Ursula Ribeiro

Background

About Ursula Ribeiro

I look back at the defining moment of my career in my mid-20s when I landed a role at the newly formed lottery operator company, Camelot, in 1994. The buzz and the excitement of the launch of The National Lottery where I had been selected out of thousands of applicants to be a small part of its history has always held a special place in my heart. And, in my 14 years at Camelot, the amazing people I met and worked with, the fantastic opportunities open to me and the life skills my roles gave me have shaped and formed the person I am and the career I have today. I didn't start off in testing at Camelot, or even in IT, but as a business user of a bespoke, clunky admin/finance system that was full of bugs and resulted in many business workarounds! With the ever-changing landscape of The National Lottery, additional draw days, new games and licence restrictions, all under the watchful eye of the regulatory body, this system gave me its fair share of challenges and headaches, particularly with multiple complicated upgrades on already unstable code. But in its familiarity, my ownership and somewhat bizarre affection for it whilst wanting to throw it out of the window during UAT phases, I evolved into a testing role, as a tester that understands and empathises with a business user's needs, the customer-facing element of an application and the reliability, accuracy and usability of a system. Since then my career has taken a few twists and turns but it always brings me back to testing; whether it is defining business processes, requirements analysis, test planning and scripting, system proving, finding defects and identifying solutions, or implementing workarounds and new processes. It's simply what I enjoy doing and what people tell me I am good at!