Call for Speakers - Closing October 13th

Track Talk Th8

Testing an SDK from a Cybersecurity Startup Company

Ivan Merola

11:45-12:45 Thursday 13th June

This professional experience has been the most challenging of my life. I was hired as the first frontend tester for a startup company that their product is a cybersecurity SDK embedded for mobile protection. There was no QA processes, almost no documentation, but lots of people to learn from. With my QA background, it was time to make things happen. We improved overall quality of our SDK. We decreased number of bugfix releases and at the same time we increased the number of big releases.

Because I was also given the task to take over the release process. We got XRAY plugin for JIRA and we documented all the test cases. We started testing processes that didn’t exist before in the company. We improved automation of some repetitive tasks. And we learned a lot.

Cybersecurity is a very obscure business and common people is not supposed to know many of the ways of how to break an application. We had to learn that. Because that’s the only way to test it sometimes. I also had to be comfortable with testing an SDK. All my previous career has been UI focused applications. This time nothing like that. I had to dig deeper, find the logs and find any way possible to test our product. It’s been a challenging experience and I’ve been working here for over a year now. And now we have a second QA, someone I referred, and we had to bring him up to date too. And he brought many new ideas to the table. It’s a constant learning experience but we have to deliver. So I thought it might be a good story to tell.