8 Months as a QA Engineer at CIMB Niaga — My Honest Experience
I never saw myself as a QA engineer. My background was frontend — I built UIs, obsessed over animations, and thought testing was someone else's job.
Then I joined CIMB Niaga, and that perspective completely changed.
Day One: Realizing How Different This Was
Walking into an enterprise banking environment for the first time is humbling. The systems are old, the processes are strict, and there's a level of rigor that I hadn't experienced before.
My project was One Statement — a platform that consolidates customer financial data into a single document. Sounds simple. It wasn't.
Every number had to be exactly right. Not approximately right. Exactly right.
Learning to Read Systems I Didn't Build
A big part of my job was validating data against IBM AS400 and ETP — two legacy systems I'd never touched before.
I had to understand how data flows between them, where it gets transformed, and how to trace a wrong number back to its source. It was detective work, honestly. Slow at first, then oddly satisfying once the patterns clicked.
SIT vs UAT — Two Very Different Games
I ran both SIT and UAT, and they require completely different mindsets.
SIT is technical — you're checking if the system does what engineers designed. UAT is human — you're checking if it does what the business actually needs. Both matter, and learning to switch between those perspectives was probably the biggest skill I developed here.
Building Automation with UFT One
This was the part I was most nervous about. UFT One uses VBScript, which I had zero experience with.
But after a few weeks of pain, something clicked. I ended up building and maintaining 20+ UI automation test assets weekly — and watching a regression suite that used to take days run in a few hours felt genuinely rewarding.
It reminded me a lot of frontend development, actually. You build something, it breaks, you fix it, it breaks again. Eventually you figure out how to make it resilient.
API Testing with TestNG
Alongside UI automation, I also did API testing using TestNG — validating response accuracy, service reliability, and integration stability.
This pushed me to understand the backend layer more deeply than I ever had as a frontend dev. Knowing what's happening on the server side made me a better tester — and honestly, a better developer overall.
What I'd Tell Myself on Day One
Quality isn't just about finding bugs. It's about building enough confidence in a system that you can sleep at night knowing it won't break in production.
Eight months in, I still don't have all the answers. But I'm asking much better questions — and in QA, that might be the whole job.