2200 - The Evolution of Software Testing - Adapting to AI and Remote Work Challenges with TestDevLab's Ervins Grīnfelds

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1:05With us right now, it's Irvins Grinsfeld. Irvins, you are the co-CEO and co-founder of Test Dev Lab. You're found on the web at testdevlab.com. Irvins, it's great to have you. Thank you. Thanks for having me. Yeah. Well, listen, before we get going and talking about the work that you do and advice you would give in the world to a business owner audience, uh what are you currently doing for fun i know you live in latvia which i'd actually love to learn a bit more about but what do you do for fun in latvia yeah you know what lately not not lately but actually for a couple of years you know like one of my hobbies is flying drones you know like i i put those kind of vr you know like glasses on sometimes with them sometimes without them but you know like just flying you know like looking at nature sometimes sometimes doing some tricks you know like with those drones you know like it's just you know like a good break from let's say kind of day-to-day business world wow so yeah and i guess i haven't been paying attention to to drone flying in a while when did you get into this uh i would say maybe kind of almost 10 years ago you know okay so yeah but those drones you know like technologies they advance you know like initially they were quite basic you know like afterwards you know like you get them smaller you get the more agile you get those vr glasses on so you can look from kind of first person view how you fly and it's amazing you know like you you know like take a break from everything you look how things look from above it's yeah it's it's it's a nice hobby you know like i recommend that yeah all right so you got to brag on what do you what are you currently flying right now well mostly in latvia but whenever you know like whenever i travel somewhere i like to take my drone with me you know like if i get you know like on some hike let's say you know like in some uh on some mountains or in some kind of nice kind of nature place it's it's always good you know like to look from above how it looks to take some kind of nice pictures you know like fly around so that's uh that's where i'm difficultly flying yeah that's got to be amazing uh what kind of gear do you use mostly dji you know like a couple of them you know like yeah i'm looking i've got it pulled out up on amazon right now the dgi avata drones like like for example one of my favorite ones is dgi avata you know like yes i'm looking at it right now yeah that's what you have this kind of joystick you know like and you you know like put vr glasses on and then you see what the drone sees and you can do a lot of tricks you can you know like how can a agile can a fly it's it's very cool you know like enjoyable experience friends that are listening uh feel free to use my affiliate like by the way i don't know i've got one linked up but you can get the dgi avada to fly more combo it's about a thousand dollars right now and uh i mean it's it looks like like everything you need and exactly you could start flying through the mountains that that's got to be so cool with the headset on i've never done that before all right well yeah well urvins let's let's talk about the work that you do with test dev lab what does test love test dev lab do yeah so i'll give you kind of short and a bit longer kind of answer in a short we test software you know like we we find bugs and we kind of point out you know like what are different kind of weaknesses or problems in software so teams and developers can fix it but you know like a bit kind of longer answer you know like why software testing is needed you know like many kind of people ask and there are kind of a couple of reasons but one most you know like simple and straightforward case why software testing is needed it helps companies to mitigate risks if they ship poor quality software you know like they could have financial consequences there could be reputational risks there could be legal consequences and it's like an insurance you know like if there's properly tested software they can avoid all those let's say kind of bad consequences what may happen and second reason why software testing is important is this deal or this kind of huge difference from good product to great product companies that invest in let's say kind of proper software testing they find all small details what may not work on specific devices on specific user configurations and we help to spot those issues and we help to make great products And, you know, to give you a fact, you know, like, well, we've been in business 13 years approximately, but we recently looked at all those companies with whom we work and whom we help with software testing kind of services.

5:57On day to day, there's approximately four billion people who use products that we test daily. You know, from that, you know, like you can guess that, you know, like quite many of well-known companies, you know, like are using our services for kind of testing needs. And by the way, Zoom, you know, like we were partnering up with Zoom and time by time testing their audio video quality. There's also public blog posts, what Zoom has published about engaging with us and helping with audio and video testing. Your clients range from Discord, Pinterest, Zoom, Microsoft, Twilio. And so do you also work with SMBs or do you primarily work with enterprise?

