Meet Shilpa Sethi, Head of QA at 90POE

With nearly four years at 90POE, Shilpa Sethi, Head of QA, has played a pivotal role in embedding quality at the core of OpenOcean STUDIO. From test automation to incident analysis, the Quality Assurance team ensures our platform remains secure, resilient and ready to evolve. 

Being in the company for approximately four years, can you share a particularly rewarding moment or milestone at 90POE, and what it taught you? 

I had always believed that consistent effort toward the Shift Left Test Strategy we set for ourselves would eventually pay off. That belief was validated quite some time ago, during a company wide meeting when I saw a graph showing over 400 deployments per month—with a success rate of 99.99%. And these monthly production deployments were achieved within just 16–20 working days, as we exclude Fridays and weekends. 

That’s when it hit me: the scale, speed, and quality we had worked so hard to embed had become a reality. This wasn’t just about numbers. It reflected the success of integrating quality early in the development lifecycle. With testing fully embedded into CI, we enabled true continuous delivery, allowing rapid feature rollouts across our platform. 

In QA, we’re often focused on what’s next, how we can improve. But this was a defining moment. It validated the groundwork we’d laid: automating at the right layers, aligning our test strategy with development goals, and promoting a quality-first culture. It taught me the power of patience, the importance of having the right team, and the impact of staying consistent. Most importantly, it reinforced that quality is not a task. It’s a shared mindset and responsibility across the entire team. One moment that stands out was when our ISO 9001 auditor left us with this remark: “You guys don’t just do testing—you do proper Quality.” That acknowledgement will always stay with me.  

How do you define “quality” in the context of a cloud-based enterprise platform, like OpenOcean STUDIO, and how do you measure it? 

In the context of a cloud-based enterprise platform like OpenOcean STUDIO, we define quality as the ability to deliver reliable, secure, performant, and continuously deployable software that meets user and business needs at scale. Quality goes beyond just feature testing; it is a mindset that must be inculcated and embraced by the entire team through processes, tests, collaboration, teamwork, and ongoing feedback and monitoring after feature delivery.

It’s like inspecting every small increment as the Lego pieces are being assembled—while also ensuring everything functions as expected when the full structure comes together. 

We have dozens of teams building software-as-a-service for a platform that operates 24x7, with all teams integrating continuously to ensure cohesive platform functionality. We can achieve quality at scale because of our four pillars: a comprehensive test strategy; robust development processes that promote a culture of quality; effective use of the Test Automation Pyramid to support continuous integration; and tools like Qodana that measure code quality to ensure it remains free from anomalies.  

What are some of the unique challenges (and opportunities) of delivering high-quality products in a fast-moving maritime tech environment? 

One of the unique challenges in delivering high-quality products in the fast-paced maritime tech environment is the complexity and scale of our platform’s architecture.Maritime technology demands high availability, reliability, and rapid iteration—there’s little room for error when operations run 24x7 and decisions impact real-world logistics and safety. That can be potentially challenging for an international company with team members spread across multiple geographic locations. 

Our leadership recognised early that quality couldn’t be an afterthought, it had to be built into the foundation. Traditional end-to-end automation, while useful, often becomes a bottleneck at scale and burdens QA with excessive maintenance. That’s why we adopted a Shift Left Testing strategy from the outset, complemented with the right amount of Shift Right testing for business validation. This proactive approach allows us to maintain quality at scale, accelerate delivery, and continuously innovate, turning what could be a challenge into a competitive advantage. 

As OpenOcean STUDIO continuously grows, how do you ensure the platform remains resilient and secure? 

At 90POE, quality is not just a phase. It’s the foundation that runs through everything we do. As OpenOcean STUDIO continues to scale, ensuring resilience and security remains a top priority. That’s why we’ve invested in strong foundations across infrastructure, architecture, process, tooling and testing. We ship features in smaller increments with testing embedded in our CI pipeline, enabling safer deployments and easier rollbacks. Continuous monitoring helps us catch issues early and maintain reliability. Most importantly, we treat every incident as a chance to learn—through root cause analyses that drive real improvement. This proactive approach, combined with a success rate exceeding 99.99% and a dedicated, experienced team enables us to scale quickly while maintaining the highest standards of quality, security, and stability across the platform.