One of the awesome perks of IT careers is the sheer number of them. It’s not uncommon for people to try two or more career paths before finding their true passion. The story of Rashmi, one of the awesome female developers at AngeLink, is a great example of that!
After Rashmi got her master’s degree in Computer Science, she worked as a software developer for years before realizing her true passion. Join us for an inspiring conversation about her career change, QA analysis, and the works she does at AngeLink.
How did you become a QA Analyst?
I was always interested in technology. Since college, I knew that it’s something I wanted to do, so I became a .NET and C# developer. As a programmer, I was writing a lot of unit tests for my software, and that’s how I got into QA Testing and Analysis. I really enjoyed doing it, so after a while, I decided to become a full-time QA Analyst. I love it because I know that every defect that I find makes the product more efficient. And when the product becomes more efficient, more people start using it. As simple as that.
Why AngeLink?
I love working at AngeLink because it’s a very inspiring company. I think we can do a lot of good things as a fundraising platform aimed at helping our community. Another thing I absolutely love about this company is the fact that it’s powered by women.
What do you do as a QA Analyst? What is your typical day like?
As a QA Analyst, my main goal is to find and report the defects of the application I’m testing. When I find bugs, I create a new Jira ticket and assign it to the manager. The manager, in turn, reviews the ticket and then assigns it back to the developer who was working on this feature. Then, it’s my job to make sure that everything works as expected and close the ticket. If I find bugs again, I assign the same ticket back to the manager and so on.
What about the internal documentation for testing? Who oversees that?
Well, user stories are usually done by a business analyst or product owner. The manager is in charge of creating test cases, but it’s also my job to read the user stories before the release and review the test cases to make sure we have everything we need.
What kind of testing do you do?
I mostly do manual testing of web and mobile applications. Most of the time, I work with iOS devices, but our QA team also tests Android and web applications.
What tools do you use for testing?
To be honest, we don’t use a lot of tools when doing manual testing. But when we need to test something on a device we don’t have, we use an app called BrowserStack. In addition to that, we plan to use Postman for API testing. It’s a popular API platform for building and using APIs and I’m excited to start working with it! We also plan to start automated testing in the nearest future, and I think we will use Selenium for that. It’s an open-source automated testing framework for web applications that a lot of big companies use today.
What would you recommend to a woman who is thinking about starting a career in QA?
This is a great question! Well, I would say anyone who is thinking about a career in QA should be very detail-oriented and patient in order to build a successful career as a QA Analyst. Never assume that the developer knows best.
What’s been the greatest reward in your professional career?
I’ve been working at AngeLink for almost a year, and I think the biggest reward for me is to see how the product constantly grows and evolves. AngeLink has changed a lot this year: we got a lot of new people, the product got better, we added a lot of new features…I’m happy to know that I also contributed to this growth.