scenarios that are likely to detect a bug.” 

In other words, according to Meenakshi, QA engineers must use their imagination to “see beyond the obvious”.

Automation takes care of the boring stuff

“There is no typical day,” stated Meenakshi. “That’s a perk of being a QA engineer. You don’t have to do the same task again and again if you automate the boring stuff.” 

Many people have misconceptions about what QA Engineers do. “It’s not just about clicking different places on the UI, recording the results, and filing defects,” explains Meenakshi. “It’s a time-consuming process that requires attention, responsibility, thorough knowledge of the product/business domain, and an understanding of user experience. This task is often harder than writing the code as it involves deep analytical skills and outside-of-the-box thinking.”

For a QA engineer, the ultimate goal is not simply to find bugs, but to have them fixed. This necessitates working closely with developers and the business team. QA engineers are involved early in the design process, because the sooner a bug is identified the lower the impact on risk, cost and timelines.

“QA Engineers are a key part of the team,” explained Lorenzo Iannone, Head of Development at LendInvest. “They ensure the quality of what we do is good enough to deliver to our customers. To understand whether a product meets quality standards, great QA engineers, like Meenakshi, are able to examine and evaluate a product with the user’s expectations in mind.”

Becoming a QA engineer

“If you are good at finding problems, love breaking systems and embracing challenges, then go for it.” That’s Meenakshi’s advice to anyone considering becoming a QA engineer. “QA is interesting and challenging at the same time. It’s about looking at a product from different angles and perspectives, and testing it with different expectations.”

QA engineering involves lifelong learning. “To keep myself up to date, I read blog posts, watch tutorials on different online learning platforms and then try to implement those skills in my day-to-day job.” 

“In my career of almost a decade in software testing, I grabbed every opportunity I got to learn different programming languages, starting from Java with Selenium for Web UI testing, Python with Appium for mobile testing, and Scala with Gatling for API Performance testing. Recently, I’ve gotten my hands dirty exploring Javascript with Cypress for front end testing.”

QA at LendInvest

Meenakshi enjoys the freedom she’s been given to come up with her own solutions and implement more efficient testing tools. “When I joined LendInvest, we were using a Selenium-based web testing automation framework, which has been an industry standard for almost a decade. It was serving its purpose but wasn’t efficient.”

“I was given the freedom to discover what works best for the team,” stated Meenakshi, who spent time researching and exploring alternative QA frameworks. She presented her findings to the team and received full support for her decision to switch from Selenium to Cypress. 

The results speak for themselves. “Already it’s paid off by doing repetitive tasks in a more time efficient way and allowing our team to concentrate on more crucial functions,” stated Meenakshi. “Having that sort of opportunity and trust has been one of the great benefits of working at LendInvest.”

Interested in joining our engineering team? Head over to our careers page to view our current open roles.