We’re back with another installment of our Gartrell Group Team bios. Joining me is Ryan Sturges, one of our newest teammates.

Welcome, Ryan! Can you tell me what your job title is?

Hi! Thanks! I’m a QA Engineer.

If you were at a party and someone asked you what that is, what would you tell them?

I test things, break things, laugh at things I've broken, and occasionally build automation to help me break things more efficiently.

Since we don’t physically build things at TGG, I’m guessing that the breaking things are more about software than fine China. Can you tell us a little more about what you’re breaking?

I'm mainly going through the intended functionality of client apps, first looking to see that the core functions are as expected, then moving outward to edge cases and peripheral features, determining the limits of the application, and finding where and how it can fail. In doing so, I'll include techniques such as modeling presumed consumer behavior, adding load, testing during different network conditions, etc. This is, of course, all done with the intent of documenting the points of failure so that devs can improve the application,  and so that product teams can make informed decisions about work prioritization.

How does automation help?

Automation consists primarily of front-end testing frameworks like Selenium/Playwright/etc., which emulate a user's web browser journey. These tests are set up such that they can be run quickly, and repeated on demand. Then, these tests can be run when changes are implemented (new features, bug fixes, etc), and we can reliably and quickly verify that the new changes aren't breaking old functionalities. Once implemented, a test suite that takes manual testers tens of hours can be run via automation in minutes, so the potential time/labor savings are large.

That’s pretty cool. What’s your favorite part of your job?

I love the feeling of improvement that I get from watching issues I expose getting fixed.

That’s awesome. Are there any projects that you’re particularly proud of?

The work on Tidypipe is still in the early days, but I'm pretty proud of the direction it's heading.

That’s pretty cool. I’ve heard some good things about the Tidypipe project. (Dear reader, the Tidypipe project is a QA software tool that we developed in-house. It is specialized for testing GIS software tools and workflows to make sure they work and that end-users don't have to add 'software tester' to their job titles.)

What do you like to do outside of work?

I play a lot of video games, listen to a wide variety of music, and occasionally enjoy personal software projects.

When you say "a lot of video games," can you quantify that for me? Is there a genre you are drawn to? Do you have multiple consoles, or do you stick with one? Tell me more about your descent into the world of gaming.

I play primarily on the computer, but own most modern consoles. I play a lot, both in time spent and in the number of games played, because I enjoy a lot of the discourse around games, and it's fun for me to chase whatever the current zeitgeist happens to be.

I have a ~monthly video game book club that I run, where our group selects a game for us all to play on our own time, and then we gather and talk about the ins and outs of it - what worked, what didn't, and why.

As for my descent into the world of gaming (lovely turn of phrase, lol), I've always loved games, but my academic interest in them came from my desire to make games of my own. I got my start in QA testing the remake of the Age Of Empires game series because I was interested in learning how the sausage was made. If it wasn't for that, I doubt I ever would have ended up working in this field.

That’s super cool. Can you elaborate a bit on the “personal software projects” that you enjoy?

I tend to build little helper companion apps for games I'm playing (There's this one in particular, called Book of Hours, that has a bunch of complicated relationships between the actions you can take and the outcomes of those actions. I wanted to map it out for myself out of curiosity. It started as some notes in a OneNote workbook, then a single Excel sheet, but then it grew to multiple sheets, and then a database, and then I realized I needed to build a better interface, so it turned into a web app.) I also attempt to make my own games from time to time. Currently, I'm working with a friend on a multiplayer web-app escape room, though that's an on-again off-again kind of project.

Wow. That’s amazing stuff. Do you have any kids? Pets? Plants?

I've got two fantastic cats: Vinck and Lembit. They show up on my video calls quite a bit.

Do you like to travel? Got any great travel stories?

I love to travel in theory, but I have trouble making time for it.

I feel the same. Thanks so much for taking the time to talk with me, Ryan!