Published on : Jan 4, 2017
Category : Kovai.co
Starting my journey with BizTalk360 back in 2014 when the product was in the early stages of 7.2 release was a very proud moment for both me and the company. As I happened to be the first tester to join BizTalk360 and the first women employee as well. It has been an amazing journey so far filled with lots of memories to cherish, and viewing the evolution of BizTalk360 closely, I have immense confidence in the long-term success of this company.
It seems like only yesterday, I sat at my workstation amongst two strangers (Arunkumar Kumaresan and Prabagaran Saminathan) and started the journey at BizTalk360. At the same time this year, 34 colleagues work with me who I would consider as friends and extended families, discussing how large MNC’s and huge Corporations use our flagship product.
Growing the Team and Processes
During the initial days, as a sole testing resource, it was a daunting task to understand the core concepts of BizTalk Server, as BizTalk Server is in itself a huge product. This blog is a great opportunity to share the experience and highlight few lessons that I have picked up along the way. Initially, I faced the following challenges:
- Establish the testing process
- Acquire end to end knowledge of the product
- Schedule interviews to hire new resources to the team
- Train the new resources and make the new resources work in an independent environment at the same time, to deliver the best quality product to the customer.
Within no time, the testing phase for 7.2 release commenced. During this period we were confronted with lots of challenges and hiccups as we were in the process of stabilizing the test scenarios, which demanded knowledge of real-time uses cases, to deliver a stable product. As a small team, the coordination across the team (between India and UK team) was exciting and helped to roll out the 7.2 release for production.
Later this release, as an immediate action item we identified few ways to learn BizTalk Server and BizTalk360 much better. To make this happen, we conducted weekly brown bag sessions from our senior developers/team leads to understand the end to end product and the technology. At that phase, we were
using Asana as a project management tool and later migrated to JIRA (a total project and issue tracking system with much better control), the testing life cycle was defined and a benchmark was set across the team to get the process control in place. As the release plan is happening on one side, someone had to concentrate on recruiting the team members in parallel.
This was also a new experience for me, as sourcing the profile itself is a very challenging task. To test BizTalk360 we need a candidate who possesses strong process knowledge and good hands on experience in all the testing techniques preferably a self-driven person with responsibility and who brings a lot of ideas to improve the quality of the product. As a result, we wanted to build a strong team in the QA department.
Some Statistics
Today, turning back the pages, it feels really exciting and to give you some numbers here;
- 16 Releases in less than 3 years
- Building from 0 to 5000+ real time test cases
- Supporting from 100 to 500+ customers
- Building the QA team from scratch to 8 members
Writing these statistics makes me feel proud but my inner soul still knows that my job is only half done. To take the company to next level as a QA team we are working to identify new testing methods and techniques. To give you a sneak peak into our future plans – We are stepping into Automated testing!
