Constant improvement: the role of Quality Assurance in TEIMAS

We interview Rocío García Carril to know in first person the role of a Quality Assurance in a Technology team and what are their functions in projects of development of technological solutions such as Teixo, the TEIMAS software for professionals in the waste sector (managers, agents and dealers).

Rocío, you are a web programmer and in 2021 you started working at TEIMAS as Quality Assurance. How did you start?

Yes, in May 2021 I started working at TEIMAS as a QA, which is the person in charge of ensuring the quality of the software and preventing bugs in it. My main objective, in the short term, has been to increase the test coverage at Teixo. At that time, tests were already being carried out to ensure that the application did not fail and the Technology department had set itself the objective of reinforcing this aspect to optimise the quality of the software.

Please, tell us about your first steps in this new professional role

The first few days my colleagues explained to me (both technically and functionally) what Teixo was like so that I could start testing. I had no experience in the waste sector but, thanks to the initial training and my desire to learn and integrate into the project quickly, I quickly began to operate very effectively. And, why not say it, satisfactory: after 15 days I was already uploading my first "training" commits* and after a month, the first ones with Teixo tests.‍

Which process did you follow to achieve the desired coverage?

We started with a horizontal coverage, consisting of testing those basic functionalities most used by users that were not yet on the list of essential tests already performed.

What was the objective of this process?

All this work that I have just mentioned was aimed at a software migration for which we needed to have 50-70% of the test coverage in order to be able to do it with guarantees. Precisely, achieving this percentage was the objective for the first quarter of the new year in QA.  

How did you measure the percentage during the process?

To measure the percentage we used a gem* that analyzed all the Teixo code. Based on what was already tested and the total number of lines of code in the project, it returned the percentage.

By the end of the first quarter the 50% target was met and the migration was really successful. From then on, we started to focus on in-depth testing, that is, testing more specific functionalities or functionalities that were not considered high priority before. Nowadays, we continue with in-depth testing and we are starting to focus on new functionalities that are included in the updates.

How was your experience at TEIMAS so far?

Overall, the year and a half that I have been at TEIMAS has been a year and a half of pure learning, both professionally and personally. At the beginning everything was new to me, but I soon integrated with the help of all my colleagues. So, I hope to continue learning from all of them and contributing to the growth of this project!

Technical terms that you will find in this article

*Gem: this is a set of code files (called libraries in programming) used to develop software.

*Commit: we could describe it as the "snapshot" of each of the changes made to the code. It allows us to count several versions of the code. The changes are made in a local repository, in which you work, and, normally, they are uploaded to a remote repository so that another person working on the project can access them.