“When you do things right, car shoppers won’t know you’ve done anything at all”
In truth, when writing this article I knew very little about the QA team.
They were a secretive bunch who had recently gained some notoriety internally thanks to their work on an exciting new project that is coming out soon (watch right here for more details!). When I decided I was going to write a little bit about what they do, I felt like I was meeting some kind of tech celebrity. Naturally, I got to work.
I wanted to do a deep dive to uncover how our expert QA’s help to deliver our dealership’s premium websites time after time and assist in putting their best foot forward online.
I don’t tend to spend a whole lot of time with the QA team members in real life, I only really know them by reputation: Mad geniuses who torment websites until they reveal their dark secrets. At best some kind of digital detective finding troubles and rooting them out, at worst a stern coding grammarian with an eye for punctuation. When I asked one of these team members for the opportunity to speak about their job, I was led into a dark conference room with a single bulb hanging from the ceiling. This was doubly strange because all of our conference rooms run on fluorescents, but such is the mystique and apparent decor-pull of the QA team. When I asked for a definition of what a QA was, my interviewee just replied: “Under-staffed. Under-appreciated. Overworked. Overwhelmed. Over….developed. That’s QA!” He laughed like it was a joke–I suspect you are beginning to understand the kinds of people from which the QA department is made. Funny, but in their own fatalistic kind of way.
QA, for the uninitiated stands for “Quality Assurance” and, in the case of Convertus, they play a crucial role that, rather unfortunately, often goes underappreciated by the end user, not that I blame you or the car shoppers! That’s the whole point. If they have done their job well, potential customers should never know that they were even there. They are the breakers, the fire makers, the stress inducers, and the front line troops in an endless war against bugs and issues that roll up on every site that we send out. They aren’t there to build your website, they are there to make sure it works even when things start to get wild.
Socrates once said that “The unexamined life is not worth living”, and while that statement wasn’t enough to save him from being executed for “impiety” and “corrupting the youth”, it does sum up the QA department’s view on websites. Honestly, Socrates might have made a good QA person himself had he the technology to do so. This team puts every website that comes across their desk to the flame in a battery of tests that span a wide range of scenarios. These tests measure everything from basic functionality to the integration of different components, all the way up to security and stress testing. The QA team is the fiery crucible on which countless website builds have been broken and rebuilt, and, if they have done their job well (and they assured us they always do), then odds are good what you will see when they are done is a website that works perfectly no matter what nightmare scenario is happening to it.
I asked them what a team like Quality Assurance considers their wider goal or mission statement. I expected something combative. Bugs are the enemy of the good QA-er, so something like “zero bugs” made sense to me. The answer, it turns out, was more sophisticated.
QA, to the team here at Convertus, is “an ongoing process that aids all team members in constantly delivering high-quality products through a series of iterative learning and realistic success metrics”.
Which showed me that this team wasn’t nearly the fun-loving lunatics I had heard about. They are legitimate and the work they are doing is vital to both the functionality of your sites and our reputation as a digital solutions boutique.
So that’s the QA team. Professional, smart, maybe a little weird after all, but unerring in their dedication to the quality for which they are named and the quality Convertus is known for!