A conversation with Fariz, QA Lead at Hubble and organizer of the ISQA Yogyakarta community, on why fundamentals still matter more than tools, even with AI in the picture.
In the first two installments of this series, we heard from QA leaders working through what agentic QA means for their teams: Huy Tieu, building an AI quality companion from inside Katalon, and Gastón Marichal, making agentic QA work for real client teams at QAlified. This time we're talking to someone earlier in a different kind of journey: a Katalon Creator program candidate whose story is less about adopting a new technology and more about what stays constant underneath it.
Fariz is QA Lead at Hubble, based in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, with eight-plus years in testing. He also organizes the ISQA (Indonesian Software Quality Assurance) Yogyakarta chapter, a community of more than 9,000 members. His path into testing, and his read on where AI fits into it, comes from a different vantage point than a product manager's or a consultancy's: a tester who has watched the tools change three times over and kept teaching the fundamentals underneath them.
THE SHORT ANSWER
Fariz's take on testing, community, and AI, at a glance:
• Treat AI as an assistant, not a replacement: it generates ideas and absorbs repetitive work, it doesn't decide what quality means.
• Build analytical thinking and product understanding first. Tools without that foundation just produce faster shallow results.
• Katalon's real breakthrough was letting testers move between a no-code view and full scripting, not replacing coding outright.
• Teaching what you know sharpens your own skills as much as it helps the people you teach.
• Language gaps in global QA communities are usually confidence gaps, not ability gaps.
The rest of this conversation walks through how a decade-plus of watching testing tools change shaped that view, and what it means for testers today.
Fariz didn't set out to become a tester. "To be honest, becoming a QA was an accident," he says. "My original dream was to be a Game Tester. Most people think you just play games all day and get paid. In reality, it was not that simple." His first big project put that illusion to rest quickly: manually testing the same game, 8am to 5pm, every weekday, for almost nine months straight. "Boredom and staying awake were my biggest challenges."
That grind shaped what he wanted from a career going forward. "Working from anywhere has been my career dream since the beginning. I started planning my path during my first 90 days as a QA or tester. I realized early on that this job can be done anywhere and anytime, as long as I have my devices, electricity, and the internet."
It also shaped how he sees the tools that came after: automation to absorb the repetitive work, and later, AI to help when a problem doesn't have an obvious answer. "AI is not always correct, but it gives you inspiration relatively easily," he says.
Five years into working remotely, his routine reflects the goal he set for himself early on. "I have been working remotely for five years, mostly from home. Whenever I get bored, I work from a cafe with other QA friends," he says. Outside of working hours, that same instinct toward community shows up again: "I spend time with my family, learn about AI, or meet up with the regional QA community."
Fariz has used Katalon Studio since 2018, back when it was still built by KMS Technology. "Fun fact: I have known Katalon since 2018. It was Katalon 5.8 that I used for the first time," he says. "Another fun fact is that Katalon in that era was claimed to be 'free forever.' Even the CLI runners were completely free at that time. Until suddenly it had a business model and became a paid tool around 2019. And it became a different company and product at that time."
He's candid about the early rough edges, too. "Don't ask about the app itself: there were a lot more bugs than you'd expect compared to the recent app version. Nowadays, they're getting better." It's the kind of detail that only comes from someone who's actually used a product across most of its life, not from marketing copy.
Before Katalon reached him, the default toolkit in his part of the industry was hand-coded. "There was only Selenium Java and Appium Java at that time, if I remember correctly. It was like a corporate default everywhere. Everything was full of scripting and coding," he says. Setting any of it up meant starting from zero. "You have to set up everything from scratch, literally."
What made Katalon stand out was the ability to move between a no-code view and a full scripting view without switching tools. "Katalon makes a breakthrough where it has a switch context between the GUI mode, the Manual view, and the Scripting view," he says. "At that time when Katalon launched, it was like bringing a fresh breath of modern tools to software testing."
