Joining LINE as a QA Engineer
Swapnali had been working at a Japanese company as a QA Engineer. Looking for a new challenge, she joined LINE, where she’s led their private cloud API automation project.
While Swapnali was a university student in India, her husband got a job in Japan. So after she graduated, she moved here to be with him, and started looking for a job. As a recent graduate she found it challenging as “most jobs needed Japanese, but I had zero Japanese background”. She persisted though, and after trying for three months, she was hired by a startup that “didn’t need Japanese as there were almost 50 nationalities working there”.
After almost three years at that company, she was ready to take on a new challenge, and started the job search once more. She was introduced to a position at LINE by a recruiter, and thought it would be a good challenge because it was for QA related to infrastructure, something she didn’t have experience with. The prospect of working for LINE was also exciting because “LINE is quite famous in Japan. I myself was using LINE when I was in India, to talk to my husband, when he was in Japan.”
A really good opportunity to learn new technologies and many different things at same time.
Although she didn’t have a background in infrastructure, she did with API automation, and so she was assigned to Verda, LINE’s private OpenStack based cloud. Her first task was to study OpenStack, and she says working at LINE is “a really good opportunity to learn new technologies and many different things at same time”.
Once she got familiar with Verda, she started API automation. At the time, while they had some automation in place for the dashboard UI using Selenium, they didn’t have anything for the API. So she experimented with different tools before settling on the Robot Framework.
As a QA team, they validate new features, make test plans, and do both manual and automated testing. By doing this, they can catch things that a developer might miss, and are only noticed during deployments. It’s rewarding as the developers really appreciate both them catching things they might have missed before they cause problems, and their suggestions more generally for improvements.
Because LINE offers her flex time, she doesn’t have a fixed schedule, but typically goes to the office between 10 and 11am, and then wraps up the day around 6:30 or 7pm. As a mother she appreciates the flexibility. “If I need to take my daughter to the hospital in the morning, I can just inform the team of the situation. The core hours are there, but there is full support from the team, and when you need help it is also OK.”
Swapnali has also taken advantage of LINE’s generous vacation policy, and after working at LINE for a bit more than a year, she took almost one month off to travel back to India to spend time with her family there.
Verda team’s environment is very international and it’s easy to reach out individually and use face to face communication to solve problems more easily
Swapnali recommends working for LINE because she has faced no language barrier in her work. In her team, all her communication is in English, and she says “Verda team’s environment is very international and it’s easy to reach out individually and use face to face communication to solve problems more easily”. She also appreciates that the company offers free Japanese language classes, so that you can improve your abilities with the language.
Another aspect she appreciates is the culture of teamwork. She says, “Teamwork is very great. If you face a problem there is no blame on a particular person. They will support and try to fix the problem instead.” Furthermore, “The support from managers is really good. They are really understanding.”