Digital Adverising Quality Assurance Automation

Early in my career, I worked at a digital advertising company called Undertone where my responsibilities included testing creative advertising assets before the launch of adverting campaigns, and technical troubleshooting of advertisements after their launch. The testing portion of my responsibilities was very manual and involved the efforts of myself and several colleagues who worked in the area of campaign setup and configuration. In addition to the manual nature of testing, the back-and-forth between the developers of these advertisements and the testers further slowed down the production of advertising campaigns.

After gaining some experience performing this work, I noticed that many of the issues we encountered were often not complex logic failures but rather simple and recurring problems such as copy/paste errors in tracking URLs, missing components like the AdChoices logo or close button, and failures in basic behavioral expectations such as the advertisement closing automatically.

Having studied programming in college, I began to wonder if the repetitive manual efforts could be reduced substantially through the use of automation, specifically by running automated tests that would be able to catch these recurring issues. I approached my manager with this idea which he fully endorsed by supporting my initiative and by providing me with in-person training opportunities with our development team in Argentina.

Between this training and my own efforts, I was able to produce a standalone application which performed automated testing of our advertising assets. This tool would accept advertising creative URLs, run tests on the server side, and within 1-2 minutes would return test results showing which tests passed and failed.

The creation of this tool made a major impact on several teams within the company and greatly optimized the production of creative assets. Rather than requiring back-and-forth between developers and testers, developers simply provided proof of validation by the tool to the testers with only minimal inspection being necessary at that point. The manual testing workload shrank significantly with creation of this tool and allowed us to focus on post-production troubleshooting of advertising campaigns.

This was an extraordinary early success in my career and enabled me to showcase and improve my software development skills to the great benefit of our department and company as a whole. This pivotal career moment enabled me to move into subsequent Quality Assurance and Software Engineer roles.