Ilya Zakharov, Senior QA Analyst

Today, Ilya Zakharov, Senior QA Analyst at Exactpro, will talk about what attracted him to the job in quality assurance, and what opportunities it offers.

I joined Exactpro in early 2016, when I was in my third year at Saratov State Technical University. It was my first working experience at a large company and in the IT field in general.

At university, I did a lot of programming, but I didn't really see myself as a programmer, and being a QA seemed interdisciplinary and even more interesting. Personally, I rather enjoy doing business process analysis and application verification, while a programmer's job, in my opinion, is more about monotonous code writing.

So, I became part of the team on a big new project, whose client is one of the world’s largest stock exchanges. Until then, I was slightly familiar with the processes that take place at stock exchanges, but I found it interesting to delve deeper into this topic. Each week, we listened to internal introductory lectures, so that everyone would have a clear understanding of the software testing and the place of this system in the financial infrastructure.

Over the course of my work here, I've been involved in many types of functional testing, from requirements analysis and test case writing to test support together with external financial institutions during a business trip to London. P.S. It was the first trip abroad in my life?

During the pandemic, I moved to Saint Petersburg and keep on working remotely. In my spare time, I play the bass guitar and travel around the Leningrad region and Karelia.