What does your "day in the life of a ..." look like?

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What does your “day in the life of a …” look like?

Probably one of the hardest questions to answer!

Of course it depends and of course no two days can ever be the same.

Having said that, I think it’ll be interesting to document a typical day at this moment in time with your current role. What does a typical day in the life of your role look like?

Perhaps you could use this structure:

Role title:
Industry:
Short timeline description of activities:

A side note: Kat Obring (@kato) does a brilliant job of describing a typical day in Lesson 5.3.0 of the Software Testing Essentials Certificate (STEC): Understanding testing in the software development lifecycle.

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Since nobody is biting I’ll start!

Number 1:

Role title: Officially it’s “agile tester” since there is suppose to be no hierarchy at my client. But everybody calls me the Quality Coach, Security Champion & Test Guild Lead

Industry: Healthcare

I got hired to coordinate testing and introduce test automation to reduce bugs (hihi, yea I know!)
After a few weeks I started seeing bottlenecks and pointed it out, the testers are doing great, but some analysts & developers/architects could use some upskilling / coaching and the process also.

So I started to focus on those things. While also introducing performance testing, SAST & some other things. I also follow up the pentests that happen regularly since I’m the SecChampion of the teams. Since it’s a big organization and there is no coordination or communication between all the testers from the company ~50-60. I started a testing guild with monthly meetings/demo’s/things to learn and share.

Unfortunately my days are filled with meetings and follow-ups, personally I would like to have a bit more hands on test work. I get dragged in all kind of meetings, even for REST design :slight_smile: but I don’t mind that.

Number 2
Role: Consultant
Industry: IT/QA :slight_smile:

So I work as a consultant for my employer but I also do internal work here. I coach & give trainings.
I sometimes go to other consultants their project to help them with their journey or choices. Free consulting basically.

Number 3

Role: Tester / Designer
Industry: Gaming

I also do some design & test work for some video game companies. I’ve been doing it for quite some years now. One company I’ve been with for ages! Some are very small companies with only 1 developer and it’s hard for him to come up and balance the game so they often reach out to go into alpha/beta mode and test their new features in the video games and sometimes I even design them and suggest them myself, which is NOT easy to do, especially the balancing part.

Timeline of my day:

  • 6am I start working for my client
  • ~3-4pm I start doing some internal work
  • 7pm I work for the video game companies / do some learnings
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Role: Test Lead (thats the one the contract at least)
Industry: Real Time Passenger Information
Not really an agenda for every day but in insight into what a day could contain.

  • Start between 7.30am to 8
  • Post in our Slack channel plans for the day and if I’m available to help others and read everyone elses to stay on top of what everyone is up to
  • Check the Jira dashboards, metrics and any query subscriptions to drive my priorities of the work thats going on
  • 10am to 11 stand ups and follow ups
  • Coffee break at 11 to have 15 minutes away from the keyboard so my dog can just give me looks of disapproval
  • lunch break around 12 - sometimes for an hour most of the time less - especially if there is something on my mind
  • We have 2 engineering squads so bi-weekly sprint ceremonies are alternated for each team every week including refinements, planning, demos, retrospectives and a longer term plan check with leads (i.e. the aspirational plan). Wednesday usually being the planning day, so meeting heavy
  • 121’s of direct reports and bi monthly 121’s with indirect reports - just really health checks and chats.
  • Chairing Quality Gates for customer deployments to ensure all stakeholders are confident in what we’re shipping
  • Meetings for upcoming projects and alas sometimes when things haven’t gone so well. My job in those is usually to keep the energy high to make sure we’re motivated to deal with it and put prevention plans in place.

Between all that I’m mainly focusing on the important not urgent tasks to improve, so a lot of meetings, investigation, ideas and learning. If I’m lucky, get into testing - but only at the teams consent. I’m not going to take work away from people just to satisfy my need to get my hands dirty…but it is a need :grin:.
Finish between 5 or 5.30pm - I have a lot of obligations outside of work with bands, dart teams and looking after my mum.

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Role title: Quality Engineering Lead
Industry: Telco / network space

My days look differently. If I may go for, what would it look like in a week?

  • Syncs with the QE team - discuss any hot topics
  • 1 to 1s with my direct reports (most recently we’ve been doing end of year appraisals and onboarding a new team member)
  • Syncs with the leadership team in form of huddles
  • Strategy and approach conversations
  • Peer review of test work, including reading things such as security reports
  • understanding the roadmap and future planning
  • project meetings
  • adding and reviewing risks into the Engineering RAID log and subsequent mitigation conversations
  • Sharing blogs, conferences, learnings etc with the team
  • oversight of QE work and ensuring we are focusing on what matters the most
  • Personal development time (like today! :-D)
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That did give me a good chuckle! :smiley:

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