Meet Harry, our Quality Assurance Engineer 💛

At Orca Scan, every release is a team effort and when it comes to making sure that each update runs smoothly across every device, in every supported languages, there’s only one person for the job: Harry!

As our awesome Quality Assurance Engineer, Harry’s work plays a huge part in catching bugs before they hit your devices, and as we celebrate Orca supporting new languages, we wanted to shine a spotlight on the quiet force behind the scenes, making sure things just work…👇

A little bit of context: Meet Harry 💛

Name: Harry Eastwood

Age: 27

Degree: Qualified Electronics Engineer

Current role: Quality Assurance Engineer

Orca-Anniversary: 27th March

Hey Harry 👋 How long have you been working at Orca Scan?

Hi 👋 I’ve worked at Orca Scan for just over 2 years

What is your role?

I am Orca Scan’s Quality Assurance Engineer. It’s my job to stop bugs sneaking into the application before any updates and find any issues in the current versions if and when they occur.

Did you study QA at university? If not, how did you get into QA work?

I am actually a qualified Electronics Engineer but I got into this role when the opportunity arose and I took it. It was never something I saw myself doing but it’s now something I thoroughly enjoy.

Tell us about a day in your life as QA at Orca Scan?

I begin my day like any other person. A slice of toast and a cup of Yorkshire’s finest. Check in with the team, take a look at the sprint board, procrastinate a little bit and then crack on with whatever tasks lie ahead. I check in with our automated test runs, raise any issues and fix what I can while I am at it.

What is your favourite part of being a QA tester?

I like the puzzles. If I find an issue, it’s my job to figure out where it came from and how to replicate it so that when I pass it onto the development team, they know where to look and have an idea of where to begin.

Can you talk me through the QA process when testing and preparing for new features like our new language support?

I begin by starting up Orca Scan on my computer locally. I then explore the new feature and essentially write automated tests in the Cypress test suite by following a user’s journey all the way from registration to logging out. In the case of our languages support, I will change the user’s settings to use a different language and then check the elements in the pages have been changed correctly into that language. Once the test is built, I run it and get to see the entire process happen on screen and if the test passes, I merge it into the test suite and it will run alongside all the other tests on the unreleased version of the app. This ensures the user should not encounter any bugs or issues. However, even then, it’s impossible to catch everything.

Can you tell us about the kind of issues you run into when testing new features, and how you overcome them?

Some issues I encounter would be, for example, the devs will create a new system and when I write my tests, I expect it to be the same process as always, a step-by-step walkthrough of the app. But sometimes, this new system does not react or behave regularly and I have to adapt the tests to accommodate this new system and find new ways to do things and explore new code to apply to my tests.

How do you prioritise tests when Orca have so many features running at the same time?

I prioritise my tests with basically the biggest impacting features first. For example, I will always prioritise logging in or creating new sheets over other features that aren’t used as much or aren’t as impactful.

How do you make sure each release is as bug free as possible?

I am constantly running the full test suite as well as building new tests to cover all areas of the app, website and web app. I am always monitoring it and making sure there’s no issues with every push to the code that the devs make.

What do you think are the key challenges in testing barcode scanning apps across different devices?

The variety in user devices. There’s no real way to ensure the app will run the same on every device. Whilst we extensively test the app on our automated suite, you never know how every device will handle new features. Especially older android devices which not only perform slower but also have different firmware which causes the application code to behave and react differently. Sometimes features of the app will break but only on certain devices, running certain Operating System versions and even different screen sizes. This is why I also use emulators to run the app on.

How would you ensure accuracy and performance of scanning in real-world environments (lighting, angles, damaged barcodes)?

I’d like to say that the scanner actually performs very well but it does help to have readable, larger barcodes when using a phone’s camera. Especially older devices. Orca Scan does allow you to use the flashlight so lighting isn’t really an issue but certainly the angle at which you capture the barcode does help. Usually straight on and a flat surface gives the best results.

What is your favourite thing about working at Orca Scan? 👀

I love our culture. I am not a morning person at all so working flexible working hours is a huge bonus. Every member of the team is super friendly and always down to have a laugh which is great especially as I have a rather dry sense of humour. We all just click and get the job done. It’s honestly a great place to work. Most days it doesn’t even feel like work. It’s more of a hobby 🙂

If you were to work on any idea/project/feature with Orca, what would you like to do?

I’d love to get involved with some sort of AI project where we can make the lives of everyone using the app, even easier.

As we continue to grow, add new features and reach new users, it’s the care and attention to detail from people like Harry that keep our standards high. So, next time you switch languages, load a new template or add a trigger and everything just ✨ works ✨ then you’ve got Harry to thank. Merci, Gracias, Danke, Cheers Harry! 👏

If you want to see more of our great team, and the fun we get up to behind the scenes, check out our socials - LinkedIn & Instagram.