A Day in the COE Life: Don Cherestal, Quality Assurance Specialist

We gave you a taste of what it’s like to work at COE when we followed around Account Executive Joe Niewadomski for the day, but now we’d like to give a sneak peek into another part of our company, our Quality Assurance department. We caught up with Jr. QA Engineer Don Cherestal to learn about some the awesome things he’s working on to help support our flagship software Syncrofy, what his day-to-day is like at COE, and what he loves most about working here.

Don is not your typical QA Engineer.  He isn’t siloed off with the software developers, head down on new releases. In actuality, Don serves as a center of knowledge for Syncrofy for the entire company, and he’s walking proof of CoEnterprise’s unique sense and culture of collaboration. One part of his job is interacting with different parts of the organization, including the support team, sales, integration and customer success, pointing out bugs or answering questions on anything Syncrofy.

“I get to interact with other departments on a daily basis,” he says. “That goes a long way in helping me understand what the company as a whole is trying to accomplish with Syncrofy. I’m not just working in a vacuum.”

On a typical day, Don will log into the ticketing system to see what the team has prioritized for that day and if there are any high priority blockers or critical bugs. After that, he’ll meet with the rest of his team for their daily “stand-up” meeting where they will present any major issues that are currently in production or development and provide updates on their current tasks.

After that he’ll head back to his desk and dive right into his day.

“One of the huge advantages of my job is that it allows me to multitask,” he says. “I can code some automation to complete something that would take me a long time to do manually while at the same time go into Syncrofy and try to break things.”

I guess you can say Don is a bit of an accident waiting to happen… in a good way, of course.

“I try to break Syncrofy. It’s better that I’m successful rather than a customer.”

During a given week, Don will meet with the support team to discuss open tickets they have with customers and then relay that information over to the development team to discuss what they should focus on.

“It’s all about prioritizing,” he says. “Obviously if an issue is customer-facing, we escalate those to the top of the list and then new features after that. There’s always a constant stream of new stuff with Syncrofy which is something that makes this job so exciting.”

Whenever a new feature is developed for Syncrofy, Don will work to manually test it and then set up automated tests. Coding those automated tests is his favorite part of the job.

“It’s a lot of fun and can be really challenging,” he says. “It keeps you on your toes. Depending on what was implemented and how many features it touches, you never know what you’re going to get. It’s always something different.”

Working side-by-side with the development team is also something he takes pride in.

“The camaraderie and teamwork here is something that is hard to find,” he says. “Oftentimes you’ll have animosity or finger pointing between QA and development. Not here. We have a great relationship with the dev team and really work to cultivate that. Because at the end of the day, we’re all working towards the same goal.”

In the end, it’s the COE family that make it a pleasure for Don to come to work everyday.

“Not only is the work challenging and rewarding, but it’s also fun because of the people I work with,” he says. “They’re really my friends, not just co-workers. It’s the people that make it enjoyable and engaging to work here.”

Don’t ever stop breaking things, Don.

To learn more about our current openings and what we have to offer, visit our Careers page.