Meet The Aptoiders: Ruben Mota, Head Of Quality Assurance
Rúben Mota is the one who manages all the quality and customer care processes at Aptoide. Rúben and his team are responsible for ensuring that the Aptoide technological planning translates into a pleasant experience for you guys. We've had the opportunity to have a chat with Rúben about his background and his responsibilities here at Aptoide. It's a very interesting glimpse into how Aptoide is built - if we say so ourselves. Get reading!
1. Can you tell me about yourself? What's your background?
Hi, I'm Rúben Mota, the man leading our Quality Assurance Team!
At a personal level, I'm that relaxed guy who is always available to go out and have fun with friends, I don't miss an opportunity to say a joke and I'm passionate about tech & gaming.
Professionally, I try to be the most practical and organized as possible, our QA team is like a HUB for all the other teams, so I have to keep everyone motivated and working on their tasks in order to give feedback as soon as possible.
Regarding my background, I've studied Telecoms & Informatics Eng. at ISCTE and in 2009 I started working as a Customer Care Assistant for Vodafone. Later in 2011, I had the opportunity to work as a tester for Vodafone and ended up being part of their QA Team for Networks & Services in Portugal.
In early 2014, I left Vodafone to join the huge challenge of being the only tester in Aptoide...back in the day I was the Aptoide QA Team. Today, we're a growing team of six people.
2. You're a self-taught QA Manager, how did you get started?
Self-taught is a good description, I'm a very curious guy and since a young age I found myself dismounting things, exploring, breaking things to pieces only to put them back up again; just to know how things worked. So I try to learn a little bit of everything to be able to understand better the problems and issues that we have to test on a daily basis. I'm always on the look out for new ways to accomplish our goals and to improve our modus-operandis.
3. What is the most challenging part of your job as a Q&A manager at Aptoide?
Deadlines, for sure! You can imagine how fast the tech industry grows, and we're not an exception; the QA team is always the end-of-line in the development phase, so if dev's drift on schedule, our own schedule to test becomes shorter.
I must say that our content control is as challenging as deadlines, as managing thousands of apps and feedback from our big community is quite the challenge!
4. Aptoide has been growing it's user base steadily for the past three years - as a result, it has seen a huge increase in the number and diversity of apps. Which measures do you and your team take to ensure Aptoide's consistent quality over time?
We have a huge help here from our backend friends, who analyze and search for virus in every App that is uploaded to Aptoide. We're very lucky to have a great and engaging community - and Ambassadors across the world - who keep us on our toes. We review every report from our users and we manually test every reported app to check if everything is according to our standards.
5. What is the most important characteristic of a great QA tester? Any word of advice to job-seekers out there?
Quality Assurance is always evolving and the ideal person needs to be hands on. A few years ago there was a functional tester, an analyst, an automatization guy and so on for one specific job, whereas now, I think a QA tester needs to be a dynamic person who's able to do all this and has a good capacity to learn new things fast.
It's a trend to say that attention to detail is the most important characteristic in a QA tester, which I agree with, but like I said before, a versatile person is key.
6. Last but not least - you're also responsible for organising the weekly Aptoide soccer matches. Who's the best soccer player at Aptoide?
Me of course haha! I like to say we don't play soccer, we just run after the ball. To mention a few, we have some "more" skilled players - Diogo Carvalho is as fast as Usain Bolt, Marcelo has the natural Brazilian technique and of course Gonçalo Ribeiro who always manages to miss 9 of 10 goals. Overall, we're all very talented ;)
Would you like to work with us?
Funny you should ask, 'cause we're actually looking for QA wizards to join Rúben's team. FYI: We're hiring 40 (!) new people until the end of the year. Come join us or tag someone below you think would be a good fit! Check out all our job openings and get in touch with us.