How Ooma’s Rakhee Mohanty uses tattling to improve products

When you think of a technology company, you probably picture the CEO, software engineers and maybe a product manager. These are the people who set the vision and make the hardware and software you use every day.

However, the unsung hero of any product is a quality assurance engineer. Rakhee Mohanty, manager of software quality assurance at Ooma, is exactly that, and her job is testing our products. Specifically, she works on Ooma’s smartphone apps.

“If you did not QA (quality assure) an app, there would be a high risk that when you send a product out into the market that it would break for your customers,” she says. That’s why QA is involved in product development early. They’re often the first people to use the app, and their job is to think about how a customer would use it.

At Ooma, they’ll even provide notes to product designers, providing insight on how a user would expect an app to behave and whether it makes sense based on what the customer has seen. The quality assurance engineers then go through any new features and begin testing. Despite being a technical job, QA has a creative side.

“Our wheels start turning and we’re like, “What if I go ahead and touch this button and see what happens?,” Mohanty says.

Communication is close to home

Mohanty’s journey to Ooma started out of necessity. As an immigrant who moved to the United States before WhatsApp, iMessage and FaceTime existed, finding a reliable and affordable way to stay connected with her family back home was essential.

That’s when she learned about Ooma, which provides easy and affordable calling to countries around the world. Working at Ooma allowed her to be part of a team committed to making communication easier and more accessible for everyone.

While that’s what helped her get to Ooma, she says what keeps her at Ooma is the company’s priority in making user-friendly and reliable products.

Break the app

Essentially, QA engineers try to break the app. Every customer uses an app differently, so product developers can never be sure how someone is actually going to interact with what they design. That means QA has to think outside of the box and dream up as many scenarios as possible.

“I have added about 16,000 contacts to the Ooma Office mobile app see if my contacts will load properly. I have sent messages that have to be at the maximum character limit with all the craziest characters I can think of. We leave devices on over the weekend and come back Monday to see if they still work because typically users don’t work over the weekend and only check back in on Monday,” she explains.

And all of that is in addition to basic testing. Mohanty and her team often test apps on all sorts of devices. That means that sometimes they have to test on very old smartphones updated to the latest possible operating system. Even further, they try to recreate bad network conditions to see how a user in a remote area would be able to use the app. Mohanty will also take devices with her while she travels to see how the experience works on the road.

Once the testing is complete, Mohanty and other QA engineers provide extensive, some might say obsessive, notes to the product team. This includes documenting information via bug tracking software. They often write all the steps they took to create the problem, then provide screenshots and other information to make it as easy as possible for the engineers to recreate the problem so that they can figure out how to fix it.

Providing this information to a developer is very similar to the relationship between a writer and an editor. Mohanty says it’s often like an editor going to an author and saying that a certain twist or character choice isn’t working. The vast majority of issues found by QA are addressed and fixed, she says.

Tattling works

Mohanty fell in love with mobile apps back when she worked in information technology, before she came to Ooma eight years ago. She would work with startups who had mobile apps and got to work on prototypes. She would basically test the apps and was surprised at how much someone could accomplish with a mobile app.

Mohanty says she’s always been curious about the “why” and “how” behind things, and loves discovering how things work. She’s since developed a mindset for testing an app that can be boiled down to, “What could go wrong?”

She prefers testing mobile apps because the process is more dynamic and offers more interesting challenges, like using different devices and operating system versions. Even small things like performance optimizations can change how things work.

“It also allows for more creative problem-solving, especially with mobile-specific features like sensors, gestures and offline capabilities,” she says. However, she acknowledges that her colleagues who QA other technologies, like web browsers, would disagree and find their specialties more interesting.

Her love for mobile apps marries with another activity she likes to do. “I used to tell people I like to tattle and no other job will pay you for tattling on others,” Mohanty explains. “Instead of getting mad at me, my team appreciates when I tell them, ‘Hey you broke this.’ This gives them the opportunity to fix a bug before it annoys a customer.”

Rakhee Mohanty’s message to Ooma customers:

“Thank you for choosing us and being with us and seeing us grow from the mobile app perspective. Thank you for all the feedback you give, like the emails and messages and reviews that sometimes help us come up with new features and improve our features. So thank you for that, it helps out a lot.”