Developer Spotlight: Diana Gabriel
By: The Eko Devs
Tags: Developer Stories, Startup Life, Work Culture, QA, Office Culture

How would you describe your job to a child?

Imagine you ask your dad to make apple muffins with cinnamon. I taste it first to check that he made it well. Then, to my surprise, I find out that dad put in banana instead of apple, salt instead of sugar, and forgot to add any cinnamon! My job is to tell dad to make the muffins better so that you have a yummy muffin :-) Still, no one’s perfect, and he might get the quantity of cinnamon wrong, but hopefully, we can make it as tasty as possible!

What was your most challenging experience at work?

I think the most challenging experience was when we completely removed Flash from our creation platform. Flash was tightly integrated with a lot of eko Studio’s core components from its very early days, so untangling it proved a real challenge. Though it wasn’t the first time we said goodbye to Flash in one of our products, it was much more complicated than previous operations. I think it had more QA cycles than any feature I have ever tested. The difficulty wasn’t in the type of tests that I had to do. It was the number of cycles we had, which included many sanity tests. If you work in QA, you know how unforgiving that can be. Thankfully that’s now behind me. RIP Flash!

What’s your passion? What do you love doing?

I love reading. I like to linger on words as I read. And read them over and over again if something is beautifully written. Languages and the origin of words, and the connection between words in other languages fascinate me. One day I hope to write my own book (and illustrate it — another of my passions — but that’s another story…;)

What is similar to QA in other offices, what is different?

We use some of the same QA methodologies as in other offices, and we have some standards and QA tools used in many other places. But even so, eko is different in many ways. We don’t stick to the rules, and there is much freedom in the way we work. Our emphasis is on moving fast while not compromising on quality. If I choose to test something without a standard test plan and in an unusual way that deviates from what is accepted in the QA community, no one cares as long as the results are satisfying.

Also, the developers here are close and friendly with the QA team. Unlike other offices I used to work in, they patiently teach me a lot of stuff, and we both want to make the product as refined as possible. It’s a joint effort here. You’re not alone.

What are the QA challenges?

Many times we forget to think outside the box. We can lose the big picture, and we might miss trivial or important bugs.

Sometimes development time comes at the expense of testing time. That ends up forcing us to prioritize our tests and cast aside things that we wanted to test or test things in a superficial manner. It can be really disappointing because, in the end, the quality of our work is measured by the quality of the product.

Sometimes, we don’t have time to test and examine the features in-depth because we are busy with other tasks on parallel other products. We need to be creative in real-time and improvise quickly to do the best we can.

What do you think is needed to be a successful QA engineer at eko?

You need to be open to changes. You need to be mentally flexible, curious, diligent, and agile. You should know how to discern between what is bland what is important, and you shouldn’t be afraid of insisting on things you view as essential to the product’s quality. On top of that, don’t stop learning new things, don’t break from routine tasks, trust your intuition, be nice, be humble, and try to keep a sense of humor.