Womenize! Wednesday Weekly is our weekly series featuring inspirational women from games and tech. For this edition we talked to Ewa Kurek, Quality Assurance Lead at Wargaming. Read more about Ewa in this interview:

Hi Ewa! You are the Quality Assurance Lead at Wargaming. How does a typical workday at the studio look like for you?

How a typical day at wargaming looks like really depends on the stage of development we are currently at. In the early stages, I take part in planning, design sessions, tech estimations and any other meetings, where issues or risk areas can be identified early. In the later stages, just before a milestone ends, QA tends to go into full battle mode 😉 it’s all about verifying a feature’s functionality and giving fast feedback, as well as making sure that everything works as intended. 

You have been working in the area of QA for almost seven years now. What is it that inspired you to work in QA in the first place?

I grew up with video games and I always loved trying to find a way to cheat the system or pushing the game rules with unexpected actions. I was very curious if there was a way to break the game, so looking for holes in systems was always like a personal challenge to me. I know that sounds awful, however, it is fun at the same time – it is like solving a puzzle in my mind.

What would you say are some helpful skills a person should have when they want to start a career in QA themselves?

Patience: Your patience will be tested thoroughly. Let’s say that you don’t have any debug tools and you have to check if a bug got fixed – in the final boss fight, insane mode, spending a decent amount of time on it – just to learn that actually, the responsible programmer forgot to push the fix to the correct development branch… Oops, I guess you have to try again. 😉

Empathy: Finding issues in somebody’s else’s work plus delivering the news that a task needs to be revisited can be slightly disturbing to your colleagues. Doing it in a positive manner and with the main intention to help make the product better, should be your main motivation.

Assertiveness: There is always some kind of time pressure, hence what tends to be postponed and cropped is the polishing/bug fixing phase. Quite often, development overflows the sacred feature freeze phase, and you might not have enough time to ensure that the quality of the game is good enough. QA should have enough confidence to say no to such situations and ensure we have enough time to test and get all the outstanding issues to be fixed.

Thank you for your time Ewa!

Ewa’s Links:

Ewa’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ewa-kurek-3a2830134/
Wargaming’s Website: https://eu.wargaming.net/en

WWW Feature by Anne Zarnecke