Joanne Yang

• 2006-Jul-25 - From a software developer to a software tester...

After graduating from university, I started my career in IT area as a software developer for a software company developing computer systems for insurance companies. My first project was to develop a system to support the commercial auto insurance underwriting process. At that point we started using the OO language called Smalltalk. Smalltalk is considered as the first OO language. And it is very similar to C++ and Java. The IDE we used was VisualWorks. VisualWorks had a very good interface to Informix RDMS. I believe the concept is very similar to what is called Hibernate (for Java) these days. At that point, Java started getting popular. So our architect group decided to adapt Java in another new project. But most of our programmers had never done any Java programming before. Since I had used some Java in my course work project, my advisor and I decided to start our first Java user group in that area. The idea was to bring people who are interested in Java programming together to share some ideas. And it turned out that it was a very good way to train people. At that point, Kent Back had invented JUnit as the Java Unit testing framework. I remember the first time I used JUnit, I was amazed with the testing concept and testing process. And I believe that's the point I thought of having a career in software testing.

After a while I came to Canada. And I decided to pursue software testing career. So far I really enjoy it. The developement background certainly helps me. I am able to analyze the problem and point out what's wrong in the code. And this preliminary analysis actually reduces the time for a developer to fix the problem. And when it goes to the automation testing, my programming experience really helps me in the script design and development.

Even though I am not a developer any more, I am still very interested in any new programming language, any new framework, etc. I think as a tester we need to know the new technology in order to test properly. If you study the CBOK (Common Book of Knowledge) for CSTE, there is a whole chapter talks about how to test new technology such as wireless application, web application, etc. And I think it is one of the skills needed for nowadays testers.

Please feel free to post your comments.

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• 2006-Jul-15 - Test Coordinator….

I am a test analyst and I am happy about that. But recently my new manager asked me to play a role as a test coordinator in a small project. So I get to do some other things in addition to testing the software. These other things include test planning, variance conference calls participation, test status reporting and making sure the test environment is ready. The most challengeable thing I think is to make sure the test environment is ready. Making sure the test environment is ready not just includes making sure the connection is working and the application is actually up, but also includes making sure the right code is there to test. Since we have multiple projects going on and so many different test boxes to manage, sometimes the code drop is a little bit confusing and not that easy. Where we should keep the old code (which is the same as the production code) and where we should put the new code in. This small project we are working on, right after we started to test, we found out that the new code was not in that environment for us to test. Good thing is that we realized the problem. And once we raised this issue, people from other group sharing the same environment with us found out that their new code was not there either. And so of course our developer had to do a new code build and put them into the right environment for us to test. Confusing? If you are a test coordinator, you might feel the same as me. Please feel free to share some light.

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