That flexibility mattered on real projects, including one with real stakes. "Early in my career, there were only two QAs handling a Property Management System. I used Katalon to build almost full end-to-end test coverage, but unfortunately, the company closed," he says.
The tool outlasted that job. "A few years later, Katalon became a widely used tool. That early experience allowed me to help others in the community and at other companies use it for their daily test automation."
Fariz's motivation for showing up in the Katalon community wasn't a plan, either. It grew out of pattern recognition.
"My early motivation came from the fact that Katalon Studio was my primary automation tool. As I built deeper frameworks, I realized it was capable of handling complex, large-scale use cases," he says. "I saw people in the community struggling with the exact same issues I had already solved, so I simply started sharing my knowledge and experience. The more I share, the more I keep learning and sharpening my skills."
That sharing now spans several channels. "For meetups, I am an organizer for the Yogyakarta chapter of ISQA, which has over 9,000 members. I am also a part-time QA instructor for corporate training at Hacktiv8 Indonesia, and I mentor QA professionals on ADPList. I'm currently building my own QA course," he says, a workload that also lines up with what Katalon's Training and Certification resources are built to support.
Two moments stand out from that work. "The first Katalon KataConnect event in Jakarta in 2024 stands out, as it was my first time attending as a Katalon Creator. Another major one is the ISQA Conference 2026. That was my first experience contributing to an event with international reach and speakers."
One of the more practical things Fariz has noticed running a large regional community: the barrier isn't ability, it's confidence. "Many Indonesians feel insecure about their English, but from my experience, they are mostly just shy to speak it," he says. He's addressed that directly rather than waiting for it to resolve itself. "I help bridge this gap by translating for them, for example just like what I did at KataConnect 2024."
He thinks AI has already started closing that gap on its own. "With current AI technology, the language barrier should no longer be a major issue anyway." And he's not treating this as a solved problem confined to one region. "Regarding collaborations with creators from other regions, I am absolutely interested in that."
As a Katalon Creator, Fariz's content plans are direct: "I prefer answering people's questions about Katalon or Software QA directly, so I plan to make an 'Ask Me Anything' series soon." His read on what's missing in the field right now is just as direct, and it's the sharpest material in the conversation.
"I think many lack a strong foundation in testing and analytical thinking," he says. "I am also still learning about this myself, because there is a lot of context behind every software product. Many people only care about releasing without bugs, and they do not ask: what is this feature for? Will users actually understand and use it as intended? Is this the right solution? Many QAs are also too focused on new tools like test automation and AI. They forget that these are just tools to help test the app. There is much more to software quality than just the tools."
That view extends to how he uses AI in his own work today. "We are now in the era of AI-assisted development. I can handle two or three tasks at the same time," he says. "The challenging part for me is reviewing the AI output, planning the prompts and roadmaps, and providing the right context so the AI agents' work and response meet my expectations."
It's a theme that runs through the broader conversation about what AI actually changes in testing: the tool moves fast, but someone still has to know what "right" looks like before handing it the wheel, a point echoed in how Katalon approaches human oversight in AI-driven testing.
His advice to anyone starting in testing today follows the same logic. "Treat AI as your assistant, not your replacement. You still need strong analytical skills to give the AI the right context and prompts. Focus on understanding the software and what the user actually needs. Once your foundation is strong, use AI to generate ideas and handle repetitive work."
Fariz's story doesn't have the shape of a strategic pivot. It's a decade of watching a tool grow up, a community grow to 9,000 people, and a stubborn insistence that none of that means much without the fundamentals underneath it. AI is the newest tool in that story, not a different kind of story.
If that mix, an accidental start, a habit of sharing what you've learned, and a healthy skepticism toward tool hype, sounds like your own path, the Katalon Creator program is built for testers like Fariz. Take a look at what it takes to join. And if you'd rather start by swapping notes with testers like him day to day, the Katalon Community is open for anyone to join.