If the life of a Quality Assurance Analyst could be summed up in one song, it might be Limp Bizkit’s Y2K classic “Break Stuff” (to refresh your memory, the very ‘complex’ chorus is “give me something to break”… over and over). The song is quite fitting for QA, but here at Pixafy, we’re pushed to look beyond the standard job requirements and to dive deeper into the ways in which we test our products.
With the holiday season coming up, it becomes ever more important to ensure a smooth site experience. In a conversation on site performance with Josh O’Connell, our Director of Operations here at Pixafy, he mentioned that a smooth, seamless user experience is perhaps the most important part of any website. “If a project isn’t put through its paces, customers will be confused, frustrated, and even walk away. As such, our QA team is a critical piece on executing on that requirement.”
As mentioned in my previous post, Pixafy’s stringent testing process allowed me to not only break stuff, but to then have the opportunity to fix and improve what I am breaking (a rarity as a QA Analyst). In the past I’ve never been able to fix the things I had broken, so I was eager to dive in and tinker around.
And tinker I did. One particular project involved configuring a web server for hosting. It became increasingly apparent just how much a QA Analyst gets to take for granted. My linux-fu was tested to its limit, but armed with all the documentation I could find (QA’s LOVE documentation, almost as much as data), the support of our DevOps department, and the desire to learn new things, I forged ahead.
After hundreds of iterations of different possible configurations, I was able to thoroughly document configs that drastically increased performance in the test environment. It was thrilling to push performance to unimaginably fast speeds and test for stability. The current testing configuration is already 5 times more powerful than the original, and works within the constraints of our existing infrastructure.
Working in an agile Pixafy environment has its perks. With agile development, QA is an integral part of the team. As such, each Pixafy development team is assigned their own QA engineer who is there from the beginning, making plans at the same time the developers are, working with the project manager to prepare testing plans as development proceeds, and checking iterations of work before the client does to make the development process as smooth as possible.
The testing process we have set up here at Pixafy is extremely thorough, and allows us to really get into the nitty gritty details of what we’re dealing with. Testing is ongoing and there are still many things to learn — testing, breaking, and optimization are all part of the fun!
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