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!