Meet our colleague Preslav Petkov. He is a Mobile QA Engineer at the News UK Tech team at Pwrteams. We used the occasion of the International Tester’s Day, to talk to him about his work and the role of the QA engineer in the future. Here’s what we’ve discussed:
Tell us how you got here? What was your previous educational and professional experience?
I am a UK social sciences graduate. During my studies, I realised I really enjoy statistics and reports, also digging into issues and finding small bits of information that need to fall into place. This had an important impact on my career as I developed an eye for detail.
My professional path as a QA began in a machine learning start-up where I got interested in automating processes. Since then, I have worked on .NET (FinTech) and Python (Marketing) projects. My current project is all about Ruby, which was an interesting new start for me as I had never worked with this programming language before. It was brilliant finding a team (even though it was more like the team that found me) that would help me learn along the way.
You are currently a Mobile QA Engineer at team News UK, tell us more about your role and main responsibilities?
The team I work in has developed the talkSPORT, TimesRadio and Virgin Radio apps. Their audience is in the hundreds of thousands. These are all great apps to work on, with an active audience that gives us loads of feedback, so there are a lot of changes. It is great knowing that your work is impacting so many people and that we improve over time.
My role is to automate processes and make sure everything is one seamless project. I verify new features and then automate all relevant tests. I am responsible for updating the CI, creating new workflows and improving processes. I always have to think about the challenges a user might face, so in everything I do, I try to mimic the experience of someone outside the organisation. This is all part of many dynamic processes, therefore, tasks and demands change daily.
What’s the most challenging part of your job?
The need to constantly learn new things.
What excites you about your work?
The constant learning! Something new every day, endless area for improvement.
What do you consider your biggest achievement?
I caught some potentially serious bugs before they made their way to production :). But amongst my biggest achievements, are some of the improvements I have made on our CI. I made a successful migration from one CI to another, managed to cut our runtime times fold, and expand our regression suite. Every single automated process makes me very proud.
How do you see the future of the QA role?
The future of the role will demand quicker end-to-end testing and faster release processes. This will, in turn, require continuous quality culture. In a way, the QA engineers will be acquiring more and more DevOps responsibilities, as they will be gatekeepers of the good code and practices. This will promote ownership of all processes amongst the team and shared responsibilities. I believe the future will be less about manual testing. It will be smart, automated and fast.
The News UK team at Pwrteams continues to grow and needs more passionate QA engineers like Preslav. Should you are such, make sure to check out the open vacancies here and apply.
