My Week showcases one of our expert’s work week – the highs and the challenges they are facing, and what the role actually consists of.

Today we take a look at the work week of Annina Hellman from our QA team. Annina has been at Zure for one year now as an QA Specialist. We got to follow Annina for one week in September. Let’s hear what the work week is like from Quality Assurance viewpoint!

What does your work week consist of?

I am basically 100% allocated to my customer work, so my weeks revolve around the two-week sprint model. We have on weekly basis rolling sprint plannings, testing meetings, UAT plannings, bug testings and other regular QA processes. The DevOps dashboard, Azure Test Plan, release pipelines and bug reports are usually open on my desk. I am working in tight cooperation with our 12-employee Zure team to have the development process going on smoothly. Also recently we got another QA Specialist for the team, so it is super nice to work side-by-side and share the QA tasks.

I have been part of this project since I started at Zure. I have been really happy that on top of the regular day-to-day operations, I have been able to take initiative in improving the QA processes but also all different areas, for example release pipelines. There has always been new areas to learn and responsibility to take whenever I have felt ready. Next up I’m hoping we can focus more on increasing the automation testing in this project!

What has been most challenging this week?

I have recently been selected as the QA Manager for a new ERP renewal project. It is a great honor but also a big challenge – given the magnitude of the project – to make sure we take everything into consideration. Questions like what are we going to test and how – like how to use the DevOps Test Plans here – are currently on my desk.

Luckily we have our Zure QA team where we can spar each other. We have a meeting every week where we go through how we are all doing in our projects. It’s great to have such skillful team where everyone is eager to help one another.

On a more concrete level, there was a very tricky bug in production that I was resolving with our development team. In these cases I first make a bug report, try to repeat it myself and check if there is more information on the logs. Luckily the problem was found by our Team Lead Janne.

What internal stuff do you have?

I am part of our Diversity & Inclusion Force, where we just conducted a DEI survey and are now planning for the activities for this year and the next one. We just booked a DEI training for the whole company in November and are looking for all the other activities we can develop together.

Otherwise I’m attending our Guild meetings, so always when I do not have customer work I’m listening to our Methodologies, DevOps & UX Guilds meetings. They are always on Thursday afternoons, so I’m trying to keep it clear in the calendar.

Best things lately?

The best and funniest thing lately has been my new Walking Pad that I purchased with our Gear Budget. Nearly everyone at the office has come to try it 😀

Overall it has been really nice working more and more at the office. We have a really good team, and it’s great sitting next to team mates and get answers to all my questions quickly. We also do our Team Lunches very punctually every month, trying out new good restaurants. We have a list of best lunch places where we fill out our observations and recommendations for other teams too.

What is essential in a QA role?

All of us QA people at Zure have different strengths, so there is no exact list of e.g. tools or needed skills we are looking for. The most important thing is quality-focused mindset, out-of-the-box thinking and pure curiosity to test and look for answers.

In case you got interested to work with us, the Test / Quality Assurance Specialist open position tells you more about the requirements and us! 🙂

If you are interested to know more about Quality Assurance, you can listen the September issue of Ikkunastudio podcast where my colleague and our QA Lead Virpi Tuohisto opens up the QA processes and testing practices (in Finnish).