Contributing in the Software Development Process as a Test Engineer
Being a Test Engineer for a year now at Tokopedia, there are so many things I learned during the journey. It’s been a rollercoaster ride for me in this past year where there are many ups and downs. But just like any rollercoaster, it always brings fun, joy, and adrenaline that make me want to go for another ride. Looking back to my first day here, I was joining without any prior experience in the Test Engineering field, I have to learn everything in this field in a short period of time. Thankfully to Lexys Jayanta, Dwi Aprian Widodo, Nada Fathia Mutiara, and everyone involved in my career development in the past year, I could survive and convinced that Test Engineering is going to be my career path (which a year ago in my final year of college, I still can’t determine what path I will choose after graduating). I am glad that I can contribute in improving Tokopedia’s quality and help boost our confidence in delivering high quality features to our users, as a Test Engineer.
In my first three month here, I mostly use my time to learn about how this industry works, deep dive into what should I do as a Test Engineer, learn to know which case could be automated and which case could not be automated, familiarize myself with the flow, the testing plan, environment, methodologies, and execution, learn how to use all the tools used in Tokopedia from JIRA to Katalon, even I had to learn about what an assertion is, as basic as that, since I have no prior experience in Test Engineering field. Since then, reviewing test cases and developing automation test script became my daily tasks, involved in ongoing project from PRD Review to Production Release to ensure the quality of the product, integrating the automation test to the development pipeline and configure the alerting and monitoring, doing manual test as well sometimes if needed, and so on. That’s what I did in the past year while I keep improving my Test Engineering skills. Until one day, I realized that basically all I did in the past year is what every Test Engineer in this world expected to do. While we as a Nakama encouraged to have 3 DNA Tokopedia (Focus on Consumer, Growth Mindset, and Make It Happen Make It Better), I started to talk to myself that apart from what I did everyday as a Test Engineer to ensure the quality, I need to build something that could help others in doing their job effectively, to increase their productivity, and to contribute to the development process as a Test Engineer.
I believe that increased efficiency and productivity of Software Engineers lead to less bugs produced in the product they develop.
Why
My Head Of Engineering, Gilang Kusuma Jati, always said to us to start with why. So let’s start with why I write these stories.
The first reason is what Nada Fathia Mutiara, my former Lead of Test Engineer, said to me during our very first 1-on-1 session:
“I am not smarter than you. I just happen to know earlier than you”
It is really memorable that I always remember it to date. A year after I joined Tokopedia I learned so much in both technical and non-technical things, and nowadays some of my workmates or Newkama sometimes ask work-related questions to me that I asked just one year ago to my workmate as a Newkama. That is the point where I give a thought about what she said, now I just happen to know things earlier than some of you, and I feel that I have to share what I just happened to know earlier to all of you. I owe you one.
Moving on to the second reason, after a year being a Test Engineer, I learned that Test Engineering has a huge chance of giving great contribution as we mainly asked to create automation scripts for testing things. With a little bit of DevOps and Software Engineering skills, in addition to creativity and laziness, we could let our product and engineering team to automate every manual task that they repetitively did in the software development process, resulting in faster iteration of software development which increases productivity.
What now, and what’s next?
What I try to tell in this first part of stories is that Test Engineering is not all about reviewing test cases — screening which test case could be automated and which couldn’t. Test Engineering is not only about developing and maintaining automation tests. More than that, we have a huge chance to make great contributions to the software development process, a huge opportunity to ease other people’s life, with our laziness in doing repetitive tasks. What can we do to take advantage of that opportunity? I’m going to share about it in the next parts of this story, including how I transformed a 5 minutes manual task that our Software Engineer repetitively did to a 2 minutes automated task, and improved it to become a 15 seconds task to complete the whole process.
Thanks for reading, I hope you find this useful, and stay tuned for the next part!
