I love this job.
Wonderful people to work with – immediate colleagues, immediate manager, developers including their managers, all the way up to my engineering VP – all great. Senior management seems good (though I’m terrible at judging that sort of thing). The company products have enough relationship to things I used to work on for that experience to be useful, and are different enough that there’s plenty of new stuff to learn. I feel that I ought to know my current product much better than I do – but since I’ve spent more than half of my tenure so far *not* working on testing it, that’s probably an unreasonable self-judgement.
I’ve been allowed/encouraged/required to do things I’ve never done before, and that has all turned out pretty well. Some examples:
- We think we’re going to need serious GUI automation soon, have a look at this implementation with an in-house framework that we used for a few things. Sure! I don’t speak browser … but this looks way more complicated than I think it needs to be, let me see what I can do with something open source. Hey, Robot Framework looks promising … and after a few diversions, I’m most of the way through implementing a Robot-based replacement. I’m still not fluent in HTML and related stuff, but I get by.
- We’d like our regression tests to run from Jenkins instead of cron jobs, can you make that happen in a way that gets us better reporting? Well, Jenkins can show results for JUnit tests, which I don’t know anything about … but OK, I made a wrapper for the pipelines to use, that (1) calls the legacy test framework and then (2) makes fake JUnit test results, so we can use Jenkins JUnit reporting. And my first-ever experience with PHP was to rework a little app for displaying legacy tests results into a version that displayed reorganized results in a Jenkins iframe dashboard.
- We need you to test this thing, and the legacy test framework isn’t a good match, and you’ll need this REST interface. I’d never done REST before, but Robot Framework also does REST, and that worked pretty well. That led to a couple of small REST projects and then to a major one, now well underway.
I’m having a blast. (Well, I could do without the pandemic, but so could we all.)