Priyanghaa Thirumalairaj, Meesho’s First Software Development Engineer in Test, on how a QA’s role is much more than manual testing & the power of smart thinking
By: Amrita Bose
Tags: Quality Assurance, Culture, Women In Tech, Software Development

Priyanghaa Thirumalairaj, Meesho’s First Software Development Engineer in Test, on how a QA’s role is much more than manual testing & the power of smart thinking Amrita Bose Follow Jan 3 · 6 min read

Born and brought up in the village of Sathyamangalam, near Coimbatore. Priyanghaa Thirumalairaj stepped out of her tiny hamlet for the first time to pursue a BE degree at Chennai’s College of Engineering Guindy, Anna University in 2010. Post graduation, she joined a service based company called Polaris Services & Consulting Ltd in 2014 where she was handling a gamut of tech related tasks such as configuration management and infra related tech support.

But Priyanghaa always knew that if she had to learn on the job, then she would have to switch over to a more challenging and fast paced work atmosphere. Joining a product based startup was the answer to Priyanghaa’s hunger for learning and challenging herself. The Senior Software Engineer in Test II tells us how her stints at startups helped her accelerate, how a QA’s role goes beyond just testing and how at Meesho she has learnt to multitask and think fast and smart on her feet.

Let’s hear it from Priyanghaa!

As a fresher when I joined Polaris in Chennai, my role was a combination of Dev, QA, and DevOps, which resulted in me executing tasks rather than learning on the job. Soon I found herself longing to work with a product-based company. Some of my friends were working in such companies including startups, and their learning curves were far more linear as compared to mine. I soon realised that I wasn’t really cut out for a 9 to 5 service oriented job, and knew that I had to get into the IT sector.

At this point, I knew that my basic knowledge of coding wasn’t enough, I had to teach myself coding languages such as Java. I then got an opportunity to move to Bangalore with an SDET role at Ola. At Ola, I was able to work in a product-based company and also in a fast paced environment. Though technically Ola wasn’t really a startup back in 2016, I joined a team where processes were set and concentrated on learning QA responsibilities. I was promoted as an SDET II after a year at Ola.

But soon that familiar feeling overwhelmed me again. The need to step out of my comfort zone, the urge to challenge myself. I then began to look for opportunities, especially in startups. And then Meesho happened to me.

Choosing the startup life

Though Meesho’s business model is quite different from a conventional ecommerce one, what attracted me to Meesho in the first place was the kind of social impact it was creating, especially towards women. This inspired me to join Meesho, and once I started here in January 2019, I realised that the impact that we were making was even bigger than I had thought. And this is when I knew that I had taken the right decision. Secondly, I had always wanted to join a company that was in the startup mode, inspired by the likes of Google and Amazon that started really small and then accelerated their way to world domination. I chose the domain of QA and the role of an SDET is not just someone who does manual testing, but it is a hybrid of testing, automation and infra related tasks. And SDET should have developer capabilities along with testing skills too.

My learning at Meesho started from scratch, not only understanding the tech aspects but also non tech ones such as acquiring people skills, since I was working across teams, especially with Product and Developers. I also got involved in the hiring process to build a QA team at Meesho. I was the first woman SDET in Meesho as one of the three testers (from the back end perspective) in the QA team, and six months after my joining, several other women joined the team too. Now you can say our QA team is diversely represented gender wise in Tech at Meesho.

Initially, I started working in a service called Qwest, which is mainly responsible for Search, Sort and Filter, but soon found myself working in many other applications such as Meesho Credits, Payments, Pricing, Storefront and more. Currently, I am part of Feed,Search & Personalization POD under O/R org. Multi tasking means that sometimes the road ahead can be challenging as well as frustrating. But gradually over a year, I have learnt to organise myself, learnt to think and work smart in order to meet the deliverables on time.

The right kind of environment

One of the things I am very proud of at Meesho is the fact that I have contributed towards setting up a stable QA environment for end-to-end testing and was involved in it from scratch. But what exactly is a QA environment? If the QA is using a development environment, that environment is likely to change. It is hard to control the state of the environment with multiple people working against it. Typically, QA environments closely mimic production environments than do development environments. This helps ensure functionality is valid in an environment that is more production-like. While deploying, we might find a bug or there might be compatibility issues so it is always a best practice to establish a QA environment separately.

To be involved in all aspects of testing is something I was able to do at Meesho. From infra set up to manual testing and automation and tools, I have been involved in the entire gamut of testing. Another achievement would be when I created Mock Services while testing an integration with YesBank, PhonePe and Paytm. I got the opportunity to build that tool and it saved time to meet committed timelines & and reduced the external dependency.

Working at Meesho, has helped me observe and understand the ecommerce model from close quarters, how features are developed from scratch, and since I joined in the early stages, I was able to see how features and products were implemented from a Dev or Product perspective too. Being involved in testing has also made me learn to test fast and smart, and improve upon my testing efficiency.

Testing to make an impact

At Meesho, listening to our resellers (Make Resellers Successful is a key Meesho value), and building on their feedback is a practice we’ve had from the beginning. For each and every feature we build, it is usually based on inputs from our Meesho entrepreneurs. Once the feature is made live and we can actually see it working with our users — seeing its impact is a great feeling. It feels really good that you have tested the feature and released it, and it has had such a great impact not only on them but also for business.

Taking ownership is something that each and everyone of us at the QA team takes to heart, and without this value we can’t really deliver.

Within the QA teams we also exhibit the value of Speed over Perfection. For instance, the Meesho VIP Membership was a big feature that needed to go live within a short span of time, and we took only four days (normally it takes about two weeks) to test it with a planned strategy so that we could deliver it faster without compromising on quality.

Test run

I think an SDET’s job is not only to formulate test scenarios and execute functional testing for features, but also involves collaborating with developers and product owners, knowing the system from start to end, knowing and using design patterns where appropriate, and doing performance testing & benchmarking. Developing tools to assist manual and exploratory testing, developing test automation frameworks and running automated tests with the appropriate test data in CI/CD are other highlights of an SDET’s profile.

At Meesho, apart from work, I love the fitness challenges that I can take up with my team or even across teams from time to time. For instance, the Groupathon challenge that I was part of and even won with my colleagues from the DevOps team. As part of the challenge we did nearly 15,000 steps daily and it was a challenging and fun experience for me at Meesho.

Want to strengthen Meesho’s women tech force and help create 20 million entrepreneurs by 2020? Then apply here. We are hiring!