In today’s Quality Sense episode, Federico Toledo sits down for a chat with a colleague and friend, Sofia Palamarchuk. She’s a Director and Board Member of Abstracta and the co-founder and CEO of Apptim, a tool that helps you to test and analyze native mobile app performance.
After beginning her career as a performance engineer at Abstracta, she led our expansion to the United States – heading up business development. After seeing the challenges that mobile development teams face, in 2019, she embarked on a mission to transform the way global mobile teams create quality apps.
When she’s not busy leading a startup, you can find her kite surfing or supporting projects that promote more women in technology.
What to Expect?
- Sofia shared her journey from tester to Abstracta CEO, Board Member and then Apptim co-founder
- The two discussed what affects mobile app performance (server side, network and client side)
- Challenges in native mobile apps (Android and iOS) to monitor and gather information to optimize their performance
- Typical types of issues in native apps (like memory leaks, rendering time, excessive CPU and battery usage)
- Observability for mobile apps
- A book not about testing, but one that everyone should read
Listen Here
Quality Sense, a Software Testing Podcast · Sofia Palamarchuk – Mobile app performance
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Episode Transcript:
(Lightly edited for clarity.)
Federico:
Hello, Sofia. Nice to see you again. And it’s an honor, a pleasure for me to have you here in the show. Welcome.
Sofia:
Thank you Fede, the honor is mine. I’ve been following your podcast for some time. I’m happy to be here.
Federico:
Oh, wow. I really appreciate that.
Can you start by giving us a summary of your career in testing, because I find it really interesting (from many points of view)?
Sofia:
Okay. It’s a really fun story, but I’m going to try to do my best to summarize it.
I started working in performance testing specifically.
I actually never did any functional testing, which is something that many people can’t believe, but I learned a lot.
After my first years in performance testing, I moved to more like pre-sales engineering roles at Abstracta… which is a company that you are very familiar with… because you co-founded it.
Federico:
Yeah. It rings a bell.
Sofia:
Yeah. I think you might have heard of that one.
So, I was in a technical role working with clients and then I changed to what many people say is the dark side: sales, but I really like it!
Just being in direct contact with customers.
And that’s when I learned about the other part of testing, actually understanding the needs, where it makes sense to add more testing and coming up with strategies.
So I really liked that role and fast forward to the present… I’m working right now on a new startup, which is Apptim.
So my current role is understanding what are the needs in mobile testing for today’s teams and we’re building tools to help them with these challenges.
I’ve been kind of moving around different roles, but everything related to software testing.
Federico:
And I can say that we have been sharing a lot of time working together in different projects, specifically at the beginning.
As you mentioned, we were doing some performance testing specifically on the server side and now you’re working mainly on the client side for the mobile devices.
So my question is, are there problems in the client side aspect of mobile apps?
As performance testers, we typically focus on the server side, why should we pay attention to the client side?
Sofia:
Yeah, that’s a great question. And I asked this question myself as well, because that’s where I was coming from. And I never thought about this.
If you asked me a couple of years ago, what was the most important? I was trying to push for more performance testing early in the development cycle, but focusing on services, backend APIs and what most people are familiar with when we talk about performance testing.
#performance #software testing #load testing #podcast #mobile developer #device fragmentation
