Eric Roth, Director of New Technologies – Test Team Manager
Cooper Jager, Senior Staff Test Engineer
Brodie Deysher, Test Engineer
Nathan Jager, Test Engineer
Mikal Paugh, Test Engineer Technician
How does your department support Inovonics products/customers?
We’re the final gatekeepers before our products go out into the world, and we’re personally invested in all of the successes and failures. It’s our responsibility to maintain the highest of standards when it comes to testing our products, and we take this very seriously.
What do people not know about your department?
We’re often the bridge between departments. We know these products, not only technically, but through the eyes of our customers as well. This allows for a lot of collaboration between departments – including product management, technical services, customer services and operations/manufacturing – and truly anyone on the team with questions about our product functionality.
Not everyone knows that we test all the components of our products. We’re not just testing hardware, we’re also testing software, firmware, cloud features, the associated literature, release notes, etc. We test every element.
How do the people in your department make a difference at Inovonics?
One of our larger initiatives is continuous improvement through mentorship. We plan for the next generation of our team. Senior team members take the time to mentor younger team members and we make a point to share knowledge in quarterly engineering meetings and lunch and learns.
Is there anything else you’d like to share about your team?
The test team has a few new initiatives this year. We are primarily focused on test automation that will accelerate the testing process and bring a new level of repeatability, especially for regression testing. We are always looking for and evaluating new tools to help us and the overall organization work smarter and more efficiently. An example is the use of Selenium to automate testing of the user interfaces on our cloud-based web products. Our mission also includes close partnerships with other engineering groups to engage in the new product development process much earlier, ensuring excellent test coverage as the product advances to release. This will ensure high quality at launch time.
From a management perspective, this year is marked by expanding our skills through continuous learning. I am specifically working toward the entire team becoming versed in all the disciplines of the group, including a deep understanding of our firmware designs, learning how our cloud architecture operates, and how our hardware functions. The more we understand the inner workings of our products, the better we can design the test plan for them. As always, we remain committed to turning around finished goods validations within twenty-four hours to keep the pipeline to our customers flowing.
