What's Your Win For The Month? January 2021

Career Career Development
#1

In a slight change from our usual routine. I thought it might be nice to celebrate a win at the end of the month. Something that’s given you a sense of accomplishment. No matter how big or small it might be, share your win here so we can celebrate it with you. :tada:

My wins for this month:

  • Work - Getting back into my work routine after a month of being out sick. This was pretty tough and daunting to do to be honest!
  • Work - As a result of being off for the month, I had time to reflect on my role. This helped me put together a template of what I do day to day but also helped me think about where I want to go in the future.
  • Personal - Lots of progress on our new home :house:
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What's Your Win For The Month? February 2021
#2

For me this months success has been making diagrams:

  • I made a flow chart to show a customers route through the feature we are working on, which helped the team and myself understand the scope of the feature we are working on.

  • I am also working with a second team and I created a table of rules for their feature which helped me find more issues and will be helpful next time we work on that feature.

I like diagrams as they convey so much, are easy to amend and fit on one page

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#3

I would definitely say my win for this month was getting my CV and LinkedIn more up-to-date and to a position where I’m exploring what else is available. Within work itself, I’d say getting back into mentoring has been good and building an API C# framework for automated tests.

Other than that, we got our application in for planning approval for some work on our house. We also got our money back from our cancelled honeymoon, after much to-ing and fro-ing!

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#4

My biggest win this month was putting my foot down at work, not to pick up unplanned work.
Which meant I could finally push the restructure of our automation framework. Demoed it to the teams and they are loving it

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#5

The most obvious win this month has been starting to deliver a software testing bootcamp to people as part of West Yorkshire Combined Authority initiative to bring people into tech. They are a fantastically enthusiastic and diverse group and a pleasure to teach.

Probably the biggest impact has been getting a CAT7 cable from the router downstairs to the upstairs office. It means my connection has gone from 7-12 to over 200! No more video meeting wobbles for me :grin:

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#6
  • Running over 80 miles this month :scream_cat:
  • Being kinder to myself and slowing down
  • Supporting my direct reports through this lockdown
  • Supporting my kids with home schooling
  • Customer feedback - making it visible and taking actions :raised_hands:
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#7

My Wins:

  • Finally joined the Ministry of Testing Pro Plan
  • Attended two 99 Minute Workshops
  • Delivered 30/60/90 goals to keep my QA team in focus.
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#8

Wins for January 2021 - only one. Setting the priorities right for this year. That’s a huge one. But that’s done!

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#9

Great going with the router cable! Physical cables are always better than the WiFi. Here in Bangalore, I am checking the feasibility of a 250Mbps connection in our area. Even 100Mbps sometimes wobbles.

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#10

Sounds interesting. What kind of restructuring did you do? Can you share?

#11

When I was a young teen my mum and I would go shopping for school shoes. We didn’t have much money, so we couldn’t afford branded things, and I had to treat my shoes with a lot of care because they had to last the whole year.
In the discount shoe shop we always went to they sold Doc Martens. I remember vividly staring enviously at the poster ad in the window, knowing there was zero chance of ever having a pair of my own, and not wanting to make my mum feel bad by asking for a pair knowing she would have to say no.

Today, at the ripe old age of 37, with my latest software testing paycheque I bought myself my first pair of DM’s.

Today is a good day.

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#13

Hi, There were several things to this:

  • Using linters to tidy up the code
  • The edges on the layers of our framework were starting to fade. So spent some time putting everything where it belongs
  • Started to make use of a feature of Python Behave. It has got a concept called context. This allows you to store information during test execution, and use that throughout the test, and also in your reporting
  • Made it easier to read to log files from the system under test. It has a wealth of information that we can report on
  • On the topic of reporting, I changed all the output to dictionaries (json), so that it can be used in various ways.
  • We now send the json to a data lake (Elastic), and then use Kibana to display
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#14

My win for January is going back to work as a tester after a long care pause.

It has been great to be back in the game and know that I still have so much to learn and share. :grinning:

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#15

Kibana is very useful for manual analytics as well concerted automated processing. Saves a lot of time going through the log files.

Python Behave context seems very useful too.

Well, let us know how it goes after all these changes (in making the test engineer go home and spend time with their family, and not staring at the monitor over a weekend!
That’s the end goal, as far as I am concerned!).

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#16

Things are changing rapidly, and new things are getting introduced. So, there’s no dearth of stuff to learn. But one has to be careful not to be drowned in the information overload.
All the best!

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#17

I’ve a few wins, work and personal.

I set myself the goal of professional development - a few hours each week and I’m sticking to it. I’ve completed some training, read other work related blogs and reading useful books. It’s only between 1-4hrs per week but I’m getting it done. It’s given me fresh ideas and I’ve seen positive results for the things I’ve been adjusting.

Personally - I’ve been focusing on my health more. So more yoga and eating well. I can now sleep on my left side for the first time in about 4ish years - pain free. I’m pain free most days too. Although I’d a bad week, that was mostly complete exhaustion rather than a week of constant pain which I’ve had up until now. So I’m seeing definite improvements - it’s been a culmination of months of looking after myself but I added some extras this month.

It’s not always easy to keep chipping away and staying consistent. But I’m pleased with myself for keeping on and not throwing in the towel - which I’ve been tempted to do. It’s definitely worth it.

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#18

That is bloody epic!

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#19

Interesting topic :slight_smile:

My successes for the month were:

Personal:

  • Collaborate with various MoT staff to create my first article, soon to be published on MoT. Yay! Thanks again for suggesting I create it, @heather_reid!

Business:

  • Starting a new job in the middle of a global pandemic has been challenging. Really wasn’t sure about taking the risk, but glad I did and would recommend it to anyone else considering it. Obviously you’ve got to ensure your employer has a good onboarding process.
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#20

My win for January was the publication of a blog post, how a design pattern from performance testing turns into an anti-pattern for Visual Testing while using Test Driven Development.

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#21

Happy to help @gerardmccann :grin: looking forward to reading it :heart:

1 Like