min. readHi, I am Ayelén from Argentina. I am 31 and live with my partner, my dog, and my cat, my tiny crew for every adventure. I love travel, art, new food, ceramics, and painting. I trained as a National Broadcaster and studied Psychology for a while, so people, communication, and empathy are naturally my thing. Those same strengths now power my QA career journey.
So why am I writing a blog at Abstra if I just told you I am a National Broadcaster? Well, this blog might inspire you to follow your dreams and create your own path.
I grew up in a home full of gadgets, cameras, consoles, and computers. My dad is a systems engineer, so every new device turned our kitchen table into a mini workshop. Learn how it works, take it apart, put it back together, laugh when it breaks, try again. That rhythm taught me something I still believe: technology changes us, and learning to adapt is a superpower. That mindset later shaped my QA career journey.
My story, the start of a QA career journey
Finding your thing rarely happens in a straight line. I tried Journalism, Psychology, and Graphic Design, each one showed me a different piece of myself, yet none felt like a full yes. I wanted a craft where empathy, curiosity, and attention to detail were not extras; they were the job.
Then came the sentence that quietly changed everything.
“My love, if you get into tech, you will never run out of work. This is the future.”
That was my dad. He invited me to sit in on a developer training, just to test the waters. I walked in as an experiment; I walked out with a direction.
I started simple and practical, the ISTQB Foundation for shared language and core concepts, internships for real bugs and real stakes, volunteer testing on side projects for repetition and muscle memory. I kept a beginner’s mind on purpose, I listened more than I spoke, I took notes like my life depended on it. Somewhere along the way, Quality Assurance clicked, and it felt like home, it felt like my QA career journey had a name.
My career as a QA
So, what is QA, and what do we do? At its heart, QA is the practice of protecting users and helping teams ship calmly. A QA turns uncertainty into checkable steps, translates user needs into acceptance criteria, and turns vague “it broke” moments into clear bug reports with steps to reproduce, expected versus actual, and risk level. In practice it looks like this, write crisp test cases and charters, pair with developers to understand how a feature truly works, run exploratory sessions to uncover edge cases, set up regression suites so yesterday’s fixes do not become tomorrow’s surprises, and keep communication kind, precise, and frequent.
A few everyday scenes that made me fall in love with the craft,
- A checkout flow fails only when a discount code and a saved card are used together. After three tries, the error finally appears. You breathe, capture the logs, write the report, and you know a future customer will never see that error again.
- A designer’s intent and the implemented behavior do not fully match. However, when you walk both teams through the same user story, you align on acceptance criteria, and everyone leaves with clarity and a simple fix.
- A release is one day away, tension is high, you prioritize tests by risk, you focus on what could break the experience, you give the team a short list that matters, and the release goes out clean.
QA blends who I am, empathy to think like a user, curiosity to chase edge cases, detail to catch what others miss, process thinking to help the team move faster with fewer fires. My day to day looks like this, map happy paths and sad paths, write test data that reflects real life, reproduce the weird, document the fix, close the loop. It is part detective work, part editor, part translator, and that mix keeps me engaged.
I did not do this alone. My dad and my brother, both in tech, have been my compass. Along the way I met generous teammates who shared time and standards, every collaboration added a tool to my kit, a better question to ask, a sharper way to document.
Life at Abstra, growing inside my QA career journey
I have been at Abstra for three years, feedback is heard, improvement is normal, and ideas have space to land. Working with people across countries stretches how you see problems and how you solve them;quality shows up as habit, not as a checklist, and I am grateful to help build that every day.
If you want to start in QA
Begin before you feel ready, take one course, shadow one tester, log one clear bug, write one small test plan, ship one small win. What feels complicated today becomes muscle memory with practice. If a path does not fit, change paths; movement beats perfection, always.
Conclusion
My path is not linear; it is curiosity with structure, internships that became skills, and self-taught learning that grew into a career I love. If you are standing at a crossroads, take one step, learn loudly, let practice shape you, your path does not need to look like anyone else’s to be real.