Meet Merix: Luiza - QA i Team Leader

After frontend and backend boys, it's time for one of our ladies. Luiza is a QA Team Leader here. She's always smiling, willing to help and to bounding through the office. Every day, at the specified time, you can find her playing card games with her buddies in our dining room.

• Tell us something about yourself.
  I am a little bit geek, a little bit nerd, and a little bit slob.

• What are your main responsibilities at MerxiStudio?
  I am a QA Team Leader. As each of testers here, at MerixStudio, I'm responsible for the quality of projects and their niceties of specifications. Due to the fact that our company offers Responsive Web Design support, I'm working not only with desktops but also with mobile devices. In addition, newcomers come to me and I take them under my wings.

• How do you work? What is important to you while working?
  Every morning I check a status of my tasks and projects I'll working on. Then I plan my job day depending on project specification, progress or if I'll work on frontend or backend. During the day, I familiarize myself with designs, mock-ups, specifications and changes made by the Client. I often meet my colleagues from others departments and consult what should be done. After all, my preparations it's time for testing. I have to focus on them and put myself in the shoes of end-user. Often it's monotonous and repetitive. During whole my work project should be taken as a whole, rather than single fragments. This is why good communication is priceless for me. If I won't be informed about change which was made, a smooth testing process may be disturbed and unnecessarily slowed down.

• Tell us something about beginnings in the company.
  I've been working here for a year and a half. I started like everybody here - at first, I met buddies from my room, then I had traditional office mini-tour. I was hard to remember all names because there were about 30 people on board. At the beginning I got small projects, I learned something about working at Merixstudio with them and of course, I learned RWD testing. Then I met Drupal, and further I was overtaken by events. Throughout the period of working here, I can rely on my work buddies all the time (not only from QA department). Beginnings were quite funny because I got into "troll room" and everybody felt sorry for me. Fortunately, the trolls turned out to be not as black ad they were painted ;)

• Have you learned something while working at MerixStudio? What?
  Most things I know now, I've learned at Merixstudio. When I started my work here, I knew Magento - the eCommerce software and platform and had a gentle idea about front-end testing. What I know now, I owe to teamwork and unremitting sharing of experience with my work buddies.

• What do you like working at MerixStudio?
  The diversity of technologies and projects. Besides, work in teams and supporting each others.

• What was the biggest challenge you faced while working in the company?
  The biggest challenge for me was the project for SoftwareONE that is still being developed. The service is very complex and include a lot of content. The additional difficulty was limited time for implementation and all works. Thanks to the effort of the whole team we made it in time so that the cooperation was extended and we're still working on new facilities.

• What cool things have you worked on at MerixStudio?
  Snake and Touch & Go are my favorites projects because we used the WebSocket technology. Facing up with its capabilities caused that testing of these apps was great fun. Anyway, whether it be otherwise when playing snake with six people? ;)

• What was your first contact with web technologies? When did you make a decision that you want to work in IT?
  A now-defunct project of RPG game based on PHP was my first conscious contact with web technologies. Then I learned basic of programming, even though my job was to implement changes to the code and test the final result. Then I faced up to a simple HTML code. When I realized that the humanities that I studied are not for me, I decided to start working in the interactive agency. So I started testing, and I stuck :)

• What is the hardest thing about testing?
  The necessity of continuous focus and looking at the project as a whole. Very rarely we work on a particular part of the site. We must constantly anticipate how the end-user may behave and we need to be one step ahead of him.

• First thing you do when you get to the office
  Cycle: turn on the computer - open the window - make a coffee.

• iOS or Android?
  Android.

• What do you do in a free time after work?
  I play: computer games, card games, text RPG, etc.

• The best hero from childhood is...
  It's rather not a girly type, but He-Man.

• Where is your favorite place in Poznań?
  The ZOO.

• Beer or vodka?
  Beer.

• Dog or cat?
  I am a dog-person. Cats only when I'm visiting someone ;)

• The website you visit the most.
  Youtube and Facebook on the second place.

• Favorite app?
  Google Keep.

• If you could only visit one website for the rest of your life, what site would that be?
  Youtube.

• If you could have your dream job, what it would be?
  Water slide tester at aquapark.