Welcome to the Asos Tech podcast, where we're continuing to share what it's like to work inside a global online fashion company. You may have bought some clothes from us, but have you ever wondered what happens behind the screen? Hey, my name is Jen Davis and I'm an engineering manager who's working for the PayTech domain in Asos. And I'm here with the very lovely John Croft. John, would you like to introduce yourself?

Hi, I'm John Croft. He him. I'm an associate QA engineer, also in PayTech.

So today we're going to have a little chat about how John got into being a QA in PayTech and a little bit about what that means now that he's here. So, John, we'd like to start everybody off with an icebreaker. And my favourite one is, what did you want to be when you were.

Growing up in a rather foreshadowy moment? I always wanted to be a scientist, even from the age of five or six.

So when you were five or six, what did being a scientist look like to you?

It was actually because of a particular teacher who was a science specialist at my primary school and one day came in and brought I think it was Lego Technic. And he'd created an entire ski resort out of Lego Technic with little Lego men running, going down the mountain and all the lifts and the whole nine yards. And I was spellbound. And from that day on, this is a thing that I want to do. And, yeah, it just continued from there, really.

So it's kind of playing playing as a job, really making and building amazing things and getting paid for it.

Absolutely. I mean, that's always been the dream for me.

Okay, so it makes sense, then, that you would have ended up in a science of sorts, but how did you end up becoming a QA? You had quite an unusual routine, didn't you?

I did originally. I actually followed my plan and became a scientist. I studied physics at Imperial College London straight after my A levels and went through the whole of that wonderful process and attempted to continue on. I really liked being an academic, so set off into the headylands of research and attempted a Master's. I had a few setbacks along the way. My first attempt at a Master's did not actually go that well, due to having a really rough year during where my exams were due. But after working for a couple of years in the real world, I decided I didn't like the real world very much. So I thought I'd go back to college, saved up my money, put myself back through a master's degree at Sussex this time, and at the end of that, they said, do you want to stay on for a PhD? Which I did, so did my PhD at Sussex and was actually granted my PhD in 2010 in a very esoteric branch of physics, solar, terrestrial, plasma physics, mostly working with satellites and vast amounts of data.

Oh, wow.

But actually that was one of the first things that really got me into software development, because I was trying to do something with the data which had never been done before. The tools didn't exist. And so I was offered a choice either develop them yourself or don't do it. And being as stubborn as I am, I set out to develop them myself and did. It was actually based on what some people know as a genetic algorithm and trying to review other people's theoretical frameworks and got to the end of that process and was all set to continue my research and become an academic forever. And then the global financial crisis hit. 20 08 20 09 20 10 and my university was in a position of not only losing particular staff members, but actually losing entire research groups. And so it was not viable for me to stay in that role at that university. And when I emerged into the rest of the academic environment, some of the people I was going up for jobs against were people who had taught me and so had vast amount more experience than I did. So it just wasn't going to work. So I picked up the skills that I'd learned already and set off into the city, which was about as far from academia as you can possibly go, I can imagine. Crikey and I worked as an analyst for a boutique market research company in the city. But one of the things that did come out of that was that I was always looking to improve process because half of my day would be spent literally just analyzing data or preparing data to be analyzed. The amount of time that I was actually producing interesting information was very short indeed. So I said fine, I will rewrite our processes. And so luckily, we had a very talented chief technologist who had just created an in house piece of data analysis software. So I rewrote our processes for our biggest client in that piece of software. And when I found that the software itself wouldn't handle everything I wanted it to do, I started writing class libraries for it as well in a language which I have now come to know and love yet again at Asos, which was C sharp, so did that for two years. And at the end of the two years, although I was very happy with the company and very happy with the people I was working with, I was desperately searching for my soul. And so one day when my comparatively recently wedded wife came to me and said, how do you fancy a career change? I thought, okay, this sounds interesting. It was about as big a change as I could have managed because I went from being an analyst in the city to being a combination teacher and university lecturer at an international school in Japan.

