Quality House is a company that has been providing software testing and ISTQB accredited training services for IT firms of all sizes for two decades and is today known as a trusted global partner
When, in partnership with Quality House, I founded a branch in Serbia in 2016, we combined our knowledge and experience with colleagues from Bulgaria and relayed that across the entire territory of the Balkans, says MD and co-founder Predrag Skoković, noting that the company is today best known across the region for its courses, despite outsourcing remaining its dominant service.
How did your beginnings look; what led you to decide to deal with software testing?
— It was 20 years ago that my business partner, Mitko Mitev, founded company Quality House in Sofia, Bulgaria, with the aim of offering quality control services, i.e. the testing of software products. The initial idea was to offer classic outsourcing services, to make Quality House employees who have appropriate qualifications in the area of testing available to other IT companies. The need to organise courses intended for professionals also soon imposed itself. Interestingly, global organisation ISTQB was formed just a few years earlier and defined the sc
pe of knowledge and skills that need to be possessed by those dealing with software testing. Quality House recognised this as a good foundation to offer software testing courses in accordance with the rules included within the teaching material promoted by ISTQB. Given that I switched from my career as a programmer to a successful software tester many years before founding Quality House, recognising the need to expand this mission was a natural progression. Outsourcing remains Quality House’s dominant service, but it is now supported by professional courses that compel our employees to pursue certification, and then to advance further and learn how to transfer the knowledge acquired as lecturers.
Does the wide spectrum of business domains that you support require that you adapt quickly?
— Nothing can be done today without software, because it forms part of every business sector – from medicine, via the automotive industry, gaming and gambling, to banking and finance – but someone has to produce that software in accordance with all good practices. Software is just a support tool in most business sectors, but we need to learn what those sectors do. That doesn’t mean that we will learn medicine or banking, but we need to understand the specifics of those professions in order to ascertain whether the software has the appropriate quality. In this sense, we have to adapt very quickly and learn constantly. It is enough to note how much the IT world has changed in the last six to 12 months and to realise that someone had to test it all. All of us who deal with software testing had to monitor all trends, adapt to them and be aware of every new solution appearing. That’s why we often emphasise that learning never ends.
Your company is among the co-organisers of the SEETEST conference, which will be held in late September. Is this an important event for your industry?
— The SEETEST conference is among the most highly attended European events of this type. It emerged as a need of people gathered around Quality House and the SEETB organisation, as our regional committee for Southeast Europe, to give something back to the community and to exchange knowledge with as many colleagues as possible worldwide. We launched it in 2008, with about 150 participants, and today we bring together an average of between 600 and 700 software testers. This year’s next SEETEST will be held in Zagreb for the first time, because we believe that the Croatian market has advanced significantly. And this turned out to be a good decision, because we’ve already sold 200 tickets.