To Merlin Johnson, a career in quality assurance is all about the pursuit of perfection. In over four years as an Infomatics employee, she has made us proud by relentlessy seeking perfection in all the projects she's worked on for her assigned client.
"Whatever work you are doing, there should be some perfection included in it," Johnson said. "It’s not just for big work, even small work should have perfection."
Ultimately, her goal is to deliver software that is fully functional and free from any bugs.
Johnson began her career with Infomatics as a quality assurance analyst, serving her client on-site. Since then, she has advanced to a QA lead position for her excellence and now manages testing on multiple client projects.
Colleagues recognize Johnson for her strong leadership skills and promoting a balanced workload for her team. This is despite tight deadlines common with application development projects.
"I just make sure my team is going in the right direction," she said. "And, if my team needs any help in testing-related work, I'll pitch in myself to help get it done."
Johnson has found that the key to successful testing operations is for the QA team to pitch in during planning conversations. This is the only way to make sure the tester's experience can have a helpful impact in the final project requirements.
"We have to move forward and look at the requirements before finalizing for further development," she said.
Project teams will be able to plan a stable workload for QA teams and keep their efforts moving ahead smoothly, simply by joining the conversation.
Even with the best leadership and planning, deadlines are known to creep up. Johnson has found the key to getting past tight deadlines is to keep a calm head.
She emphasized that it's important to prioritize and test the most crucial aspects of an application first.
"If we test the core scenario, we can see if the application is working well or not," she said. "Do the sanity testing first then move on to secondary aspects of the application."
Since joining Infomatics Corp, Johnson has earned a promotion, multiple pay raises, and worked with the human resources department on compliance through multiple stages of her immigration journey.
"Infomatics has been very gracious," she said.
Johnson has a earned her bachelor's degree in information technology and has accumulated more than 4 years of experience in quality assurance.
