Vivek Kurhe

VYU Mobile App, India.

• This mobile app allows users to verify the authenticity of a physical product. The app requires two permissions, i.e., camera and location. The user scans a QR code on the product, and if the product is successfully identified, the user is directed to the next screen. Here, a matching overlay of the product is displayed on the viewfinder, and the user must align the overlay with the physical product. The application then shows a result of 'Genuine' or 'Fake'.

Roles and Responsibilities.

• Active participation in the sprint refinement call to discuss, prioritize, and estimate user stories for the next sprint.
• Have daily standup calls with the QA team to look at progress, discuss doubts, or ask questions.
• Contribute to establishing the standard QA procedures on an engineering team.
• Provide regular direction, mentoring, and coaching to the QA team, ensuring the success of the team's manual and automation efforts. This includes reviewing and suggesting improvements in test cases and bug reporting, ensuring their involvement from the earliest phases of user story creation and refinement, clearing their doubts, and ensuring they are collaborating well with the team.
• Manage the day-to-day activities of the QA team, such as managing their workloads and providing them support in case they are overloaded with many tasks.
• Work on more strategic things, such as certifying technology for a product based on different metrics, such as covertness, accuracy, reliability, ability to replicate, and response speed, under different conditions like lighting, angles, and distances to validate the patterns or transfer of encryption on the actual sample. Standardizing device lists for testing periodically, leading pen test engagement, recurring meetings with cloud testing vendors, etc.
• Lead pen testing engagement, coordinating with a vendor, arranging meetings, discussing pen test scope for the product, providing access to the required resources, getting updates from them, and proactively reporting delays to the leadership team, reviewing pen test reports to ensure that the negotiated testing scope has been covered.
• Meet different cloud testing vendors, such as BrowserStack and LambdaTest, to discuss our product's testing challenges and to understand how they can help us overcome the challenges.
• Make unique contributions that help both the clients and developer team define and produce the value that the business needs.
• Collaborate with cross-functional teams to define testing requirements and priorities.
• Help the R&D team with the volume of data to train the Decoder (core technology of the product) and test to validate the accuracy of the ML model with new test data.
• Collaborate with the R&D team for the changes in the statistical algorithm of different product configurations, performing risk assessment based on the changes made to each product's configuration to determine what tests need to be run, and driving extensive testing of the product to benchmark performance.
• Maintain documentation of test performance with configuration changes to the backend and frontend.
• Perform ad-hoc testing with the entire QA team involved, responding to the client's feedback to deliver updates quickly.
• Perform usability testing with random users to get feedback on the final product to be shipped to production, and provide factual information to the team based on their verbal feedback and test results.
• Inform the test progress against schedules to management.
• Monitor and analyze the performance using internal tool RCA for efficient and problem-free operations.
• Stay current with industry best practices and emerging trends in quality assurance and software testing.
• Identify areas for process improvement and contribute to the ongoing evolution of our quality assurance practices.
• Involvement from the earliest phases of user story creation and refinement.
• Review the readiness of the next sprint user story in the first couple of days of the sprint planning call.
• Estimate testing tasks to ensure that enough time is allocated to testing to deliver the story safely.
• Create high-level tests for the story and share them with developers up front to help them drive development with a code-test-first approach.
• Create detailed, comprehensive, and well-structured test cases once the sprint starts and work on more exploratory use cases.
• Look for ways to contribute throughout the development cycle, and beyond.
• Ensure programmers are writing unit tests for all the pieces of code they touch before handing test builds to QA.
• Inform programmers about the issues immediately found as a part of the sprint during a round of manual testing, retest issues ensuring they are closed, and do a round of regression testing by performing risk assessment based on the changes made to each build so that the existing functionality still works after the code fixes.
• Pair with programmers to help them address the root cause of the issues on the specific mobile devices, both Android and iPhones.
• Work closely with programmers to review automated acceptance testing to ensure good test coverage of business-critical functionalities.
• Review the smart checklist anytime during the sprint to ensure the successful delivery of the user story by the end of the sprint.
• Ensure the successful delivery of user stories of sufficient quality in each sprint to bring value to its users.
• Active participation in retrospective meetings to discuss what went well, what went bad, and what could be improved after releasing the stories into production.

Tools and Technologies.

• Sentry, PostHog, Flutter Testing, jest-dom library, PlayWright, Jira, Zephyr Plugin, Postman, PostgreSQL, LambdaTest cloud device farm.

Key Achievements.