Wow, that is a huge leap.

It really was. I mean, the university stuff not so much, but certainly teaching high school children in another continent was a big move.

In Japanese as well.

In a combination of Japanese, I have to say, at first there was quite a lot of international sign language. But as the years went on and I finally managed to drag my Japanese up to a reasonable level, I tried to, if not dictate or teach the material in Japanese. Certainly in my interactions with the kids directly, those would be in Japanese because they were far more comfortable, only lectured. Actually realized that I was enjoying the teaching more than the lecturing. So after a year, I stopped the lecturing to concentrate on the teaching. But again, tech reared its ugly head because I started working with the school robotics team and introducing the kids to programming languages and actually the basics of programming and computer science as a subject. Carried that on. Lived very happily there, including after my son was born for five years. And then my wife and I decided that it was time to return to the British Isles so that our son could attend school in this country, became a teacher in this country, have worked both in the state sector and at an independent school. I have to say that was helped by the fact that I actually managed to make head of department in Japan before I came back and then COVID hit the pandemic and teaching a physical science with a strong experimental requirement became very tough, I bet. And certainly at that point there were the cracks starting to show in terms of my resilience. But one of the things that I did manage to get into at the school before I eventually left was, again, I started pushing towards tech. So I was seriously involved in the It department. If I'd stayed on another year, then I would have been teaching computer science as well. And I was also getting our students into a space design competition so that we would then leverage both my science background and as well as the tech background because they would be designing satellites and spaceships and habitats, which they absolutely loved. Who wouldn't? Exactly. I think the best days, I have to say, while we were doing that, was the day that they landed the Rover on the surface of Mars. And it was a time of day when I could get them to watch it live.

Oh, wow.

So, yes, I basically said, look, this is how it really works. And then those moments were wonderful, but towards the end they were too far between and I needed to do something else, at least for a while.

Yeah.

And so I looked at the thread of my life and went, what has been the theme here all the way along? And even from five or six years old, the thread was tech. Either engineering wise through the Lego or I have to say, when I started messing around with the old Acorn electron with Acorn Basic.

Oh yes.

Because I was a gamer even as a child. And what I discovered was that I was in fact very bad at them. And so what I had to do was I started changing the game program code so that I could always win.

Fabulous. Fabulous. This is the kind of hackers we need.

Go on. And that's where it all began. And I just realized that actually this was the theme that I had gone through all my life. And so what I did at that point was that I got in contact with the Sparta Global Agency, went through their training, which I have to say, with my background wasn't too onerous. And as soon as I was interviewed and then offered a place at Asos almost eleven months ago now, jumped immediately, said yes please. And I've been enjoying it ever since.

Fabulous. I mean, that is just such an incredible story. Although you said that the crack started to appear in your resilience. You're the absolute epitome of resilience. I mean, listening to how you can change from one thing to another, pick yourself up, relaunch yourself. It sounds like at the death of the planet there will be ants and John Croft left still fighting on and carrying on. That's incredible.

Thank you for going for ants rather than cockroaches.

You're very welcome. So now you're here with us and obviously we're loving you, having you part of the team, you're a cracking associate. Talk us through your typical day as a QA engineer. What does that look like?

One thing I like about it is the variety. It never starts the same way twice. Usually the first thing I do is check to see if anyone has tagged me in anything that's broken. That's always a good start.

Always.

If nothing immediately is jumping out, then I'll review our services through dashboards just to check that there are no problems, no alerts. If there's nothing that's jumping up and trying to grab my attention, then I start to pick up any of the half a dozen things that I've been assigned. So recently I've been working on test strategies that have been either for my own team or in fact cross team projects, which are always interesting. Trying to get to work with other people that you've never even heard of before starting the project. So this is brilliant. Every single person I've met so far is very good. As long as it isn't in the morning when I haven't had my coffee.

Yeah, that's true for all of us.

