Somashekhar is a QA evangelist with hands on experience in web and mobile application testing. He is also extremely passionate about ensuring a smooth user experience and very particular about delivering a high quality end product.

Tell us about yourself!

I’m from a city called Sankeshwar, in the state of Karnataka India. It’s located in the southern part of India. I did my masters in computer applications from Vishweshwaraiah Technology University (VTU) situated at Belgaum, which is affiliated to Sikkim Manipal University. My upbringing has been influenced a lot from my mother, who herself is a schoolteacher and my older brother, who is an automation engineer in a multinational company. I have around 7+ years of experience in quality assurance in educational and e-commerce domains. I started my career with AarGees Business Solutions, in Hubli, Karnataka. I later joined True Sparrow Systems in 2012, with Nishith, Sunil, and Junisha. Then my journey started from True Sparrow Systems, to fab.com, to hem.com, and to OST. In terms of my interests, I’m naturally a helping person and I like to be happy and full of joy. Specific to software applications, I like finding bugs and fixing software applications.

What excites you about blockchain?

Blockchain is a very powerful innovative technology in terms of the durability, reliability and longevity. Due to its decentralized nature, blockchain does not have a central point of failure. It is secure and transparent, meaning that changes are publicly viewable by all parties. Additionally, all transactions are immutable, meaning they cannot be altered or deleted. Users can trust that transactions will be executed exactly as the protocol commands, removing the need for a trusted third party. It is a cutting edge technology and it involves the learning of many new concepts.

What does your role as Principal QA Engineer at OST entail?

As a principal QA engineer, I’m leading a QA team of three. My responsibilities primarily include making sure that applications are bug free and easy to use, management assignments, monitoring of QA projects, analyzing and troubleshooting issues in a timely fashion, and ensuring that projects are delivered within their allocated time lines. I’m fortunate to be working closely with Sunil Kedar, our CTO. Under Sunil’s leadership, I get to learn a lot on a daily basis.

What products, developer tools, or protocols are you working on?

My team’s primary responsibility is to ensure that the entire OST technology stack is a bug free. To be specific, we work on various products like OST KIT, OST KYC, Pepo Campaigns, APIs, and SDKs. We are also exploring how we can contribute to protocol related testing.

What do you look forward to for OST in 2019?

As a QA team, our vision is aligned with the company’s vision. OST in 2019 is very exciting, we are moving towards pilot launches, more enhancements, continuous QA, and building automation tools to reduce manual effort. We’re all very excited!

Thank you, Somashekhar!

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About OST

OST blockchain infrastructure empowers new economies for mainstream businesses and emerging DApps. OST leads development of the OpenST Protocol, a framework for tokenizing businesses. In September 2018 OST introduced the OpenST Mosaic Protocol for running meta-blockchains to scale Ethereum applications to billions of users. OST KIT is a full-stack suite of developer tools, APIs, and SDKs for managing blockchain economies. OST partners reach more than 300 million end-users. OST has offices in Berlin, New York, Hong Kong, and Pune. OST is backed by leading institutional equity investors including Tencent, Greycroft, Vectr Ventures, and 500 Startups.