• Enhanced QA Processes Across Product and Engineering Teams: Successfully revamped and optimized QA processes within both Product and Engineering teams, leading to significant improvements in overall product quality and development efficiency. Spearheaded the implementation of best practices for test automation, defect tracking, and quality assurance metrics. This resulted in a reduction in critical defects, accelerated release cycles, and strengthened collaboration between QA, development, and product management, ultimately enhancing the customer experience and driving higher satisfaction rates.
• Revamped delivery-side QA processes to ensure release readiness: As a team lead, I spearheaded the overhaul of the delivery-side QA processes, addressing critical gaps that previously led to customer dissatisfaction and post-release escalations. By implementing comprehensive pre-release testing protocols and establishing clear quality criteria, I ensured that the product's readiness for release was accurately addressed. This transformation reduced the number of issues in Production and eliminated the frequent customer complaints that plagued earlier releases. The new processes provided greater confidence in the release quality, leading to smoother launches, and significantly enhanced customer satisfaction. This version emphasizes my leadership role in solving a key problem and the positive outcome of my efforts.
• Mentored and empowered junior QA engineers for independent project management: Mentored and trained a team of Junior QA Engineers, providing them with the knowledge and skills necessary to reach the required competency level. Developed a structured training program that included hands-on workshops, one-on-one coaching, and regular feedback sessions alongside their project work. This approach not only boosted their confidence, but also enabled them to handle their own workload effectively. By empowering these engineers to take ownership of their projects, I fostered a more autonomous and self-sufficient team, which contributed to the overall success of the QA department.

AlphaCoach Fitness Coaching App, India.

• AlphaCoach is a one-to-one fitness coaching mobile app. The app is specially designed for individuals who are looking for a user-friendly and easy-to-use app. They provide well-researched diet plans, a customized exercise regimen, and an in-app chat option to connect with their team of certified trainers. The app also has a daily success checklist for self-monitoring and tracking.

Roles and Responsibilities.

• Involvement from the earliest phases of user story creation and refinement, with the Business Analyst and Development team.
• Review the user stories with a team and create detailed-level manual test cases and the most important automated acceptance tests for the mobile app (Android only).
• If the code cannot be tested using test automation, collaborate with programmers in the writing of UI automated tests.
• Retest issues found as part of the sprint, and ensure that they are closed.
• Lead standup calls to discuss progress, plans, and problems for the current sprint stories.
• Demonstrate new changes or functionality to stakeholders to get early feedback from them.
• Participate in retrospective meetings to discuss what has gone well, what has gone badly, and what could be improved.

Tools and Technologies.

• JavaScript, Appium, WebdriverIO, Mocha, Postman, BrowserStack, Jira, Supertest, and GitLab.

Simplified Credit, Nigeria.

• Simplified Credit is a platform developed by AG Partnerships to help SMEs with getting information, assessment, planning, and monitoring services that improve access to credit and help them grow sustainably.

Roles and Responsibilities.

• Involvement from the earliest phases of user story creation and refinement with the product owner and customers.
• Attend regular standup calls to look at progress, plans, and problems.
• Review the user stories with a team and create detailed-level manual test cases, as well as the most important automated acceptance test cases, for user stories.
• Retest issues found as part of the sprint, ensuring that they are closed and quickly adding automated tests for the bugs found.
• Close collaboration with the backend programmer during API testing of complex business logic to understand all of the parameters and the purpose of each function.
• Close collaboration with programmers for the automated tests if parts of the screens are difficult to access and to look for alternative solutions to the problems.
• Automate the process of running tests daily on the nightly build using the CI server, Jenkins, as well as publishing test reports after the entire test suite run by integrating Jenkins with Slack, giving the team the summary of tests passed, failed, or skipped.
• Investigate the results to determine whether the failure is due to a change in the application, a bug in the application, a change in configuration of the environment, or a bug in the test itself.
• Reviewing the accuracy of the automated acceptance tests before adding them to the regular run.
• Ensuring the delivery of user stories of sufficient quality to bring value to its users.
• Responsible for implementing the test scripts, the infrastructure, and the reusable code, as well as maintaining it, investigating the results, and improving the test automation framework over time.
• Participate in retrospective meetings to discuss what has gone well, what has gone badly, and what could be improved.

Tools and Technologies.

• Protractor, JavaScript, Jasmine, Node.js, Jira, Chrome dev tools, Swagger, MongoDB, AWS, Sentry, and Slack for test automation result notification.

Key Achievements.

• Implemented Automation Build Process: Implemented a robust automation build process using Jenkins, significantly reducing manual testing efforts and increasing efficiency. One of the most notable achievements was automating the testing of a complex financial model in Excel, which previously required 4-5 hours of manual testing to validate financial numbers. With the new automation in place, the testing time was reduced to 20 minutes, allowing for rapid feedback and quicker iterations. This not only saved valuable time, but also improved the accuracy and reliability of the testing process, contributing to more confident and timely releases. This version emphasizes both the time savings and the impact on the project's overall efficiency and reliability.