Jay Shah
How did you come to Checkmk? What made you decide to join?
Oliver, our Tech Recruiter, reached out to me via LinkedIn! And since the first introduction call, everything just clicked in place, one interview after another. Happy to be here.
What must a software product and the company behind it offer for you to remain convinced of them even after several years?
Every company should treat their employees with respect and fairness, as these points serve as the basis of every relationship. And being specific to companies delivering software products, the product should address a genuine need in the world that we live in.
What do you think makes Checkmk or your team in particular special?
Checkmk fulfills all the previously mentioned criteria which I have in my mind.
Having colleagues who have the same beliefs helps a lot and that is what makes working with them a wonderful experience.
One of our developers highlighted our good work-life balance. What does a healthy balance mean to you, and how do you achieve it?
Ideal definition, working 8 hours everyday for 5 days a week. Realistically speaking, it depends. There are longer days and then there are shorter ones.
But both the ideal and real scenarios have one thing in common – healthy balance can only be achieved when there are transparent communication channels established between the parties involved during a work day. It leads to effective effort management between everyone and thus, enables a good work-life balance.
Which development tools do you prefer using, and why are they essential for your daily work?
Tools could be divided into different categories
- Platform
- Ubuntu / Unix and heavy reliance on using bash and corresponding tools.
- Development workspace
- Git; IDE - VSCode; python environment - UV; docker
- Testing and Test automation
- Python; Pytest; Playwright-python
- Documentation
- Sphinx (development); Confluence (Testing) + Google Drive
- Effort planning and estimation - JIRA
- Workflows - SCRUM
Every day work as a test-automation engineer requires reading a lot of code and validating new changes in the framework. Thus, the usage of git and bash related tools. A well setup IDE also helps a lot in browsing through the framework code and processing information. Whether it is for reviews or implementation purposes.
Workflow wise, SCRUM helps in team growth over a period of time as it enables learning from the experiences of team members.
Can you describe the typical lifecycle when working on a new software feature within a team?
High level Initiatives are planned in the Roadmap for the upcoming release, which are broken down into features. These features are developed and validated using SCRUM (Agile development) practices. On completion, a feature is reviewed by stakeholders such as Product owners, other Team leads and Technical consultants. Any feedback received is discussed and worked upon by the team.
This cycle continues until the Initiative is complete, whereupon an initiative review is performed by stakeholders to gather feedback and act upon any critical issues.
How do you ensure the quality and scalability of your code?
On a higher level, discussing the test strategy when an initiative starts enables a common understanding of Definition of done, at a feature level and an initiative level. Definition of done acts as a guideline to understand when a software implementation has been developed and validated successfully.
On a deeper level, creation of test plans for every feature under development ensures that the planned use-cases and critical edge cases have been validated thoroughly.
What do you value most when collaborating with other feature teams and developers?
Collaboration usually involves solving an issue together and reaching a decision. And thus, the most important thing for me is that people involved should be open to all the opinions being raised in the team. Each opinion corresponds to a different perspective. Finally, after considering all the opinions a consensus should be reached.
Do you remember a particularly interesting, exciting or beautiful experience you had at Checkmk? If so, can you tell us about it?
It was my first “hour” at Checkmk and I was in Munich for my onboarding. I had not been on-site before that. I was in desperate need of coffee, and my brain just led me to the nearest coffee machine. Without even asking anyone for directions. It just felt natural being in Checkmk.