Interview
Cristian Moga
QA Discipline Lead
I’ve been working in QA since 2014, originally starting out in a gaming company before moving on to testing software for web applications. It’s here that I really learnt a lot about QA and built a strong foundation to develop my skills further. I had a great mentor who taught me a lot around automation testing, and my love for the discipline grew.
I have held several QA engineer roles at various companies before joining ddroidd in 2020, where today I am QA Discipline Lead.
With more than 20 QA engineers – and growing – my role is to manage and coordinate the team, ensuring best practice is followed, and using my experience to help develop their knowledge and expertise.
I believe to get the best results from a project that the QA team should be involved from the pre-sales and discovery phase. And that’s exactly what myself and the team do here at ddroidd. We work with the rest of the project team from start to finish to understand the client, the technical requirement, and objectives to decide the best test approach and tools to use. We work closely with our business analysts; a strong connection is essential to ensure the most effective outcome and results are delivered for our clients.
ddroidd is not constrained by process and red tape, and we’re not afraid of trying something new. We have the flexibility to choose the right tools for the project because you’re trusted to do a good job and make the decisions that you think is right.
A perfect example of this was trying out a new testing framework. At the time, the most popular testing framework was Selenium as it had a reputation for being the best. However, we came across Cypress, a new automation testing framework that would be better for a particular project and we gave it a go, which turned out to be much better than the more popular one at the time. Today, Cypress is much more commonly used and I’m proud that we were early adopters of new technology, something we strive for here at ddroidd.
I love the fact that you can be creative. We often find strange bugs in our applications when we follow strange behaviours, and when that happens, we get the same funny reaction from the developers: "How the heck did you think of that?"
We always test the applications from the end user point of view, but we also try to go beyond that and be creative. Something else I really like is that we can always come with suggestions and improvement ideas.
No one can argue with the fact that a QA team is essential to any software company these days. Whilst software QA can be done by anyone from developers to business analysts, with all the new technologies and complexities of the software applications, a dedicated QA team of experts with a testing mindset is crucial if we want to deliver quality software.
Don’t give up and don’t be discouraged that it’s technical with lots to learn. There are a lot of QA courses online to get you started.
Want to read more from Cristian? Read his blog ‘PERFORMANCE TESTING IN QUALITY ASSURANCE’ for a deeper insight into QA, the importance of performance testing, and Cristian’s personal passion.