6:47SMBs as well. You know, like we like to say that our target customer is somebody who has something to lose. You know, like typically it's not early stage startup, but SMBs, corporates or series A, series B funded kind of startups are typically already companies who have something to lose. They already have a decent user base or they have investments. And those are typically our kind of target clients. And they understand importance of shipping good quality products. That's when they kind of engage with us and start using software testing. Yeah. Well, how has the world of QA been changing and evolving over the past year or two with the popularity of AI-enabled tools?

7:37yeah it's a very good question you know like well but one step step back you know like as at all like we are in a business 13 years and i would say is that it's a constant process of us adapting and looking what's happening in the market in technology trends and also change and adjust our offerings and even before ai you know like just to give an example a few years ago during COVID pandemic, of course, industry was completely different. Everything was remote. Let's say, work was remote. Healthcare was kind of mostly remote. Education was remote and significant shift of audio-video communication.

8:18That's, you know, like when we kind of changed a lot of our kind of testing offerings, laboratories and products for audio-video communication testing. But of course, the world changed, you know, like once again, now it's kind of ai trend but the way how we look at ai we look at more like an opportunity first off you know like there's a lot of products implementing new ai features like for example products um like zoom or any others you know like they use ai transcript feature you know like where meetings are being summarized and you know like after the call anyone can get kind of summary of you know, like what was talked in a conference.

9:00Those things need testing and very specific, you know, like type of testing. We have solutions for that, you know, like we also have a research and development team who invented, you know, like special ways, algorithms and tools, how we can reliably test those AI features. And that's just kind of one example. But we look, you know, like at how different products integrate AI and we come up with specific testing types, how we can let's say kind of help them and that works out you know like quite well other than that a lot of new companies you know like are raising funds and being created in AI space and those are potential kind of customers of ours we try to reach out explain how I kind of niche capabilities around AI testing and work to get them as a customers and lastly probably I would like to mentioned that AI itself, as I mentioned, we have a research and development team.

9:59We are looking how different AI tools can help us to do even better work that we do currently by speeding up or making more efficient regular testing that we provide to our customers. So that we do as well. Yeah. And for those who might be much newer in product development or any kind of development, would you mind maybe just kind of giving a 101 on the importance of QA and kind of where that should fit in? And I think what I really want to know is how can we develop more of a QA mindset within our own organizations? Yeah, also a very good question. So what we see, you know, like one of the biggest mistakes, still many kind of companies or kind of software development teams do believe that testing should come at very last stage.

10:51You know, like they believe that, you know, like they can develop product, they can almost be, you know, like close to launch date. And only then they assign, let's say, kind of software testing teams to help to find different bugs. In our view, that's quite wrong. In order to actually prevent issues quite early, software testers should work alongside with developers already almost from beginning of development. And they should be the ones, you know, like who can validate and test already initial kind of code iterations. They can kind of test requirements. They can test user stories. They can point to issues on very kind of early builds, even if they are not ready.

11:41And it's much cheaper. It could be maybe for somebody counterintuitive, you know, like someone can think, hey, it will be kind of cheaper to get testing in very kind of last stages of product. But it's actually opposite. you know like issues or kind of potential kind of defects found much early in development cycle are way more kind of cheaper and faster to fix once they're kind of spotted early enough let's say in development cycle and we typically you know like in in for most of our kind of customer engagements we typically help from early on on development kind of cycle with advice with with testing support and help, let's say, kind of to steer a product through kind of different stages until it's successfully released.

12:32Yeah, and obviously, I think this should go without saying, but what are the benefits of just incorporating QA into everything we do? Like if you're thinking about the typical SMB founder and because I think a lot of us, you know, we just we're excited. We're excited to get our product to market. We're excited to get, you know, just get it out there. But there are consequences to, you know, kind of gummed up launches. And some of that is reputational. And I guess maybe you could add on around that topic. oh yeah i mean um i mean first first of uh i would say quite a few clients did reach out to us only when they faced consequences you know like how they're gonna ship some products that had you know like a lot of crashes or you know like some other significant problems and they kind of realized what could be actual consequence of not you know having an appropriate testing so that's you know like one thing but there's way you know like more things and i could kind of mention a couple of them one also quite important area of software testing is legal compliance let's say for example accessibility testing which is also quite a big trend at the moment and there are specific laws and regulations not only in european union also united states and the rest of the world that that puts specific requirements for digital products, how they should be designed from accessibility perspective.

