BeyondTrust

We know our customers like to get the inside track into Bomgar and better understand what goes into the solutions they use every day. Throughout the year, we’re giving you a behind the scenes look at a few of the teams here at Bomgar. We thought what better team to start our new Q&A series than Bomgar’s QA (Quality Assurance) team.

We asked some of our customer advocates on the Bomgar Insider what they wanted to know about our QA team, then sat down with five key members to get some answers. Let’s see what they have to say:

Q: How do you define QA?

Theepa B.: QA makes sure that Bomgar’s solutions are bug- and issue-free!

Leigh M.: As a Director on the QA team, I oversee time estimations and work with our Support and Development to manage new product updates and feature releases.

Johnathan C.: I work on the back-end of security and appliance testing to make sure we’re creating the best products for our customers.

Q: What is the process to test a new feature or release?

Leigh M.: When we incorporate new features into any of our solutions, QA first receives a demo from the Development team to understand the new features they’re putting into the products and how they’re supposed to work. Then we receive builds from Development that include new features and/or any bug fixes. We will test the new features and fixes to ensure they work and meet the product requirements. Rinse and repeat until we are confident. Lots of testing.

Basically, we are the first customer of any new feature or fix, and we try to do what the customer would do across all the platforms a customer may use. We try to break the feature!

Theepa B.: We also provide feature requests, how a feature should be or should work, and then Development takes that into account for future releases.

Q: Do you have a favorite Bomgar feature? Why that one?

Johnathan C.: Within our Remote Support product, the ATLAS Cluster feature enables customers with large global deployments to allow multiple Bomgar appliances at different places in their flow work as one. It is easy for customers to use and set up, but how the code works under the hood is very sophisticated. For bang for the buck, and the bandwidth that customers receive, it is pretty great.

Pat P.: Our new SAML authentication feature allows customers to use single-sign on from anywhere as long as they have web access. It’s secure and they don’t need to have network access unlike Kerberos. They can use the single sign on feature across different platforms whether or not they are logged in to the domain or realm. It’s pretty cool.

David L.: Linux service mode jump clients. I kind of gravitate toward Linux more anyway and I think it’s neat to see a jump client where you can actually set a Linux machine to the log-in screen and still get to the machine, similar to how we use the Mac service jump client. Jump clients in general are a pretty neat thing to me, but this is one of the cooler ones.

Q: How do you manage the pressures of deadlines? How do you know when something is really ready for release?

Leigh M.: We manage the pressure based on the character and integrity of people in the group. We have a very diverse team that has a good work ethic and strives to make the product the best it can be. They can pace themselves and raise red flags when they need to. We communicate very well to help manage the pressure. It does get very intense during the last two weeks of a release and the week of a release, but we try to look out for each other and shift work among QA team members when we get close to a deadline.

Q: How is the QA team different from Development?

Pat P.: QA tries to see everything through the eyes of the customer. What may make sense to a member of our Product or Development teams may not be as clear to the customer. It’s a different perspective that we’re constantly bringing to the table.

Q: What do you want our customers to know?

Leigh M.: QA does a lot more than just testing Bomgar’s product features. We work closely with the Support team to understand and resolve issues, we do security testing, we do load testing, we set up environments, and all sorts of things that other QA departments may not do.

Johnathan C.: We have our own software products that we use and develop just for the QA process. So not only is Bomgar developing software that customers use, but in order to adequately test it, we develop our own software that’s designed for testing Bomgar products and features. The work that we do with Support and other departments is almost all done behind the scenes. We are a great resource for our Support team when they need to find answers for our customers, which could be cool for some customers to know!

Thanks to all the members of our QA team! Bomgar certainly wouldn’t be what it is without them and their commitment to making our solutions the best they can be.  

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