Here’s a transcript of the video:

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PointAbout’s Director of Quality Assurance, Perry Miranda, goes in front of the bright lights to talk about his role at PointAbout. Interview by Will Sherlin w/ Perry Miranda:

Will: We are back here for another edition of Inside PointAbout. The next victim is Perry Miranda. He is our Director of Quality Assurance here. So Perry, tell us a little bit about what your day-to-day is like at PointAbout.

Perry: What we do here in the Quality Assurance department is we look across the productivity tools that are used over the software development life cycle of the apps and software we develop here. From doing the Configuration Management, release management, continuous integration builds with tools like Cruise Control. Any other productivity tools we continue to improve on and get as many as we need, look at the bug tracking systems, the source control, the version control. We also work with actual testing the applications that are produced as part of our consultant services team.

Will: Okay. Good deal. I know we work with a variety of platforms. Are there certain ones that are easier or harder to test on than others?

Perry: That is a good question. Certainly we have been working on several platforms. The Blackberry, the Android, the iPhone, iPad. We are recently getting in to the Windows Phone 7 platform. So far I believe iPhone, obviously, and Android have been the most popular ones. And those are pretty straightforward as far as installing the apps and testing the features. Blackberry, you know, it’s a more challenging platform. But there is still a good number of users out there. So it is still a good market to be in. But it definitely has its challenges. Its interface is not as intuitive and as flexible as other platforms. Windows Phone 7 is getting bigger. It was just released so we are still learning. There is a learning curve that we are going through but it looks promising as well.

Will: Before PointAbout, you were at a few different companies. Can you just tell us about your background briefly?

Perry: Sure. So I spent 11 years at AOL. There I worked on a long list of different products and platforms. I pretty much was managing all the QA teams for the community applications and platforms that AOL had, including chat, instant messaging, You’ve Got Pictures, Blogs. And I ended up taking over the content management QA Teams for all their entertainment web channels. We tested there the web front end and also the back end…the content management system, including the music, TV, movie channels and games channels. After that I worked at Navteq. Actually at a start up which is called The Map Network. It was a local Washington DC start up. It was acquired by Navteq, and shortly after I started there it was acquired by Nokia. And I was their first tester. I was hired as a QA Manager there. I ended up with a team of 40 people managing all the content management solutions that they had. And I also worked on the very first SOAP services web platform that they developed from scratch. That is what I did before I got here.

Will: Good Deal. Just some kind of nuts and bolts of QA. I feel like a lot of people think that QA is something that comes in at the end of the development cycle when all the code has been done and packaged up and bundled nice and neat. But that is not really the case. When does QA start for a project?

Perry: Well I personally think that QA starts from the very early stages. You know from the concept phase. You always have to, and its not just a QA, you know, QA should be part of everybody’s jobs. The day-to-day operations and way of thinking. So you start, we find from the concept phase all the way through the release of the product or the system. It is important in QA to bring a different kind of point-of-view. Always trying to look at the what ifs. “What happens if this doesn’t work?” So we bring that, I think, in to the process. That kind of reasoning or thinking which I think is very valuable at all the phases of the project. From the early concept phase to the UI design, navigation, to the requirements phase and then obviously once the software starts to be implemented. I have always…at AOL that is always the culture. There were a lot of issues that were caught early in the process, the brainstorming sessions and the UI Design that didn’t make it in to the code.

Will: Good Deal. Thanks very much for joining us and we look forward to having you back.

Perry: Thank you!!