Bug Warriors

The Client

memoQ is a global leading vendor on the market of CAT tools and TMS systems. CAT tools are used by translators, proofreaders and reviewers to work on content translation, while Translation Management Systems are business-critical applications of translation agencies and other linguistic vendors, as well as large enterprises to manage their translation resources and budgets.

The Project

It was in 2014 when I developed the first automated tests for memoQ, followed by some other highly focused projects, such as certain load and performance tests. In 2017 I’ve been promoted to the QA Lead role. At that time we had to maintain multiple product versions in a feature boom era, and it became clear soon that we would not be able to author and execute as many tests as we want. It was this time when we saw the need of having automated end-to-end tests, and launched an automated-first initiative. In a few years, we’ve extended our manual test repository of around 5K tests with another 5K of automated tests. As a result, we could dramatically drop the time to perform a complete regression testing by 95%, and the human resource needs have been decreased accordingly, over 95%. This worked as an enabler to author more tests and to process our backlog.

Having so many product versions and such a giant test repository called for facilities to overview where we are and where we are heading. As we used multiple tools, such as Selenium and Ranorex for automated tests, TestLink to maintain the manual tests, and Jira to manage development tasks and bug tickets, we needed a solution that could consolidate data from various systems. The result is a Power BI dashboard with some complex Power Query M data cleaning transformations which can provide near real-time status information and quality metrics, enabling us to measure if the direction we follow is good in terms of development or feature quality, as well as in terms of the quality of our QA efforts.

The Personal Side

This team that I was fortunate enough to lead and, I hope, drive, has been the best team of my life so far. I could work with people who always showed proactivity and endurance, as well as incredible flexibility.

It was extremely interesting to develop our data analytics solution and to try to get the insights from various data source to be able to get meaningful and actionable quality metrics, as well as to explain the charts and see if forecasts work.