Yes, exactly. So developing things like that or recently started integrating things from things like the Qalp, so the QA's learning path, so new approaches or catching up on conference presentations. I love learning new things, trying out new things. I'm not sure if I've worn down my team's levels of energy so far.

But no, not at all.

They're always happy to try new things, always happy to improve processes and outcomes. And then if there's a chance for collaboration that comes up during the day, someone started a call in our channel or there's something going on in one of the other teams, I'll jump on and either seek to learn something or share what I'm working on.

Cool. No, I don't think the team are growing tired of you. I think you're an absolute breath of fresh air for that team, and they relish every moment with you. One of the things that I certainly found difficult when I was more hands on was that compromise that you have to find between doing everything you want to do and doing everything you can do. Given the deadline, what's your approach on that? How do you decide what you can do versus what you should do?

I am not naturally, given my technical bent, a logical person. So I actually keep my brain outside my head, not to advertise them, but Obsidian, the note keeping software, everything that is on my plate goes into Obsidian, and it goes in with a start date and a due date, and quite often with a priority and with a size of task. And at any point in the day, I can look at that and go, okay, these are the things that I've got coming over the hill. That one is due tomorrow. Better do that or I don't have anything due until next week. How do I split this up, especially, how do I split this up in a way that doesn't drive me nuts? And just being able to have that in front of me all the time has proved to be invaluable, but also with a little bit of extra coding, and I've been able to track what I've been doing in a day. I have a tendency to get drawn into things and sometimes find it difficult to put them down again. And I have a nice little monitor which tells me how much I've done so far since my last break.

Wow, that's impressive. And I also need a copy.

Go on. Quite often I can turn around and look back at my to do list and I can just see today's little work bar getting a little high and go, okay, now is the time for a walk by the river. So that's been invaluable both in prioritizing what I can actually do in a pragmatic way, but also making sure that I look after myself during the day, so I'm still as useful at 05:00 as I was after my first coffee.

I think that's a great point, actually, that people think that you need a very logical, scientific mind, as it's described in order to work in science. But as long as you've got the right tools around, you can have a brain like a firework, as long as you've got the right support around you and still be a very effective, as you are proving, individual. So you talked about that little app that you've created that you are going to give me a copy. So what tools and technologies do you use for testing and bug tracking?

I do actually keep a lot of it in, so my tasks start out in Obsidian and quite often I will actually link my work in progress also in Obsidian. The thing that I have learned over the last eleven months is also to keep what I'm working on where the rest of my team can see it. Especially as a QA, I found it's quite easy to disappear down a bug hole and emerge the next day. But yeah, I learned that fairly early on. So now quite often if I get to a logical breakpoint, I'll drop whatever it is that I've been working in into a story, or I'll publish to a Confluence page and give the link to my team or post in our channel. I mean, I try and keep it fairly light with regards to tools because I think that you can get to the point where you're almost working on the tool rather than working with the tool, and I want to stay away from that as much as possible. So I tend to keep things light. And in terms of the code, for example, if I'm working with code, it's either going to be Visual Studio or Vs code and things like Ncrunch, just to keep my tests running and so on. So I find a light touch with tools. Serves me best, at least.

Yeah, for sure. We've all disappeared down those bug holes. Absolutely. They're very enticing. So you've touched on it a little bit there, but what soft skills do you think are essential for a QA to have, especially working in cross functional teams?

I think communication really is the biggest one. I mean, I've certainly met people who have said, oh, the ability to kind of recognize things in code. But to be quite honest, if you don't know what you're looking for in the first place, if you don't know what your requirements are, that always starts with a conversation. And chances are, the earlier you can have the conversation, the better you'll have an understanding of what the requirements are, either functional or non functional. And also you can start to tease out some of the possible risks. Once you're at that point, you've actually won half the battle because then it's a case of getting that information to the people who actually need it, or making sure that the people who need to be aware of it are aware of it.

Absolutely.

