Vlad Konstantinov shares his journey as the first QA engineer on the Compose Multiplatform team at JetBrains. From a blank slate with no defined QA process to testing strategies, automation, and scaling the QA function as the product expanded from desktop to iOS and web. He discusses balancing process, automation, and hiring, and lessons learned for future growth.

Autonomous testing complements conventional testing by leveraging cheap compute to explore software state spaces and uncover “unknown unknowns” beyond human-written tests. It spans a spectrum from random-input fuzzing, which is fast but struggles with complex conditions, to symbolic execution, which uses SAT solvers to systematically reach hard-to-hit paths—though these solvers can become prohibitively slow on complex constraints. Exe strikes a balance through concolic execution: it runs bare-metal code on concrete inputs while instrumenting paths with logical constraints, invoking a solver only when needed to explore alternate branches. This approach combines the speed of concrete execution with the path-finding power of symbolic methods, avoiding the full cost of traditional symbolic engines.