Quentin

How I joined mthree

I’m originally from France and came to Montreal, Canada, in August 2018 to pursue my Master of Science. I graduated in April 2020 and began searching for jobs; I didn’t have success in finding anything for a few months. I was approached by an mthree recruiter on LinkedIn and it seemed like a really interesting opportunity.

The process of joining mthree was really smooth and easy. You’re really well guided through the process. From the moment I was approached through to the end of the training, the team made sure that everything was okay.

Why I chose this line of work

I knew that the software development in banks is really interesting because there is a huge aspect of security. The idea of handling the security in such a domain would be interesting.

It’s been a really good experience. I’m glad to have joined a team that’s really dynamic. They’re always open to suggestions and it’s really interesting to be able to bring in your perspective as a new employee.

What a typical day is like for me

I mainly work on the Internet Banking Solutions for Businesses project. As it’s a huge 20-year-old project, there are layers and layers of code that all have to work together. The project is so extensive that only a few people know the entire project and how it works. I’ve only been working here a few months so I’ve barely scratched the surface – I just know what I need to know!

A normal day for me starts with six 15-minute-long meetings in the morning. These are agile working meetings where every team shares what they’ll be working on for the day, and if they have any problems.

After that, the rest of the day is quite free. As I’m a test developer, I work across all five development teams. At the end of the day, the Quality Assurance team has a final meeting to talk about what we’ve done during the day.

What tests I did for the application I enjoy most about my job

As this is a banking application for companies, we need the login to be extra secure so we use RSA keys. These keys are used to identify that you’re inside the software so you can carry out functions like transactions, sending money, or opening accounts.

My role is to make sure every one of these functions work. When I first started, I worked a lot on testing the login, it’s the part you don’t want to mess up! I was testing everything. If you imagine a webpage, my role is to make sure that everything you can interact with as a user works fine.

I use a tool called Selenium, which allows you to control a web page from code. We write a code that’s a test, and in that test it controls a web page to do the action a user would do. A test is an interaction with a page to replicate a process a user would do.

For example, the user journey would be starting with logging in, then going to the menu, then going to the transactions pages. After that, it’ll be creating a new transaction and making sure it’s registered and sent to the to the user correctly. That’s an example of one test case, and we have hundreds of them.

My favourite part of my job

It’s the fact that every day is different. I know that I’m going to be creating and testing new things every day. For example, before I arrived, everyone thought it wasn’t possible to test RSA keys. I thought to myself that it must be doable, so I did some research and found a way. Even if you’re a new employee here, everyone takes your ideas seriously. You can bring new things to your work and that’s every makes every day different!