Free Test – Trondheim, Norway

Interview with Asha Jyothi Venkat Meruvu

By Jørgen Austvik and Tor Stålhane

Asha started in QA after advice from her adviser, who thought her logical reasoning capabilities, quick observations and communications skills was exactly what was needed in a QA department. As it turned out, the adviser was right - she enjoys her work, and finds it challenging to find defects and inspire others to follow the identified quality standards. At the present she works for Infosys – a large consulting and service company with more than 100 000 employees all over the world.

She enjoys the learning aspects of testing - you get to learn the business by testing tools and also about the companies’ products and portfolio by testing a range of products, in addition to learning about the QA field and quality standards. Another nice thing with the job is the opportunity to communicate with other teams, often from other backgrounds – e.g. business, development, end users – which creates good relationships and help her build her network.

Asha sees challenges for the testing field, mainly because the developers to testers ratio is high. As a consequence of this, there are fewer employment opportunities for testers. In Asha’s opinion, the challenge with being a tester is that you are getting less exposed to new and emerging development technologies and forget the passion for programming and developing products. In Asha’s opinion, the most needed improvement in QA and testing moving is to make developers adhere to QA standards and at the same time deliver products at time. Sometimes people take short cuts to meet the deadline but at the expense of not delivering the requested quality. We hope the Free Test conference can help in this regard.

Asha's presentation is about Testlink (http://blog.testlink.org/), which is a test management system that store test cases and test plans, record test executions and results. Testlink improves and organizes the test process and test life-cycle. As such this presentation is targeting testers, developers and managers.

When Asha doesn't strive to make developers follow QA standards, she enjoys being with friends, playing table tennis, music and watching Indian television and movies. If you want to try some free testing tools, she recommends Apache JMeter, Bugzilla and of course Testlink.