On November 26, 2015, I joined as the 47th employee at Microlise India as a Test Analyst. I started working with Team ‘Jugad’ on the ‘GeoHub’ project. I vividly recall the moment I realised I had to test something without a user interface. I had experience as a black box manual tester, so I pondered, “How?”

But the answer I discovered to this “how” question was a game changer for me. I learned about the entire software development life cycle, from requirements to deployment, and the icing on the cake was that I also learned about monitoring the deployed product. Over the last seven years, my skill set has progressed from that of a simple manual tester to that of an experienced “software engineer.”

In 2015, I became acquainted with a number of software industry concepts. TDD, BDD, Test Pyramid, and one engineer, CI/CD, were among them. I’ve seen all of these ideas put into practice over the years. I consider myself fortunate to be a part of this transition. You are not confined to your role at Microlise; you have the freedom and platform to explore things that interest you.

Without your teammates and mentors, your journey would be incomplete. I’ve been on seven teams so far, and it’s been a pleasure to collaborate with such a talented group of people. Let me not forget how much I enjoyed the fun, sporting, and charitable events at Microlise India. Microlise makes you feel valued and acknowledges all your hard work.

It was difficult for me at first not to have the product tested by a dedicated tester’s team. However, I discovered that it is a concept that can be learned and implemented by a developer or engineer if properly trained, and with modern techniques, it can be automated to quite an extent. I had this opportunity here to train people on what testing is for a broader audience and learn from them how to make it faster at the code level.

Even though I no longer perform testing in a conventional way, I have discovered a better and more effective way to maintain product quality in Microlise.