6 Questions with QA Mahesh Shahi
By: Madhu Sudhan Subedi
Tags: QA, Quality, Software Development, Quality Assurance

This article is based on some questions I had asked to my QA friend Mahesh Shahi hoping to learn from his career journey.

Image Source: Photo of Mahesh Shahi Bro

Mahesh Shahi is currently working as a QA Engineer at UBA Solutions Pvt. Ltd. He has been involved in the industry for more than 4+ years. He loves Photography, Art and Music. He is an active communicator and the person who takes start to finish ownership of the work.

1) How did you get into the tech?

I completed my bachelors in Electronics and Communication engineering. We had to study C programming, C++ and some other machine level programming. I loved those classes as we got to solve various logical problems like creating a flag with * and creating Fibonacci series. I loved solving those even though it would take hours. Its like soduko and puzzles. During my last semester, I took an extra class for .Net with C# where we made a simple library management application. I learned a lot there. But more than learning I developed an interest in creating small applications myself. So you can say that's how I got into Information Technology.

2) Do you feel comfortable standing up to developers who disagree with your results?

Yes. But for that, I must be sure that what I am standing up for is genuine and correct. If you are sure that you have done the right thing then you should never be afraid of anything. Having said that you must also be able to express your work so that other person can understand. There will be cases when you have done everything right from your viewpoint but you might have missed something, or, you may not be aware about it. So, you must be ready to listen to what another person(in this case, a developer) has to say. It’s always good to agree and learn from your mistakes. In short, there must be a clear conversation between each team.

3) How do you know your product is customer friendly or not?

This was the Most difficult part for me. Mainly because of the projects I was involved in. I was working in a company which created and traded Fonts. I had no idea about it at first. So, it was very difficult for me to understand what types of professionals or person our customers were. It got easier with experience. I slowly became aware when we were getting positive reviews and feedback regarding what changes our customer were disliking. I did my own research once in a while about what type of service does the customer making the electronic purchase like and stuffs. So for me, it was a learning process to know what kind of changes our customer will appreciate. Mainly what I earned was that the basic flow of product viewing and purchase must be perfect. Other things are always secondary.

4) What are the things need to consider to make a better quality Software?

I kind of answered that in my previous answer. You need to make sure that the basic functionality of the software must work flawlessly. It is not an easy task and I don’t think it has to be perfect during our first launch. Definitely, the first launched project is never flawless. But what can and must be done is reading the reviews and complaints of the customers and fixing them gradually. This brings the second important thing which is Customer Service. Every customer wants to have listened. Every people want to have listened. So you should maintain a good customer interaction medium, whether it be a customer representative or someone from the team to monitor customer reviews and comments, and take those reviews and comments seriously to make sure the customers are happy.

5) What is your process for finding a bug in an application? How much time do you typically spend on debugging?

The sad thing is my process of finding a bug in an application is limited to the release of the feature. Mainly when we get a new feature request, we make sure we know everything we could related to it. We spend a lot of time discussing the possibilities and impacts. The result of the discussion for a QA will be a complete set of test cases. There is no specific time spent for that. Sometimes most of the scenarios are found during our grooming sessions whereas sometimes we find scenarios while we are working on it. But the main thing is we must not skip or ignore any findings even though we found it just a day before release.

For your second question, I spend most of the time trying to reproduce the but in as must specific steps as possible. This in course will also work as debugging the bug as Dev team will know the exact scenario in which it is reproduced and some surrounding scenarios where we are not reproducing the bug. Much of the time it would find the exact bug in the code.

6) What are your professional goals going forward?

Even though I have learned more about the Customer experience and possible outcome of any fix or new feature, I am very weak in automating test cases as I am not giving enough time for it. Automation is a must for a QA nowadays. So I must manage some time for learning these kinds of stuff.

Apart from that I really want to learn Scrum Processes and get a certificate. Hope for the best.