Farhan is a QC engineer on Computan’s HubSpot integrations team and front-end team. He’s handled the testing, verification, and quality control work on many different types of jobs since joining the Computan team in late 2019. These days he is helping test the many different HubSpot integrations Computan’s developers do. In this installment of Behind The Coding, Farhan explains why he never eats pizza, but it’s his meal of choice on special occasions, what an all-nighter in the world of QC looks like, who his favorite teammate is at Computan.
Hi Farhan! It has been so long since we’ve caught up. How are things going?
Hi Sajeel. All is good on my side. How are you?
Good thanks. What are the last 3 things you Googled and why?
1 – Female watches
Ok. I’m assuming this is because you are looking for a gift for someone. As you are not a female, nor are you a watch 😊. Why?
Yes, you are right! I am not a female and I am also not a watch. I don’t think we have any watches on our team haha.
Not that I’m aware of.
Actually, I was planning on buying a watch for my sister so I was checking out different styles and places to get it – Amazon, Daraz.pk, and other online shopping sites.
Ok, what else?
2 – T20 World Cup Schedule. I played cricket on my University team and with the T20 World Cup starting I wanted to see when my favorite teams are playing. After this, it looks like I Googled Facebook….
…Wait a minute, you Googled Facebook? Why? Did you forget the domain name for the world’s biggest social media network?
(laughs) no no nothing like that. Actually when I have time I like to study data privacy and company terms & conditions.
Do you mean you actually read all of those details instead of just pressing the checkbox?
Sometimes yes! Everyone should. Especially for Facebook since Facebook manages your off-Facebook activity very tightly.
What do you mean?
Well in one of the latest releases of the FB mobile app I noticed that by default for example it will automatically receive activity data from many online banking apps. So if you do your banking with a bank or financial institution that Facebook has a relationship it’s not inconceivable to think that Facebook will access your account activity and buying data to target advertising to you. I was reading about that actually right before you called! I will read more after we finish.
When was the last time you worked after hours to solve a hard problem?
A few months ago we had a Shopify store owner coming at us that the ‘add to cart' function on their site wasn’t working.
Uh-oh. That’s a big thing for an eCommerce business owner.
Yeah exactly. They were saying they couldn’t add products to the cart. Nadeem (Nadeem Ahmad Shopify developer on the Computan team) asked me to recreate the issue and scenario for him since when he was adding the product to the cart things were working fine.
Ok. What happened next?
I added it to the cart fine on my end too!
So the customer was a liar!?!? I mean, how is that possible?
Haha no no of course not. This is what makes QC and testing so difficult and so necessary. I went through different scenarios – tested the add to cart feature on different devices, browsers settings, laptops, Internet providers, and geographic locations. Also since this was a Shopify site I ended up testing it with different apps enabled/disabled to see if I could recreate the issue. After doing all of that I figured out what the issue was.
Ok, what was the issue?
I honestly couldn’t tell you! But what I can say is I was able to recreate the issue by disabling cookies on my browser. When I told Nadeem that he was able to fix the issue. I think the subscription app the client was using with the store combined with the cookies being disabled caused the Add to Cart button to break for them. A unique issue for a unique setup to view websites!
That’s a lot of effort
This is kind of the problem with front-end UI/UX testing. It could be nothing in the code and simply related to someone’s viewing experience. When the bug is appearing for some and not for others it makes pinning it down really difficult and sometimes really fun.
What do you love about QC?
Really the idea of simulation. I love writing scripts for automation testing. Particularly Python scripts. With front-end testing, I think our clients (marketers and designers) have such huge attention to detail that I like the challenge of making sure our work passes their rightfully lofty standards. Which we tend to do when we follow processes and procedures the way someone like Kassem (Mohmed Kassem – Senior Project Manager at Computan) does. I like all of my teammates at Computan. No disrespect to you Sajeel or anyone else, but he (Kassem) is my favorite teammate.
No disrespect taken! Why is Kassem is your favourite teammate? What makes him a good Project Manager for a QC Engineer like you?
Mainly for the way he sets things up for us. For one, he makes sure that we have the right tools in place and that the right tools are connected. For example, we use Bugherd to track bugs as many companies do. We also invite our clients to log bugs they see there too. But what we do that most others don’t is set up a repo in Github so that issues can be reviewed and seen there by the developers. Not a big deal, but something Kassem thought of and initiated. Then, when we do a task he makes sure that the QC person involved knows exactly what the project is about so we can QC the project as a whole instead of looking for bugs or visual errors.
What about testing and QCing HubSpot Integrations? What is interesting about that?
The hard part about testing HubSpot integrations is understanding what the integration is supposed to do. Sometimes the developer or the PM on our team has only a snapshot of what the integration is going to do for a client overall. The developer might only tell me to make sure data from one place is appearing properly from another source. But that doesn’t mean the integration is done right in the client’s eye because they have a broader view of what the integration is supposed to do.
Who are 3 people you’d like to have dinner with and why?
I’d invite 3 friends from University – Tayab, Fahat and Kainat. We’d have donair pizza.
Good call! I love pizza and donair is great.
Actually, I really dislike pizza. I never eat it.
Wait, what? You just said you’d have a reunion with 3 of your friends from University and you’d have pizza.
That pizza is actually really special to the 3 of us! That’s why we’d have it.
When was the last time you cried tears of laughter?
Probably pretty recently. After watching my favorite comedian - Aftaab Iqbal.
Where were you when you first saw a laptop/desktop?
I remember it like it was yesterday. I was at my cousin’s place. He had Windows XP and we used the web browser to surf the web for a bit. Then we played Tekken 3.
Classic millennial upbringing – surfing the web and Tekken.
Yes!
What are some things your teammates don’t know about you?
Well, many don’t know that before I got into QC I did Android development and built a few Android apps.
Really? I didn’t know that! Were they React Native apps or device-based apps
No, pure platform apps. Not RN or anything.
Ok. What else?
I met my fiancé at University. She’s also a QC engineer. Better at it than I am too! You can say I will be marrying up.
Hahaha! That is a good answer.