Communication is a massive one. I think there's also an element of creativity, to be quite honest. It is very easy to fall into patterns of going, yes, we're going to test these things every single time, but certainly with the microservices that we have at Asos, there are so many moving parts that if we don't allow for the capacity to well, for something just to happen, then we're missing a trick.

Yes.

Expect to the unexpected.

Yes. Because those things just pop up on far too regular basis, don't they? Yes.

It's always wonderful when somebody says it's impossible that this is going to happen and then five minutes later yeah, the.

Famous lasso is what's the likelihood of that ever happening? Well, okay. And I guess this must be easy for you, coming from your background, coming from your research background, but how do you now keep yourself up to date with this huge momentum of change in the software development world?

Yeah, I think I do lean on my research skills for that. Certainly when I was doing the research, especially the literature searches for my master's degree and my doctorate, I had to read a lot of papers very quickly and so that turned into a bit of a skill, but also to be able to survive conference talks with retaining some of the information that they wanted to impart. Those tend to be very useful in keeping myself up to date. Luckily, through a combination of kind of online conferences, especially these days conference recordings, it's quite easy to have one of those running in the evening. I'm not going to suggest that I always use them to fall asleep, but it has been known to happen and.

It'S going to beat just watching some inane stuff on TV right, or listening to yet another crime podcast, which I don't do. I don't do it anymore, honestly. I don't.

Absolutely not. But the problem actually is more that I then come into the office or come onto teams the next day and go, I've got a great idea, let's change all the things. No.

Yeah, that moment when you come back from a conference and you're just buzzing with the enthusiasm to try these new things and then yeah, I think Asos is a great environment for people going, well, yeah, why don't we?

Yeah, and it really is. I mean, certainly a lot of the things so I was lucky enough to go to the Sidious conference last month, I think, in person, or maybe possibly the month before. And, yeah, I mean, half the things that I came away from that with, I then came into the office the next day, I was like, oh, we've got to try these things. And nine times out of ten, it was a, yeah, give it a shot. I mean, the one time out of ten it was a very much a no and even more no and these are the reasons, but there was always the reasons. It was never a flat no. Yeah, it might be we can't do that at this particular point in time or that doesn't match where the business is going at this particular point in time, but that was one in ten and it made sense every single time.

Yeah, we're working in Paycheck. We are slightly more restricted, aren't we? We have the PCI compliance and all that, we have to meet. But it's great that others are supporting you in these initiatives and going, yeah, why don't we give that a go? I think that's part of the beauty of working here. It really is.

Absolutely, I'd agree. I mean, I've come up with two new ideas in the last two weeks and both of them have been taken on board, so, yeah, it brings such enthusiasm for the work. If people aren't just slapping you down all the time, if you're getting encouragement, it brings you on.

Yeah, absolutely. It gets you through those dull days, doesn't it, when you're just kind of elbow deep in a code trying to find that little pesky bug.

Although I have to say, sometimes it is nice as a QA to go. Yes, there is a problem here now you find cool.

Cool. John, it's been a delight talking to you so far. Love your journey in, but I'd just love to know, what do you think has been your highlight working at Asos so far?

I think in this case, it's probably my first released prod, getting some code actually out there and then spectacularly failing to break everything. And it wasn't just the process of doing that, which I have to say, my fingers were shaking on the keyboard as I saw it go out, but I think it was actually the encouragement from the team for me to do it because I was still fairly early in the job. It was a small change, it was a tiny thing and the encouragement and the belief and the support that I received throughout that process was just really evident, both from my LSE and from another QA in my team. And it was just altogether a very powerful moment for me.

Oh, that's so lovely to hear. Really is. And I think your team and as are most of the teams throughout Asos, it's all about success or failure as a team. It's never on an individual. So that's just lovely to hear your actual experience of that. Thank you, john, thank you so much for your time. I've been absolutely delighted listening to your story. Thank you very much.

Thank you, Jen, for having me on.

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