14:06And software testing can point out and specifically kind of outline what are things that need to be fixed or improved in order to reach compliance. So to put it simply, you know, like we can help also to avoid any legal consequences. That's another kind of example. And what I mentioned kind of previously, we can be, you know, like a gate what differentiates good product from great product. Also, you know, like to give example, in our fleet, we have more than 4 ,000 devices, meaning kind of different phones, operating system variations, tablets, computers, screen sizes. and typically any company just they don't have capacity to test and see how their product behaves in all those different configurations, form factors, network conditions and we are the ones who can do it point out exactly where are some bottlenecks, drawbacks issues and they can incorporate those findings and essentially build a great product and everybody knows what it means to ship great product it means more customers, more satisfied customers, more revenues, and you name it, everything what business owners want.

15:25Yeah. Listen, I can tell you what it's like. Again, when you put something out to the market and consumers or users have the ability to review what you're doing, you do not likely want a lot of negative reviews right out of the gate. Exactly. That can be really tough to undo, especially for some of that stuff that just for whatever reason gains traction gains uh you know ranking or whatever and then then you're dealing with everybody over the next three to six months or longer uh that you know is reading all these negative reviews on a you know version you know 1.0 of your product when you really should have shipped 1.09 or something exactly that's familiar I'm sure that's something familiar you've come across.

16:16Yeah, yeah. No, exactly, exactly. Yeah, all right. Well, so your website is testdevlab, Irvins. Talk about resources that you have available for folks. By resources, you mean? Yeah, just like where someone goes after they've heard this conversation. Yeah, no, typically, typically, they go to kind of our site and we like to say that we are kind of one stop shop when it comes to any, let's say, quality assurance services, products or innovations. And in our website, we have quite detailed overview of any specific kind of testing type, be it manual functional testing, be it test automation, be it security testing, be it accessibility testing, be it performance, audio video testing, be it comparability testing, you know, like meaning kind of test on wide range of different hardware.

17:13then we have kind of a lot of information about specific kind of case studies specific use cases you know like how testing you know like could be applied for specific kind of company types or product types so all of that you know like we we have written also tons of kind of case studies you know like about how companies have used our kind of services products or innovations all that can be fine but of course you know like what i would recommend the most simple one is you know like we have simple button in our website and like when we have you know people companies kind of reach out to us and we are happy you know like to jump on a call provide initial consultation kind of demo of our product and see you know like uh use as much and then provide kind of more context what specific company uh may uh need from from all kind of service offerings yeah i should point out that you've got a podcast tech effect uh we do we do indeed and this is the room you know like where we where we record it ah yeah why are you doing a podcast and and what do you talk about uh we it's a wide range of different topics you know like of course mostly around technology and uh software testing but not only we like to invite also business owners everybody likes to talk about b2b sales and marketing strategies you know like that's a quite important thing uh we like to share kind of over kind of stories around that we like also to listen you know like different experiences in industry because i mean everybody and you know as well you know like how interesting sophisticated is b2b sales and marketing and there's kind of a lot of kind of different kind of insights and learnings but yeah mostly you know around technology, you know, like we like, you know, just, just, just invite cool guests, you know, like speak with them, you know, like get, get, get interesting insights and.

19:08Excellent. All right. The website test dev lab.com for someone who's ready to engage with you or, or has a project that they want to talk about QA, what would you recommend that step be? yeah just you know i go to the site there's kind of button to schedule a meeting you know like or just to reach out to us and that's a very kind of simple step go kind of feel in the form reach out we will kind of quickly kind of reach out to you and as i kind of told you know like every specific company is quite different you know like feel free just to you know have a call explain your situation we'll be happy to consult provide our kind of insights advice what can be done and then let's see, you know, like if we can kind of collaborate together.

19:55Irvins Grinfelds, co-founder, co-CEO of Test Dev Lab, found on the web at testdevlab.com. Evans, thank you so much for joining us. Once again, thank you.

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