Meet our Testers: Michele from Italy

For our first tester interview of the year we decided to interview Michele, one of our top testers in Italy who recently participated in a test that was a little more unconventional.Hi Michele! First of all, tell us about yourself. I’m from Italy, born and bred. I’ve been an IT person all my life and I continue to be one today. I’ve been part of different teams in different companies while studying IT Engineering. In my previous jobs I serviced printers, PCs, servers, networks, data storage, and more. After completing my degree I moved to different companies for maintaining applications and services. I’ve been working more and more with people in the business, helping them make the right decisions about their IT requirements and providing them with the right solutions in a chaotic world. Right now I’m deploying and integrating different applications for a huge multinational company.What else do you like to do besides testing?I like to run, play videogames and sing. I also read a lot as it helps me dream of worlds and people I will (hopefully) meet in the future.You recently participated in a test for a sports app that required you to go out for a run. Tell us about your experience doing this test. Actually, I’m glad you asked me this question. I’ve got quite an interesting tale about this. I received the invitation to take part in a test for a famous sports event sponsor but I didn’t have a lot of time left in terms of deadlines. I read through the test tasks and one of these tasks was to go out and really do some physical activity. I had been a little lazy during the last few days so I thought “Why not?”. I then took the occasion to go out and run. While testing all the features of the app, I spent almost two hours running, while my usual run is 40ish minutes. So I would totally re-do something like this as I had a lot of fun and it got me off the couch!Which product do you wish Testbirds would test so you could participate in their project?A videogame related app or website would be fun. I would also totally take on any car or transportation testing as I think we’re experiencing lots of innovation in an area where for a long time we’ve had few new ideas. I also was thinking about some companies asking you to test hardware and software solutions, too. As an example, Fitbit could send Testbirds the smartwatch and some applications related to it, in order to test unreleased products. It would be really cool!Is there any question you would like to ask us here at Testbirds?Where do you see yourself in 3 years? Do you think we will be testing lots of other things we can’t even imagine right now?Nice question! We asked Veronika, our Marketing and PR manager, to tackle that question: Hi Michele! Thanks for asking such a great question that addresses a very important aspect of our work here at Testbirds and the future development of our company. Our mission is to become the world’s leading company for innovative testing solutions. Therefore we are constantly striving to improve and extend our services, to develop new technologies and to enhance the flexibility and usability of our platform for our clients as well as for our testers. At the moment we have offices in Munich, Amsterdam, London and Budapest as well as several Sales Partners all around the globe and we are constantly working on our expansion and to make new markets accessible for us. So in the next couple of years the conquest of the testing world is one of the points on our list.But that’s not all of course. One of the main drivers of the testing industry and our own business model is the increasing digitalization that affects our daily lives more and more. The Internet of Things is only one aspect, but it shows very well how fast the world is changing and how important quality has become in this context. More and more connected devices find their way into our office and into the hands of our testers – from toothbrushes to vacuum cleaners to electric tools. This massive trend is unstoppable, but people will only be convinced to adopt this technology if the usability and functionality are exceptional and give a real additional benefit for the users. And that’s of course when (crowd)testing comes into play. For sure there will be things to test within the next few years that most people can’t imagine at the moment. That’s what makes this industry so exciting for us and hopefully also for our testers. Thanks for participating in the interview Michele, and we look forward to keep testing with you this year!