Weekly digest 09/08/2024
My second in the weekly digest series :-) How has your week been? Feel free to share in the comments.
Reflection of the last months
At the end of this week I am now having a summer holiday. I’m looking forward to a break — switching all professional things off and doing other things. It’s giving me a moment of reflection of the last months. Resigning without a role to go to. Job hunting. Securing a role. Then falling deep into building up a quality engineering practice — setting up an environment where quality engineers can do their best work, banging the quality drum in all areas, learning about the product and getting hands on, plus more. It has been a fantastic journey that I’ve thoroughly enjoyed. There’s still a lot to do (as always), so looking forward to building upon some foundations created when I return.
Ask from support from your manager
I had a performance check in with my manager and it went really well. Something I’ve learnt is not to be afraid of asking for support. Actually yes, I would like your help on something, thank you :-) It’s great to have a boss that is invested in quality engineering and gets what the vision is.
Onboarding a new team member
We had a new team member join the quality engineering team this week. In terms of onboarding I created a one page document. I’ve got to be honest, it was not perfect, however, it got the main points across. In this document were:
- The team members to have 1–1s with
- Key software
- Overview of the different teams
- Goals for the probation period.
- Other important information
Overall I felt it was a good “starter” document — although will be getting feedback to see what they thought and iterating on this.
Learning more about the product
I’ve learnt a good amount of the product in the last months, yet there’s more to learn. One of my team members spent time with me to talk through a few more areas. I appreciated their time to go over it with me. It was useful to learn from them and enabled me to do a successful pair testing session with people outside of engineering. It’s important that we all learn together and give feedback to make things better. Along with that I improved our test coverage, which is always good news ;)
Pace
Overall, the biggest reflection I have is around pace. Sometimes you’re going to have very productive weeks, other weeks may not feel as productive. This is all OK as long as we’re learning, moving forward and doing what we feel is best.
