My First Overtime
Last weekend, after almost eleven months on the job, I worked more than forty hours for the first time. Working extra hours on a regular basis was one of the things that drove me crazy at Widgets so I've enjoyed working eight and leaving. At the beginning of the year, however, my manager informed the leads in our group (I'm a lead but don't have anyone reporting to me) that he would appreciate it if we would all volunteer to be the test lead during one of the monthly releases of our flagship software, Gold-Law. He then tried the Jeddi-mind-trick on me to get me to volunteer. I volunteered anyway.
The actual go-live period for the release is early Saturday morning so a test lead and a tester come in at 8 a.m. and run through a suite of tests until the "all clear" is given. Most of the tests are automated so you start them off and see if anything breaks. The test lead is responsible for communicating our group's status and finding out what's going on in the other groups that are testing that day. On an easy release, everyone is there for four hours and goes home. On a difficult release, there may be a number of fixes which require several rounds of testing. Everything needs to be working perfectly (or as good as it was) by Monday morning.
I don't have much to do with the mechanics of testing software--my job is to make sure people have a test plan and actually do the testing. If someone asked me what the test suite actually tests, I couldn't give a good answer (the software, right?).
Luckily, since this was my first release weekend so I was just shadowing. We (me, another lead, and a very experienced tester) spent the morning in the test lab down the hall from my cubicle. I spent most of the time manually testing some new features, actually getting the correct results. There was free Sunny D (yuk) and lots of doughnuts (which I don't eat).
At noon we announced that everything was good in our tests. Unfortunately, there were some "customer facing" issues that required fixes which would not be ready until later in the day. Since I was the shadower I was released but the tester for our group wound up working a few hours late on Saturday night and again early Sunday. Normal stuff for Widgets but unusual for Laws R' Us although there are a lot of release horror stories.
Hopefully I won't do this again for at least a year.
NEXT: Widgets Update!
The actual go-live period for the release is early Saturday morning so a test lead and a tester come in at 8 a.m. and run through a suite of tests until the "all clear" is given. Most of the tests are automated so you start them off and see if anything breaks. The test lead is responsible for communicating our group's status and finding out what's going on in the other groups that are testing that day. On an easy release, everyone is there for four hours and goes home. On a difficult release, there may be a number of fixes which require several rounds of testing. Everything needs to be working perfectly (or as good as it was) by Monday morning.
I don't have much to do with the mechanics of testing software--my job is to make sure people have a test plan and actually do the testing. If someone asked me what the test suite actually tests, I couldn't give a good answer (the software, right?).
Luckily, since this was my first release weekend so I was just shadowing. We (me, another lead, and a very experienced tester) spent the morning in the test lab down the hall from my cubicle. I spent most of the time manually testing some new features, actually getting the correct results. There was free Sunny D (yuk) and lots of doughnuts (which I don't eat).
At noon we announced that everything was good in our tests. Unfortunately, there were some "customer facing" issues that required fixes which would not be ready until later in the day. Since I was the shadower I was released but the tester for our group wound up working a few hours late on Saturday night and again early Sunday. Normal stuff for Widgets but unusual for Laws R' Us although there are a lot of release horror stories.
Hopefully I won't do this again for at least a year.
NEXT: Widgets Update!
posted by changingagain at 9:34 PM
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