Near Me Quality: Keeping Clients Delighted
Julien Levadoux | May 11, 2016
Welcome to the Near Me Quality Assurance Blog series. As Director of Quality Assurance here at Near Me, I will be sharing what we do behind the scenes to test the platform and give our clients, and their users, the best marketplace possible.
First a quick introduction...
My background in Quality Assurance (QA) includes 10 years spent at Macromedia/Adobe where I started as a French Localization QA and worked my way up to QA Lead while belonging to different teams. I have experience testing Version 1.0 software (like Adobe Livecycle Collaboration Service) and more established products (like Macromedia Dreamweaver).
Where we come from as a QA team
I was the first QA engineer to join Near Me (back in June 2015). I relied on my experience to provide direction to the company when it comes to ensuring we improve on our code Quality before it goes onto our production servers.
In a short space of time (those were some fun weeks), we went from patching holes and adding features “on the fly” to a more organized release cycle.
Part of this improvement was adapting Scrum for our releases (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrum_(software_development)). I will tell you more about Scrum and our release cycle in my next blog post. We are still improving our processes, tools and coverage every week. We are, without a doubt, in a much better place now than we were a year ago.
We are committed to delivering an excellent, high-quality platform marketplace for our clients and recently added another two outstanding QA engineers to the team.
Quality Assurance can be compared to a treasure hunt!
We, as QA engineers, get to hunt for defects (aka bugs) in the product before it gets released to the customers. To be a good QA engineer, you have to be curious, pay attention to details and have a passion for this perpetual pursuit of a bug free product.
100% “Bug free software” does not exist, as the President of Ambrosia found out many years ago when he promised to eat live insects if a bug was found in his company’s software… spoiler alert: he did end up eating those insects at Mac World Expo in the summer of 2000 (http://www.macobserver.com/tmo/article/Ambrosia_President_To_Eat_Live_Bugs_At_MACWORLD).
But you can get as close to 100% bug free as you can and avoid that bug-eating fate with organization, tools and lots of testing. It’s possible to deliver a solid product with a minimum number of bugs if you dedicate time and effort to quality control.
Our Engineering team is top notch!
At Near Me, we are passionate about Quality and it’s something we are all committed to on the Engineering team. Developers and QAs work hand in hand throughout the development process. I will be sharing with you more about our cooperative processes in future posts.
Quality is built into Near Me from the start. Among other things, our developers add unit tests to their code which are also peer reviewed. From the time a defect is entered in our Bug management system (Jira) to the time a fix gets released to our customers, we all have one thing in mind: Quality.
Our customers trust us with their businesses and we take that responsibility very seriously. We are building beautiful, scalable and reliable marketplaces which will help them thrive. That’s where the Near Me Engineering team shines.
Where we are now as a team
Using a mix of automated and manual testing, we work hard to ensure that our customers’ Marketplaces work as they should, so our clients can focus on Sales and Marketing and growing their client base, not worrying about technology. The Engineering team introduces new features every week and it’s our job to test them thoroughly to make sure that they are ready for prime time.
Going forward, the QA team will share with you the different tools and techniques we use to ship solid and reliable code on time. Feel free to reply to this post or contact me at julien(at)near-me(dot).com if you have any questions about the Near Me Quality Assurance process and I look forward to sharing in my next blog post, my tips and secrets about how we do things here.
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