New Beginnings

Hello, dear reader. I know it has been a while. I sit here, watching the snow fall on Christmas Eve and am reflecting on this past year. I have grown and learned so much about quality assurance and software testing. I have met many people who have been open and willing to teach me about not only QA but career development. I will never be able to show my appreciation for those who have helped me through my internship. As my internship is reaching its one year mark, I have chosen to take the next step and have accepted a full time QA Analyst position at a different company. I will miss everyone I have worked with this past year.

As this new adventure approaches, I have been experiencing only what I have heard about from others, Impostor Syndrome. My background in psychology hasn't prepared me for these feelings of not being prepared or good enough to perform for this new position. I wonder if maybe the hiring manager has made a mistake and they will realize it soon. If I allow myself to fall deeper into these thought swirls, I become dizzy. My hands are clammy. I can't see straight. But I know that I am a hard worker and that even if I'm not completely ready, I have the drive to take everything one step at a time. I am still a QA Newbie but I am miles ahead of when I first started a year ago.

I hope that you, reader, never feel the pang of anxiety and question your own worth but if you do, I want you to know that you aren't alone. We all experience it in a different way but we all have our doubts. It is okay and if it isn't now, it will be soon. Take care of yourselves.

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays.

End of an Era

I’m not quite sure if I have ever mentioned my volunteering but every Saturday I volunteer at a great place for people dealing with cancer. I have been volunteering here for over 4 years. I can’t talk highly enough about this place. It’s with a heavy heart that I am ending my time here. It has been a very difficult decision but I unfortunately can not give as much as they deserve from me. It’s been a hard couple months that I’ve been thinking about this and I know I’m going to miss this place dearly.

If anyone who reads this is in the Cleveland, OH (USA) area and is either dealing with cancer themselves or has a friend or relatively with cancer, take a look at this place. The website is Www.touchedbycancer.org.

Take care everyone and Happy Halloween!

Grooving

My team has been putting out builds weekly for a good time now. We are finally getting into a testing groove. There are so many deadlines coming up, I was getting really nervous but I think we got this. Its really great working with a team that can get stuff done together.

I know this was short but I'm back in classes and don't have much time to come up with ideas for posts. Thanks for reading!

Epic Whoops

Today has been very interesting to say the least. My team was testing an environment that was just cloned from production. We are making sure nothing is super broken. Well, no one could get past one screen without a Help Desk Error. So, it was looking like an environment wide issue. Little did we know, our developers were noticing a problem IN production that was causing interfaces to fail. A few email chains later, it came out that a different team pushed a change to production without testing and it failed across the board. The dev team supervisor isn't in office but I can feel him seething through his emails. My supervisor laughed because this is such a ridiculous problem that shouldn't be happening. There is a QA team for a reason. We should be able to catch these problems earlier and prevent this s#*! show. Oh boy. 

UPDATE:

I'm writing this in an email to myself as it is all happening. Basically, this change has affected all environments and we are stuck. A patch could be made to bandage the problem briefly but I'm not sure if our team works like that. I'm still learning as I go along. Currently, its mid-morning and supervisors are scrambling. No one can do anything except maybe work on test cases. I just started a new audiobook so I'm quietly listening to that and waiting this mess out. 

UPDATE 2:

Its mid-afternoon. While working on some version testing scripts, I received an email from our interface developer to try the software again. I was able to get it to work through a transaction. I get to finish my work today! I hate leaving incomplete work that I should have been able to get done in the first place for the next day. Off I go!

Quotes

Hello, all!
I really love quotes. I'm one of those people that posts a bunch of quotes on beautiful backgrounds on Pinterest. I especially love funny quotes. Here are some that I found recently related to Software Testing:

“Discovering the unexpected is more important than confirming the known.“ -George E. P. Box

"All code is guilty until proven innocent." -Anonymous 

“To an optimist, the glass is half full. To a pessimist, the glass is half empty. To a good tester, the glass is twice as big as it needs to be.”— Anonymous

And lastly, my work background,

Loss

I hope you all are well. This post won't be about QA or testing. I'm going to go a little more personal today.
Yesterday, I lost a friend. It was very sudden and under unknown circumstances. He was a close friend of my future family-in-law and it is hitting us very hard. The coroner had a theory at the scene that breaks my heart. Unfortunately, we have to wait to find out what really happened. He left behind two children.
Where I live, drugs take the lives of many. I am trying to not come to a judgement until we know for sure but it is looking like we lost another one to these horrible substances. What I want is to memorialize his memory. I don't want him to be another statistic. Just part of an anonymous number on the news. I know he will always live in the hearts of those who knew him but I want his children to know how amazing he was. I'm not sure how I will go about this.

Take care of yourselves and reach out to the ones you love.
-Marie

Ebbs and Flows

I am writing this on my phone so apologies for formatting/grammar/spelling errors. It has been very slow at work and I'm working on a project that won't be needed until 2018. It makes me wonder if all teams are like this or not. We will have a ton of work all at once then we will have nothing to do to the point where I can write a half ass blog post from my phone. I've been refreshing my email for about 45 minutes just to have something to do other than this tax XML. I know nothing about Brazilian taxes but I've been sent to create the XML that is sent to the Brazil government for tax and inventory control purposes. I've been working on it so log my mind is numb. Thank god for the Nerdist podcast. If I had to sit in silence and do this, I would start spinning in my chair. 

