Unlocking Excellence: The QA Engine that Powers SkillLab's Impact

Clarity, confidence, and collaboration: The triple-threat mission

If we had to describe the Quality Assurance (QA) team’s primary goal in one sentence, it would be to bring clarity and confidence to a very dynamic environment and to ensure our team has the critical information they need to ship an excellent product fast.

The QA team's work is driven by more than just finding bugs; it’s about being a deeply user-empathetic advocate. We constantly ask: How does this feel for the person using the platform? Is it intuitive and fast? Does it truly help our users achieve their goals?

This curious, questioning approach means the QA team must start collaborating from the very beginning of the product cycle, testing requirements and ideas before any code is written. Through activities like exploring, experimenting, and questioning, the team gathers essential information to help product managers make conscious, well-informed decisions about risk.

Quality from the ground up

Quality at SkillLab isn't an afterthought; it’s a collaborative effort. The QA team is deeply integrated with the Product, UI/UX (Design), and Engineering teams, ensuring quality is built in from the start through refinement meetings where the teams meet to discuss new proposals, covering the product vision, technical feasibility, and timelines. The QA team collaborates with the PM and Design teams to discuss and test the requirements and initial designs, ensuring the solution makes sense for the people using our platform.

The detectives at SkillLab 

The QA team is constantly employing its critical thinking and deep knowledge of user needs to look for potential flows that might be overlooked. This exploratory mindset recently prevented a significant issue that would have impacted both counselors and the people they support. Here’s the example: 

A mismatch in data handling

While enhancing an existing feature, the QA team uncovered an inconsistency in the implementation. A specific scenario, where a counselor would edit or remove certain parameters, would appear to work correctly on the screen, throwing no errors.

However, the team's meticulous testing revealed a technical mismatch: the data-removal requests were utilizing a different pattern from the one expected in that part of the application. This meant that while the flow looked successful to the user, no actual data update was happening in the database; the addition or removal simply wasn't being performed.

The real-world consequence

If this bug had made it to our users, the real-world consequences would have been severe, directly hindering a person's pathway to employment and education.

• Reports derived from this feature, crucial for planning and assessment, would potentially show incorrect values, causing harm to the counselors and stakeholders relying on this information.
• Custom recommendations provided by our application—which leverage this data—would incorrectly calculate scores, leading to inaccurate suggestions for careers and courses.

In short, the very tools designed to guide people toward better opportunities would have led them astray.

The innovative catch: Exploring beyond the 'happy path'

The discovery was a direct result of the QA team's commitment to exploring beyond the "happy path". After validating the basic, successful flows, they began looking for scenarios that a user might naturally attempt. They found that if a counselor chose to edit the parameters initially assigned, which was a reasonably natural flow, the application would behave inconsistently under certain circumstances, preventing the edit from happening without alerting the user. This innovative approach to testing is how the team ensures the quality and trustworthiness of our data.

Ready to make an impact? Join our research-driven journey!

If you're passionate about continuous learning, solving complex problems, and building technology that makes a real difference in people's lives , we encourage you to explore our vacancies on our Careers page or follow us on our LinkedIn. We'd love to hear from you!