Tech Talks With Mirza Sisic

When we talk about digital transformation, it refers to revolutionary technologies that contain innovation as its core. However, innovation without quality is worthless, both from the business and user point of view.  

More importantly, the need for creating technology that delivers consistent and reliable output, checking on everything from functionality to performance becomes necessary. Though advanced development practices that involve use of DevOps and Agile have complemented the entire product lifecycle, quality assurance solutions could enable testers to meet the highest dynamics of end-user experience.  

Especially, when the entire tech environment is quickly expanding, quality assurance and software testing nurtures the entire business process. However, pursuing quality goals requires a widened perspective and thorough knowledge of the integrating QA in the earliest and every stage of SDLC.  

With the objective to gather more profound expertise and insights, this time, our expert, Rajeev Verma, interacted with Mirza Sisic, who is working as a QA developer at Consulteer. With an industry experience of almost 10 years, Mirza defines himself as a blogger, Memer, MoT Sarajevo, and Agilist. 

He is a young and enthusiastic QA who started his career as a tech support and moved into software testing. He is a casual RPG gamer and a Sci-fi fan who constantly aims to involve with testing community.  

With that being said, let us quickly jump on the interaction to explore Mirza’s perspective on working fundamentals, opinion for agile, implementing automation, and more. 

Rajeev: What makes you feel inspired? 

Mirza: Solving problems, getting thighs done, helping people understand testing, mentoring others, writing blog content and seeing people succeed. 

Rajeev:  What has fundamentally changed about your work from when you started until now? 

Mirza: Most notably, remote work has become pretty much a normal thing, and just 5-10 years back it was pretty rare, and most companies would consider it a privilege if you were allowed to work two days in a month remotely. 

Rajeev: What is your opinion for leading Agile for small scale and medium scale companies?  

Mirza: From my experience Agile works best in smaller companies, they are by nature more adaptable and flexible, also they don’t usually have as many regulations and internal policies as bigger companies do. As for larger companies pure agile is very hard, if not impossible, so it’s common that a hybrid approach is taken where we have Waterfall elements combined with Agile, for example we have two-week sprints, but we have fixed release cycles every three months. 

Rajeev: According to you, what are the key metrics that are most effective in an agile environment? 

Mirza: I’d say customer satisfaction, retention and ease of onboarding of new customers. Customers don’t really care how DRY our code is, or that our tests have a 100% pass rate, they just want their problem solved. 

Rajeev: How to ensure success in implementing automation? 

Mirza: There are many starts that need to align in order to have automation be a success.  You need top-management support, long-term commitment, either to have dedicated automation testers who know how to code really well, or to have the developers involved in automation. Other than that, it’s important to automate features wisely, balancing risk, gain and the costs. Of course, also, our framework needs to have a scalable architecture, use clean coding standards, etc. 

Rajeev: If you weren’t doing what you are now, what industry would you like to be in? 

Mirza: I’m not sure, maybe I’d be a history teacher because that’s what I studied for, before I dropped out. I liked reading history books a lot and thinking about other people's mistakes and recognizing repeatable patterns through history.  

Rajeev: If anyone wants to connect with you online, how can they? 

Mirza: I got links to my social media on my website: mirzasisic.com/contact 

At BugRaptors, we constantly aim to improve our network of testing professionals. Doing so allows us to exchange perspectives while allowing the testing community to learn new aspects of modern-day technologies. We hope this conversation between Rajeev and Mirza would have left you with some insightful imprints.   

For more information, contact our team through info@bugraptors.com