QA Connect is a reality! by Guido Bolaños

Posted on January 18th, 2012 by liz

Like many of us, I worked myself through college at a restaurant.

I was very lucky and basically opened the restaurant to the public, with the chef/owner and a small crew over ten years ago; now is one of the best in the city! And I had the chance to be part of it from the beginning.

At first, we did not know what to expect or even what to do… we just wanted to serve good food at an upscale yet cool place with a great vibe.

I was a bartender/waiter and my job was to make sure that the customer was happy and got what he/she ordered. As we grew… more customers came, we got great reviews on newspapers, Gourmet and Bon Appétit magazines. We were on demand! So now we needed a food runner, busboys and more waiters.

Juana was our food runner and she checked the tickets we sent to the kitchen; with the food assigned by seat number she took the food to the table. If there was something not clear or wrong, then she would let us know, so we could make sure it was all good for our customers.

Sounds familiar?

Our digital production company seems very much like Indika; and the QA department, like Juana and myself, working together to make sure our customers get exactly what they want.

We deliver the goods. Everything goes through us before it goes to your table, and we make sure your order is right!

QA Connect Process from QA Connect on Vimeo.

When I started at BOSZ almost 2 years ago, it was only 10 of us at QA. Processes were defined and we began to work. Thinking about all the valuable information the QA department could gather from the fact that everything must go through us, we thought of an excel sheet. Who did what and when, who reviewed and was it approved or not. That’s how it all started.

In the beginning this was tricky yet possible; but when the team started to grow to a current number of 35… the excel sheet was just not good enough.

That is how the idea of QA Connect was born.

A centralized database that would allow direct and real time access to metrics such as:

• Approval rate by team and/or developer
• Reject rate
• Does not meet
• Workload on a specific period of time.
• Graphics and tables
• A blog
• A repository

And so a group of us began working on this idea. Didier, Wexford, Vivi and Diego put great amounts time, creativity and experience to make this happen. And they did!

After six months here it is! Our very own, home made – fresh from the oven recipe for metric managing and overall performance.

QA Connect is a reality!

QA Connect from QA Connect on Vimeo.

With a Does-Not-Meet rate of less than a monthly 1%, 35 Analyst all over the company working on different teams and a custom made QA tool to process all the info we generate; I could not be more proud of the people I work with.

I think every manager thinks they have the best team… but really I DO HAVE THE BEST TEAM!

I cannot sign off before thanking once again Didier, Wexford, Diego, Vivi and everybody else that has helped us through this process for their time, great attitude and disposition, creativity and plain awesomeness!!!

TOTAL ROCKSTARS!!!