After chatting with a few QA experts and professionals, I realized something a lot of us have in common and many of us didn’t plan to be in QA, but somehow, we ended up here. Maybe you switched from dev or support, took a chance on a testing role, or just kind of stumbled into it and stayed. However it happened, I’d love to hear your story. What brought you into QA, and what’s kept you going? Feel free to share, I’m really curious to see how everyone’s journey has unfolded 
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No one has shared their story yet, so I’ll go first 
I’ve been doing community engagement for a while, starting off as a volunteers at events and meetups, but this is the first time at Katalon I get to work closely with QA professionals. It really helped me see things from a new perspective and opened up new horizons.
What makes me stay in Community is that I believe community is a gateway to bring value to many and connect people from different walks of life.
Now I want to hear from more of you and especially @Monty_Bagati if you don’t mind me bringing you to this thread 
Monty, what has made you stay in QA all these years?
I remember your journey from manual testing to automation leadership. It was super inspiring. For those who haven’t read it, here’s his story:
Meet Katalon Creator - Monty Bagati
Anyone else reading this, feel free to jump in, too
Even a short reply is more than welcome!
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Well , I think , I was fortunate enough to get projects in different domains and that has
kept my interest intact in QA.
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I am not going to brag here, but I think my story is pretty cool and would not trade it for anything! Got a BS in Math, then got a Masters in Computer Science. Off to the development world I went! Life was great, then I came across a start up company the same year the first iPhone came out and they wanted a hybrid developer/QA. Long story short, I took it and we ended up being acquired by a Fortune 500 company.
Of course there has been bumps and different jobs along the way, but life is good in QA land (many thanks to Katalon!).
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May I jump in here a little , we as a community, love hearing stories like this because it shows how many different ways there are to find success in QA. If you could go back to that first hybrid developer and QA role, what advice would today’s you give to your past self? I believe many young QAs here would love to learn more ^^
I dont know what advice I would give, simply because the advise I would give is to start with coding as a background (like I did), that way you have the mindset of how code works, therefore when you are testing you can approach it with the mindset of a developer.
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“That’s solid advice ^^! Sounds like you have a cool story behind how you started coding to being QA. If you ever want to share it with the community, ping me anytime! We’d love to feature it.”
@depapp, can’t leave you out! We haven’t known each other long, but your contributions have been amazing. Would love to hear your QA story too!
alright, here’s my QA story:
I actually got into QA by accident. in fact, back then I didn’t even know such a role existed.
it all started back in college when I was working on a project with my friends. we were all from coding backgrounds, but I was always the one who cared most about quality. I’d go through everyone’s work and test it to find bugs. that experience kind of naturally pushed me into QA, and I started learning more and got especially hooked on automation testing.
as for Katalon, I had already heard of it a long time ago, but only started really using and exploring it over the past year, since my current company uses it as part of our automation stack.
recently though, I’ve become really interested in cybersecurity. I find it super cool that finding security-related bugs feels like a level-up from finding functional ones.
that interest even led me to discovering a security vulnerability in the Katalon platform, which eventually gave me the chance to have an awesome chat with Coty, the CTO of Katalon. we talked about so many exciting things, especially around the future of QA in the AI era.
so yeah, that’s a little about my journey
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Hi Depa, we are a community powered by people like you, and your contribution helps us learn and continuously improve our product. Thank you so much for taking the time to share and support the community ^^.
Bella
Hello @grylion54, I can see you are also a great community contributor, if you don’t mind me asking your QA journey
That’s already been done, but I just fell into the position with my last two companies. For this one, the previous Tester took a position of management and I was asked if I would continue with the testing since I had some experience with another automation testing software product. This company also tried the same software as what my previous company used, but the previous Tester moved us onto Katalon instead. So, I kept using it, and…voilà.
Note my “project 2” is the replacement software to the one that I used to maintain eons ago.
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And voilà, here you are rocking Katalon like a pro ^^