Whenever a consumer buys a product, his/her whole experience depends upon the product’s quality. Just imagine, if someone buys earphones but the sound quality is poor. What kind of experience would that be for a user? The answer is obvious and the same applies to almost any product, be it a physical object or a software. To prevent users from facing such situations, quality assurance and testing are necessary. Through this process, the QA team verifies the product’s compliance with the functional requirements. In Investopedia, it is defined as a “process through which a business seeks to ensure that product quality is maintained or improved, and manufacturing errors are reduced or eliminated”. With the mission to help establish cost-effective quality frameworks with the goal of facilitating the overall success to their consumers, QA Mentor, a software testing company, is a global leader in Software Quality Assurance and Testing.
QA Mentor was founded back in 2010 with a vision to help different QA departments around the world in different organizations, and to streamline and improve their QA processes. QA Mentor is all about guidance, mentorship, support, training, providing strategic directions to the organizations who want to mature their QA processes and bring the QA function to the next level. This is also a reason the company was named QA Mentor.
QA Mentor stepped in the market with the idea to offer very economical quality assurance testing services. It wanted to introduce QA function into organizations because back in the day, QA was not a very well-known function and many companies were delivering products without any sort of QA quality assurance and testing. Development teams or businesspeople were doing QA, there were no independent QA functions. With its ideas and vision, the QA Mentor has been advocating the importance of quality assurance testing and the need to implement quality assurance testing processes within organizations.
Helping through Educating
QA Mentor supports company leaders, stakeholders, and all kind of industries with its quality assurance domain. According to the company “we are talking to various stakeholders, CEOs, chief executive officers, chief information officers, chief technology officers, product owners, product managers, and anybody who has anything to do with the product, with the application, with the mobile applications, and looking for delivering those products successfully without any problems to their customer base.” It also offers several QA training classes to the customers or even quality assurance professionals, who want to improve their QA departments and audience.
QA Mentor also offers over 25 different QA trainings to train and coach quality assurance to professionals in different areas, whether its automation testing, performance testing, security testing, exploratory testing, or agile testing. It delivers all this educational information through multiple means. The company asserts, “we have the E-learning modules which are available for anybody to take and self-study them. We have corporate trainings where we come on board and provide this training through professional instructors, and we do online trainings as well with our lead-based instructors. So, the audience is very wide for us. We deal with startup companies and mature fortune 500 companies. Anybody who wants to mature their products and deliver quality from their release perspective, those are our clients. That’s our audience.”
A Proficient Leader
Ruslan Desyatnikov, CEO and Founder of QA Mentor started his career 23 years ago as a junior tester. He used to wear multiple different hats as he was going from one company to another. Over the years he has worked in different positions such as manual tester, automation engineer, performance engineer, security engineer, QA manager, and then stepped as head of QA and testing services. He says, “I used to manage the big team of 200 plus people for financial services organizations. So, in terms of my contribution to the overall QA community, I’m writing various different articles about quality assurance and testing. They are published in various different magazines, including Forbes magazine, CIO Review magazine, and many others. I am a frequent blogger on LinkedIn, posting a lot of information, a lot of materials to a lot of followers.” The company is organizing workshops and seminars and building number of elearning courses with Ruslan’s help.
Getting Ahead with Automation
QA Mentor utilizes many of the latest technologies to make its solution resourceful. Nowadays, many organizations are moving towards artificial intelligence and machine-learning, and QA Mentor is no exception. The company has over 15 different clients in the artificial intelligence space to whom it gives automation and performance testing support. Through their research and development department, QA Mentor assists its clients with any latest technology in the market. The company has created several proprietary automation frameworks to support applications in Java Selenium, C# Selenium, Python, Open Source frameworks, and Enterprise-level automation tools frameworks. QA Mentor describes these offerings “like a restaurant where if someone wants a different variety of food, it will be there. These services are for different budgets, for different technologies, for different cultures within their organizations. For instance, many companies don’t have very technical QA testers. They have manual testers. We need to accommodate that.”
Technical testers are very expensive and for that reason, many organizations cannot afford them. But at the same time, those organizations want to do automation. To help small organizations and nontechnical users, QA Mentor builds automation frameworks which allows their clients to operate those frameworks without any technical knowledge and expertise. These frameworks can also execute scripts, modify scripts and support and maintain automation frameworks because they were built with the intention to help non-technical testers.
Global Approach
QA Mentor wants to establish a footprint in every single country in the world. It is aiming to serve all the local companies so that they will operate with the best practices and QA methodologies. The idea is to establish a footprint around the world, and every year the company is opening three to four new locations and/or new offices around the world. In India, it is expanding to attract more talent. Only last year it opened two locations in India, one in Bangalore and the other in Chennai.
QA Mentor is also trying to open new locations in Dubai and Manilla, Philippines. The company further adds “We also continue our acquisition strategy of acquiring smaller companies. Smaller companies that need some help and direction and are open to operating under the umbrella of a bigger brand, that’s where we come in and how we can expand and grow quickly.” QA Mentor also wanted to continue to provide economical testing services in addition to the training center locations for the whole community. Today, there are 300 people working with the company with an aim to become a 1,000-employee company. There’s a long way to go still, but QA Mentor is looking forward to achieving that and their approach will attract more QA engineers to support clients.
Informative way of Marketing
In terms of marketing activities, QA Mentor participates in various trade shows. The company shares a lot of knowledge through its in-house articles on quality assurance and testing in different magazines and publications. It has a large and evergrowing number of followers and readers who admire the information the company provides on quality assurance and testing. Some of the marketing activities the company does is sending 100 coupons for its e-learning courses on Facebook or on LinkedIn, sharing those classes free of charge to the first 100 people. The organization visits colleges, especially in India, and provides free seminars that explain and educate college students about quality assurance and testing. This is a way to encourage and directly educate students about the potentials of becoming a quality assurance engineer.
Testimonials
“We’ve been working in collaboration with QA Mentor for more than 2 years. During this period the QA Mentor’s team showed a high level of professionalism and quality of work. We depend on their contribution and hard work for our QA Department. We rely on QA Mentor for providing qualified and experienced resources at a reasonable rate” —MICHAEL LAVATMAN, CTO, BWELL
“QA Mentor has consistently provided superior testing services for us and have been very accommodating when we were on tight schedules to complete our projects on time. Automation scripts that they build for us helped to achieve faster regression cycles and quick health checks of our builds. We look forward to our continued testing efforts with their team” —ED SPIVAK, CTO, CHEFMOD, LLC.