QA beginner for a month

I have worked as a developer in QA for a month. In general it’s good, a new position and a new environment (of course people in here are also very nice!). I would like to review what I have learned last two month and what could be important for us.

Orientation

The first thing to get started in a new company is to be familiar with the environment. I got a long page of new starter on my first day. Another important thing is to get introduced to colleagues.

In my opinion, interpersonal relationship is crucial in the company. Especially for QA, something it might be more important than your responsibility. Good relationships can smooth coordination of all aspects of the work.

Test cases

Since I don’t have commercial experience in QA, my manager assigned a senior QA engineer to give me a tutorials, which is really helpful. I have learned to use TestRails to create test cases. To use test cases through out the QA process makes I feel confident with my QA result.

Test automation

The team have built test automation for a year and achieved a great success. As a developer in QA, I can use my programming background to help in test automation. However, as a new starter point of view, our automation could be a little hard to pick up. The reasons are:

• Configuration files are located in different folders.
• All methods are loaded into memory at the beginning. Even they are not required.
• Have to learn all modules for a single spec.
• Methods are called by an irrelevant object.
• Too many unknown codes. No one knows why it’s there.

Without admiration of their wonderful achievement, I just hope we can refactor the codebase structure at some point. I believe it’s beneficial for all of us.

Not sure whether this post makes sense. But I will definite share my learning here, and hope can discuss with all Hackers. NEVER STOP LEARNING