QA manager at The Economist, Dileep Marway, reveals his tailored strategies and key principles to maintaining a healthy work culture.

Marway has over 10 years’ experience as a software testing professional and is extremely passionate about quality assurance, with his key principle being “putting customers first”. Taking this approach helps him tailor his strategy, with the customer at the forefront of the journey taken to improve quality.

The Economist Group is the leading source of analysis on international business and world affairs. They deliver information through a range of formats, from newspapers and magazines, to conferences and electronic services.

“What ties us together is the objectivity of our opinion, the originality of our insight, and our advocacy of economic and political freedom around the world,” revealed Marway.

‘Reflecting on overall system quality’

“As QA manager for the Economist, I form a centre of excellence and execute our QA practices globally providing services to our cross-functional product teams. The key to my role is reflecting on overall system quality.”

Marway’s general day starts with reading new articles around changes in the testing area and also world news. He is a firm believer that you have to always be willing to expand your horizons and in this field of work if you stay standing in one point you will get left behind.

He continued: “I own and coordinate the quality assurance of our business-to-technology relationships, and create innovative solutions to deliver high business value. My role is hands-on with day-to-day project operations; being involved in the finer detail is key to me.

“I believe that for me to assign a task to my team I must understand how to execute it myself; therefore, I can implement improvements more successfully. I am an early riser; this is when I’m most productive and it gives me time to plan my day before the meetings kick in!”

The Economist’s culture is built on digital vision as this puts the customer, products, and services they engage with at the heart of everything they do.

‘Customer focus, collaboration and innovation’

“We have created values based on outcomes, customer focus, collaboration and innovation that we live by and are able to demonstrate. At the Economist we have more of a software company mentality to the business and learn from the likes of Amazon, eBay and Google,” added Marway.

What he enjoys the most about his job is what the future holds: “You can feel that change is in the air; more companies are now progressing with agile, scrum, DevOps and continuous delivery. The key focus for many companies is delivering on new business value faster,” he revealed.

He believes “software can now be built and released far more quickly than it was in the past. This has had a huge impact on old testing strategies; this is where the future is exciting. If QA strategies are not progressive then QA professionals will get left behind.”

According to Marway, the cost of delivering poor quality software is rising and key examples in the news portray the impact to company revenue (e.g. Apple security flaw in November 2017). As a result, companies need better quality assurance; the QA manager is key in this new software-driven world.

He also noted the future of the QA manager role is ultimately dependent on how development frameworks move forward, and as DevOps takes hold, more and more companies are moving to a continuous testing model.

Written by Leah Alger