Working Life Blog

New Technology and Working Between Teams.

Arif Ashraf – Quality Assurance Engineer

It could be argued that of all the ways technology has improved the lives of humans across the globe, none are as important as the technological advances in healthcare and medical research.

Working at Aridhia has allowed me to contribute towards helping the enhancement of such technological improvements in this sector. The improvements within this area are rewarding knowing my participation in this sector are helping such advancements through my role at Aridhia.

I am Arif Ashraf, and I am a QA Engineer at Aridhia. In my time here, I have worked on many of the platforms and products developed by our team.

I have been fortunate to have seen the products engineered evolve into a seamless integrated cloud platform. Being the final hurdle of QA Engineering before our developed products reach our clients and end users, I get to work with many of the different teams here at Aridhia: from Dev Ops Project Management, data scientists, and more closely as part of the development teams. Aridhia has a multi-cultural environment and working with people from different backgrounds and experiences always brings something new to the table.

Technology today is evolving at such a rapid pace, enabling increasingly faster change and progress. However, it is not only top technologies and trends that are evolving: a lot more has also changed due to the outbreak of COVID-19, making IT professionals realize that their role will not stay the same in the contactless world of tomorrow. An IT professional in 2020-21 will constantly be learning, unlearning, and relearning. In this time, I have seen Aridhia adapt and move with this change as its platform and products take advantage of the latest technical advancements.

Working as a QA Engineer, my role has not just been limited to this alone. In my time at Aridhia I have continually been given the opportunity to be hands on with different areas of Dev Ops, Development, live deployments and projects involving Cyber Security, and setting up our move to Microsoft’s Azure cloud-based infrastructure. Coming from a developer background this has allowed me to keep practicing on my foundations as well as learning new things which has not limited me to a rigid role. This is a great value in Aridhia as an organisation, as I believe this has allowed me to learn and gain experience outside of what my job title would usually cover.

Working here I have been able to learn and adapt to the latest technologies. The team are all able to recommend new trends and have been given the opportunity to display concepts of work that can be implemented to help with projects we work on. Within a working month there are always meetings held to show and see what everyone has been working on. This helps everyone learn and share their knowledge, see the latest developments, and know what Aridhia has to offer not just for our clients and customers but within the company as well.

I have had the opportunity to work on some great healthcare projects and products here which include the evolving platform Research Safe Haven (RSH) that since became Research Analytics Platform (RAP), which later became AnalytiXagilty (XAP), and was eventually re-engineered into the current Workspaces! As well as that, I’ve worked on Kuwait healthcare services, Great Ormond Street Hospital, Stratified Medicine Scotland, London Cancer, De-Identification, and Healthcare Landing Zone.

Current projects I am now working on include Aridhia’s FAIR Platform and Pseudonymisation (PMN) which is the latest API development of our previous legacy product De-identification.

Working in Aridhia has been rewarding knowing we are able to make a difference to the healthcare sector, helping medical researchers to do their research in a more efficient and collaborative way and improving patients’ wellbeing.