sacha chua :: living an awesome life
Entries Tagged as 'sketches'
Moving from testing to development
One of my coworkers asked me for advice on shifting from a testing role to development. Inside IBM, cross-role experience can often be picked up within a project, on a BizTech opportunity, or by assignment to another role (if the project manager really, really believes in you). Here are some tips if you’re considering the shift yourself:
Although you can build your skill in steady increments, building expertise can be a long and frustrating process. You’ll make a lot of progress in the beginning, but you’ll probably hit a plateau. Don’t be frustrated.
Unless your project manager is okay with taking a risk on you, you probably won’t be able to immediately spend time developing those skills on the job. Here’s how you can free up some time to work on improving your skills:
- Look for ways you can work more efficiently and effectively, so that you can save time.
- Document those processes so that you understand them better and so that other people can take over your role when you leave.
- Automate as much as you can, saving more time and enabling more people to do your work.
You want to be replaceable. You can’t spend time learning something else or move on to another project if that would leave a big gap in your previous team.
How can you learn more about development when you’re testing?
- You can improve your processes, learning more about available tools along the way.
- You can learn how to script while automating tasks.
- You can learn an in-demand skill and get pulled into projects that way.
- You can focus on providing additional value while testing. For example, if your project is okay with it, do whitebox testing in addition to blackbox testing. By reading the source code, you might be able to think of test cases that should be covered. You can try helping with problem identification, using tests to narrow down where the bug might be. Once you get good at that, you can try documenting your problem-identification process and commonly-encountered bugs. When you’ve got a good feel for the structure of the program and how things are generally fixed, you might even tentatively propose fixes.
What other advice would you give to people who want to move from testing to development?
Save to - del.icio.us - Digg it - reddit - StumbleUponI love reading. Love love love love.
Here are a few more books:
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Fight For Your Money: How to Stop Getting Ripped Off and Save a Fortune David Bach, 2009 Decent reference, useful form letters. Nothing too surprising in terms of advice. I like this more than his other books, which tend to hammer in the Latte Factor a bit much. Good to give to people who are just starting out in Canada. |
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The Illusions of Entrepreneurship: The Costly Myths That Entrepreneurs, Investors, and Policy Makers Live By Scott A. Shane, 2008 Surprising data-driven insights into entrepreneurship. Depressing in some places (such as when he’s looking at the statistics for women and entrepreneurship), and encouraging in others (such as when it comes to capitalizing new businesses). Something to read in a library. |
How are these Friday book reviews working out for you? How can I make them better?
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Interests can be rabbit-holes of awesome. There’s no telling how deep they run.
One of the things I love about exploring interests is getting inspired by people who are passionate about them. Book-binding, for example—there are people who are very geeky about book-binding. Same goes for photography, sewing, gardening, and all sorts of other good things. That’s what’s great about the Internet. It’s easy to find people passionate about an interest, no matter how niche it is.
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I’m trying to figure out how to explain to other people what this barkada thing is like, but it’s hard.
I can’t explain how the conversation can flow so fast and funny over water and pizza. (And to think that other people drink alcohol to relax their inhibitions.)
In-jokes that still haven’t grown old, after all these years. New jokes and references. Politically incorrect humor mixed in with ideas and initiatives. Serious thoughts mixed in with crazy antics.
There’s something about critical mass and quick retorts that’s part of the magic of being in person.
It’s amazing being part of a group like this.
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