A day in the life of Alex, QA Analyst in the SBS On Demand team

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Words by Alex Hipolito

“Since I was a kid, I’ve always been a huge fan of SBS. My family and I used to watch SBS World News during dinner almost religiously growing up. I watched many SBS documentaries with my Dad and Nordic Noir TV Shows like The Bridge with my Mum.

I started at SBS in 2017 in the SBS On Demand team after the General Manager at the time told me how exciting it was to work here and what sort of impact I could contribute to. I haven’t left since!

My current role as a Quality Analyst is to help the team to ensure quality in our platforms – that can mean minimising the number of bugs in the platform by carrying out different types of testing. I also support the team to improve their processes so that testing is done throughout all stages of software delivery.

I am part of the On Demand Engineering and Product team, whose vision is to connect people with inspiring content and a delightful digital experience to celebrate our differences and shared humanity. As a team, we gather and analyse the different requirements needed to achieve a goal, implement and test the solution through automated and manual tests, then release it when it is ready. But releasing the feature doesn’t stop there – we monitor usage and audience feedback to evaluate whether what we’ve delivered has solved the problem we set out to achieve.

SBS offers not only great career paths but has also provided unique experiences outside of work. During my time at SBS I have taken the opportunity to participate in special events such as dressing up and dancing on the SBS Float for the Sydney Gay & Lesbian Mardi Gras, attending the studio audience for the filming of Mastermind, and running for the SBS Team in the Blackmores Sydney Running Festival! Where else can you do all those things?

What I love the most about working here is the people in my team. I am always supported and feel that my ideas and opinions on product and process matter. I have also never had so much fun working with colleagues before! We work hard, but we always have time for fun and camaraderie – whether it be Friday team lunches, team birthdays, or team events every quarter. We have even been axe throwing!

I love how we are continuously learning, both on the job through problem solving and experimentation, but also through external training and conferences. Over the last few years I have learned how to test SBS On Demand across all our different platforms, from a user perspective as well as a technical perspective. I have also learned how to code automated test scripts in JavaScript and PHP and have gained enough confidence to coach others in testing our products.

At the moment, my team and I are working on a rebuild of the SBS On Demand website. We are improving the product based off audience feedback as well as remedying growing pains with our current website. We are learning and implementing industry standard web frameworks such as React and building in visual and UI automated test scripts to make the website easier to test. I am proud to be working towards making our new website more accessible to users who may have hearing, mobility or vision impairments by implementing WCAG standard design, code and testing practices from the start.”