Day in the Life: Anna Wilson, Quality Assurance Manager

I joined Luminance as an Operations Engineer just under two years ago after completing my undergraduate degree in Mathematics from the University of St. Andrews. I was later promoted to Lead Quality Engineer and now manage the Quality Assurance team at Luminance. Working with Luminance’s AI on a daily basis, problem-solving any technical issues and ensuring a seamless experience for our customers means that I’ve had the privilege of witnessing first-hand how much our tech has evolved in the past couple of years. Excitingly, a critical part of my job is seeing and testing all of Luminance’s new features before they are released to our customer base, so I’m constantly working at the cutting-edge of AI.

On the Quality team, we oversee every technology release and also work on longer term projects to enhance automation across every step of Luminance’s internal development processes. Here’s what a typical day in the life looks like for me.

9:30

I arrive at our Cambridge R&D hub just before 9:30. Luminance operates a hybrid working model, so I check with my team in advance about which days we’ll be in the office and which days we’ll work from home this week! I grab a pastry on the way in before preparing to start my morning catch up.

10:00

Time to check in with my Quality team before we get stuck into work for the day! We typically do a brief catch-up on the progress we’ve made so far in the week, and what our individual priorities are for the day ahead. I take the opportunity to share some fantastic feedback that has come in from a customer overnight – they’ve tried out one of Luminance’s newest features, our AI-powered chatbot, and are absolutely loving it. We’re always developing our AI to suit the evolving needs of our customers, and it’s always a great motivator for the team when a new feature lands so well!

11:00

Next up is a standing meeting with our Chief Technology Officer, our Head of Product Specialists and other leads to discuss upcoming product updates as well as any urgent matters that need to be addressed. Today, we’re discussing the release and rollout of Self-Serve, the latest application of our legal Large Language Model. The QA team has been testing this feature since the very beginning! Our job is essentially to try and ‘break’ the technology, so we can identify any bugs or points of weakness. With Self-Serve, we put the feature through its paces and feedback to our Dev team. We test everything from buttons to different combinations of user permissions to ensure everything works as expected. Occasionally we will also flag something in the feature that feels a bit awkward and feedback to the Product team so we can continue to perfect every single feature.

11:30

It’s time to see a live demo of a new feature our Dev team has been working on – one of the most exciting parts of my role! It’s critical that my team is involved in the entire development process so we know exactly what this new feature does, what optimum performance should look like, and how we can conduct QA tests.

When testing out new features, I like to put my ‘customer hat’ on. Adopting the perspective of an end-user helps me to understand every use case and any possible issue they might encounter. Having a complete understanding of new features ensures that we’re able to execute intensive testing and deliver a completely seamless user experience.

12:30

Lunchtime! My team and I sit in the kitchen to enjoy our meals and complete the cryptic crossword.

13:30

My next meeting is with our newly formed ‘Quality Council’. The council is an internal forum consisting of representatives from our Support, Operations, Dev and, of course, Quality teams! In short, Quality Council helps us to facilitate collaboration across teams. We discuss issues raised by each of these teams to optimize internal processes. A recent example would be how we improved Contract Templating to save Support time! Quality Council helps to facilitate collaboration across teams.

14:30

Next up, I join a Zoom meeting with my London-based colleague, Madina, who leads our Legal Analyst team. They’re helping us confirm the results of an automated test check. Legal Analysts are critical to assessing the performance of Luminance’s AI, as they beta test new features and provide a legal perspective on their accuracy and usability. They provide an invaluable feedback loop with the Cambridge office and are critical to assessing the performance of Luminance’s AI.

15:30

For the rest of the day, I can crack on with a project I’m really excited about. I can’t say too much yet, but it’s going to expedite our entire implementation process. I love being able to pursue passion projects at work! During this project, I’ve been able to dredge up some of my Ops knowledge which is always exciting! This project is really expanding my skillset in terms of setting up services and incorporating different components to create a valuable new feature for internal usage, with benefits for clients too.

18:00

With the day wrapped up, it’s time to head to our quarterly team meal! Last quarter we went to an incredible Indian restaurant, this time we’re heading to a restaurant around the corner called Bedouin.