In what ways have you grown professionally during your time at Crossover?
Working at Crossover made me realize that my past work experience had a very limited scope. I had done automation testing, but not even at 10% of the scale that we do at Crossover. As a Quality Assurance Engineer in other companies, you're mostly expected to do black box testing without delving into any details of the application or its business logic. Switching entirely to automation testing meant learning a lot of technical skills that I had not needed in the past.
My team performs peer reviews, which have improved my coding abilities a lot. And at Crossover, I’m using resources like TestRail and TeamCity that I never had access to in previous roles.
Has your compensation at Crossover impacted your lifestyle in any meaningful way?
My father passed away a few years ago, which introduced significant hardships to my family. I scavenged for scholarships to complete my graduate degree. As the sole breadwinner in my family, I dedicated all of my wages to basic living necessities for myself and my relatives.
Amazingly, my income roughly quadrupled when I joined Crossover. My family’s quality of life has improved significantly. After only 7 months at Crossover, I am able to think about investment opportunities. I bought a car for my family, and I have been able to cover my younger sister’s medical expenses. She is a cancer survivor, and my Crossover compensation has allowed me to ensure that her post-treatment screening happens regularly and she stays healthy.
Being an independent working woman in a country like Pakistan is relatively uncommon. Through Crossover, I have been able to provide my family with the best of the best, which has motivated me to work even harder.
Tell us about your team. How have your colleagues (teammates, managers, direct reports) helped you grow?
My manager is extremely helpful and empowers everyone in the team to constantly improve. Seeing my dedication to my work, my manager and architects in the team have assigned me responsibilities like deploying automation frameworks for projects and maintaining an internally developed Jenkins job. These have been amazing learning opportunities for me.
Please tell us about a time at Crossover when you successfully completed a seemingly impossible task.
My team had automated tests for a project that had been developed without CI (Continuous Integration). After CI was added, many tests failed due to inconsistencies in the speed of execution. We allocated several developers to the project, but they were unable to improve the pass rate for over a month. I suggested leveraging protractor-flake and adding retries in scripts. By implementing these suggestions, I was able to increase the pass rate from 30% to 85% in only a week.
