Hi there! I’m a few months into my first QA job. Being the first “formal” QA in the company, I had to develop most of the flows and methods we have for testing. We used to ship e-commerces that were not thoroughly tested, or were tested by the same developers that built the product.
Since they hired a Junior role (me) to start the QA Department, knowledge gaps were expected and I’m doing whatever I can to build a scalable structure and documentation for future hires in QA.
My context aside, I’m used to test in diferent browsers and different resolutions/devices. However, in a recent project I encountered something I hadn’t considere before.
A website layout I am testing breaks in my Thinkpad laptop, 1920x1080 BUT scaled to 125%, but not in 1920x1080 at 100%.
When you are testing, do you take into account the diferent scaling options Windows offers? My laptop has 125% by default, so I assume a good fraction of the userbase has scaled displays also.
Any input regarding this topic is highly welcome, also regarding being the first member of the QA department being a junior and proposing the future of QA in the company.
For the time being I’m working on installing a culture of quality and BDD, working in the whole process, from the sales pitch to design, to delivery.
You will consider more things than you have resources to have tested. So really you’re sampling, and your choice of sampling will depend on your situation. If you’ve found a problem with in-browser scaling that tells me that the tech you’re using doesn’t give you scaling support out of the box, therefore is more of a risk for your product. You may want to find out why it’s breaking, and perhaps it’s one particular technology that causes the problem - then you can find every instance where that technology is used and check that. And so on. It’s all one big exploratory feedback loop.
I was the first tester in a company early in my career. I threw myself into learning and it’s where I learned the value of deformalisation - moving explicit scripts into charters. Also where I learned the weaknesses of metrics, and the importance of communication. I was very lucky to attend good talks that excited me about my job (by MoT) and I encourage you to strip mine the training budget for conferences and courses if you can.
Thank you Chris, it’s encouraging to find others that had to discover or plan things for their company, even if it seemed way out of our league at the time.