People profile : Test Engineer

Name: Ben Hall

Education: BSc Computer Science degree at the University of Hertfordshire

Position at Red Gate: Test Engineer

Start date: 3rd September 2007

First job ever:

My first job was 1st Line Technical Support at an Internet Solutions company who provided hosted online servers to a wide range of clients. We hosted small personal sites up to large online gaming networks hosting their online multiplayer servers.  I would be the first point of contact for our clients when they had any support issues or questions about the service.

Before you arrived at Red Gate what did you do?

I joined Red Gate as a graduate directly from University, but after a long summer holiday.  During my final year I had a number of different experiences and projects going on.  My main role was being a Microsoft Student Partner, where I would talk to other students on campus about technology and answer any problems they might have. I also help develop an open source unit testing framework which has given me some great real world experiences.

What does your job involve on a day-to-day basis?

Breaking stuff! As a tester, I need to find bugs within the software we produce and as such that requires breaking it in lots of interesting ways. I do a mixture of manual and automated testing depending on which part of the system I am focusing on.  Manual testing enables me to see the product from the user's point of view, it allows me to discover possible design issues and parts of the application which could be made easier to use for the end user. Automated testing involves writing test cases within C# which can be executed against the application to verify if it works as expected.  By using automated testing, we cut out a lot of the repetition of testing and this allows us to quickly identify when something is broken.

What do you need to be a Test Engineer

A passion for technology and wanting to produce great software definitely helps!  Unlike some companies, the testing role at Red Gate is very technical and having a good understanding of the technical aspects of the product certainly helps you to break it.

A willingness to break software is useful and an eye for detail can help pickup problems which are often missed.  Being able to write software is also an advantage as we write software to break the software we write.  Our main programming language here is C#, so some knowledge of this is useful, but it's easy to pick up if you have a different background, such as java.

Why did you choose Red Gate?

I truly believe that Red Gate is producing amazing software solutions which make thousands of people's work easier.  After using their software and hearing the great comments from people within the industry, the chance to work here was a great opportunity and one I didn't want to miss.

The fact that everyone here is really excited about what Red Gate is doing and everyone wants to produce great software definitely makes this a great company to work for and something I wanted to be a part of.

What are your favourite Red Gate perks?

There are so many, but the Feel Good Fund is cool. The company has put money aside for employee perks; this involves a very expensive coffee machine, breakfast cereals, a well stocked fridge of smoothies and other goodies.  The fund also pays for lunches and various social events every month.

What's your most memorable Red Gate experience so far?

TechEd was great! It's one of the main Microsoft developer conferences in Europe.  This year it was held in Barcelona and I was lucky enough to go with a number of Software Engineers in the company.  It was a great week and the fact Red Gate covers the cost was excellent.