On a positive note, I went kayaking over the weekend with some girlfriends and it was fantastic. I want to buy my own kayak. It was nothing too intense. Just a lazy float down a river. 

Here's to hoping for more work soon. Take care, reader.

Happy 4th of July week!!

I am sitting in the office with only a few other people. Everyone else is working from home or took vacation time. It's so quiet and I love it! I am regression and defect testing today. I have already messed up and tested the wrong test set. It's not the end of the world but it's times like that when I remember I'm just an intern. I hope to learn more about slowing down and actually reading emails completely. It is also a Monday of a holiday week. My brain isn't on yet.

Everyone have a good week and be safe!

Ministry of Testing

I had another informational interview with a QA software tester at my company. He was a wealth of information. One of the resources we discussed was the Ministry of Testing. He went to TestBash last year and couldn't speak higher of it. I get so excited knowing there are so many people out there being innovating and growing this field. I hope to go to TestBash someday.

This was a quick post but last thing is I have joined the website uTest. It is a social network for software testers. I'm still working my way through it but check it out!

Tool Plug

Hello, dear reader.

Today I'm going to tell you about a tool in my life that has greatly improved my organizational skills. I have been using Toodledoo (www.toodledo.com), which is both an app and a web based task list system. There are many aspects to this product that are useful but I  mostly use it for the task list function. What sets it apart, in my opinion, is the priority and due date feature. I am able to put a task in, example, pick up my dog's flea meds from the vet. Then, I can choose a due date and priority. The service then ranks the tasks based on importance levels, the closest due dates and higher priorities have a top importance level. What I like about this system is that I can put everything I'm supposed to remember into my phone and check it daily to see what is coming up and what can wait. It releases me from the anxiety cycle of trying to remember everything that needs to get done and when. So, check it out. I do believe there is a subscription cost but there is a free trial. I highly recommend this app.

End to end testing

I'm learning a lot more about SQL and Oracle lately. We had some test requests to test interfaces from our store database to our Oracle database. I have absolutely no experience with Oracle beyond looking up what has replicated to it. But the queries to Oracle are ridiculous. So many decodes and unions, I have have no idea what's going on. I have to trust our senior analyst knows what she's doing.

And that leads me to my next thought. I love my team. We are only five strong but four of us are women. And the dev team has women on it too. I have contemplated maybe going to another team to focus on security. But I'm afraid to bounce around teams. I'm pretty loyal to my supervisor and I'm not sure how it would look. I'm so new to all of this career thing. So, I'm going to stick around in QA for now and learn as much as I can.

On the note of learning QA, I'm looking into classes and certifications. I have no idea what organization to go through or if I want to do QA or software testing. Finals week is coming up and I keep just adding to my stress. Thank goodness for yoga and coffee.

Where's the semicolon?

It's been a while, hasn't it? I actually forgot I had started this. Life has been kind of crazy but who's isn't?

I have discovered cold brew coffee. It's amazing. I purchased a warehouse club sized package of coffee over the weekend and it's almost gone. Needless to say, I've been on point with my tasks, if not a little jittery.

Not much going on at work because the dev team is in training. We are slowly creeping along with our weekly tasks. It's been pretty boring. I completed a SQL basics certification from sololearn.com and now I'm starting a Ruby one. Ruby is very similar to the previous languages I've worked with but no semi colon to close the command. It's driving me crazy. It's such a reflex to end each line of code with a semicolon. It's pretty irrational of me to be upset but if this is the worst thing going on in my life, things are going pretty good.

Informational Interview

I just had the greatest talk with a QA engineer in my company. He's on a different team so he brought a very different perspective to testing as a whole. His team is more of an Agile format as mine is Waterfall. The more I learn about Agile, the more I am in love with the concept. He also directed me to a new blog to read: lisacrispin.com. I look forward to reading her perspective as well. Also, he introduced me to some books that I will have to report back on as I acquire and read them.

Overall, an amazing 30 minute chat. So thankful.

Virtual Machine Testing

Today was a quick but productive day. I got to speak to a manager in a different part of IT and I learned a lot. I'm really questioning how I want to develop my career. Even though most of it is usually stumbling into positions and dumb luck.

We were finally released a virtual machine from the systems team that was supposed to be tested ages ago. There wasn't enough time in the day for me to finish the script all in one go. What is exciting is the rest of the machines are not virtual, we are trying this out. Seems to be working so far. Except at first, I would ask development to populate the database with, you know, data, and all I would get is a screenshot back of data on their machine working fine. Gotta love that. But, I'm exhausted. I need to learn how to titrate coffee better so I don't crash so hard. Have a great weekend!

First!

Well, I guess I'm here now. I couldn't find many QA blogs, so, I'm starting my own. I am a college student (second time around) and am trying to work my way into the world of Software Quality Assurance. I am an intern at a large company doing QA work. I am lucky as hell to have this position. I was under the delusion that Development is where I needed to be and QA would be my jumping point. Two months in and I'm in love with QA. We do mostly manual testing but my new project is to research automation software. There is software built into our system but it requires a good amount of specialized xml coding to work. I'm actually looking forward to diving into this project.

I'm not going to claim this to be an interesting read. I just want a place to waste my breath (keystrokes?) on this new venture. Read if you want.

Take care. 😺