Udeme Jalekun is a Senior Quality Assurance (QA) Engineer and educator who transitioned from customer support into quality engineering after identifying that most recurring production issues were preventable through stronger use-case testing. Her work spans functional and non-functional testing, including integration, system, performance, and automation testing, with a focus on building resilient, scalable systems that protect revenue and improve user experience.
- Explain your job to a five-year old.
Let’s assume the 5-year-old loves to watch the ‘Paw Patrol,’ I would explain software testing using that animation series. Each pup is awesome in their own way because of the unique tools in their pup packs, which they use for each of their missions. A software tester is the guy who checks that each tool does what it’s expected to do, how it is expected to and at the right time.
- What’s the biggest misconception startups and founders have about QA?
The biggest misconception many startups and founders have about QA is treating it as optional, something you add later when you’re bigger, not something you build with from day one. They assume developers can simply test their own work and that this will be “good enough,” especially when the pressure is to ship fast.
- Five years from now, what will separate average QA engineers from exceptional ones?
Product understanding and sector-based knowledge. With the advent of AI, many people feel that human thinking will be contracted to AI agents. But in principle, AI is trained by data, data obtained from humans’ responses to unprecedented challenges. The exceptional QA has interacted long and deeply enough with their sector/product/service and can predict edge cases and scenarios based on actual interactions with the systems under test and with people who have used the system under test.
