Sukrutha Raman Bhadouria
Senior Software Test Engineer, Citrix
Sukrutha hosts Girl Geek Dinners in the Bay Area for fun in her spare time. She is also a Mentor at Hackbright Academy. She has 5 years of work experience as a software engineer at Citrix, and lives in San Francisco’s sunny Mission district.
Getting Started
When I was a little girl and my father bought Macintosh’s Newton, I got interested in technology. As I started working, I did continually change my mind about whether or not I wanted to continue working in technology. Looking back, tech seemed so hard and complex it seemed – and there were no women role models to look up to.
After college, I applied to Citrix at an on-campus USC job fair, and then I was called in to interview. I can’t say I always wanted this role because I studied to be an electrical engineer and slowly started moving toward the software side! It’s worked really well for me so far to take one step at a time, and for now I have more short-term goals like learning new technologies and getting better at the work I do. Ultimately I’d love to be CTO or CEO of a tech company that makes consumer products.
My favorite part of my job as a software engineer in test is that I’m the first customer, and it allows me to come up with creative use cases for the product I am testing. I use build tools like Maven and Ant to run my automation tests. Web-based testing requires knowledge of HTML, CSS, Javascript, JQuery, etc so you know how to write test commands to interact with a mock or headless browser. Selenium requires the tests to be written in a programming language, and we [at Citrix] picked Java.
Depending on what type of product you are testing, and what component you are testing, there are a variety of tools for test automation. For example, I use JMeter for Load Testing, and Canoo Webtest and Selenium Webdriver for Web-based testing.
This is the best time to be a woman in tech, there are so many support groups and many more role models now than ever before.
Advice for New Engineers
Whenever you learn a new coding language/technology, find a project to work on so you can actually put it to use. Ask a lot of questions – no question is dumb.