New Assignment - A Financial Adventure

Sometimes, some things do fall into place. I'm a week into my new assignment, trying to learn as much as I can about stock exchange, financial instruments and trading strategies - most of which is very new to me. More importantly, however, I have been hired to implement SBTM on a system test level and train the service organisation in ET. Fascinating stuff, and I'm thrilled to be here.

The customer develops and sells a stock market trading client, packed with plugins, features and market connections. They have come a long way with automated regression tests, and are beginning to realize the benefits of complementing that with manual, exploratory, testing. Initially, I will be doing that in a system test sprint early next year with the help of a team from the support department.

The support staff has been involved in testing in such a manner before, but under much looser guidance. With my help, the goal is to make the test period more productive by setting some structure, giving some coaching and establishing some form of informative reporting.

Right now, I'm in the midst of

• organizing tool support
• setting up a test lab (configuration of a number of workstation, places to sit, etc)
• putting together a test plan, writing a set of charters
• gathering input from the dev teams, assessing risks and need for regression testing
• preparing users and test environments
• establishing a process for testing, debriefing and reporting
• working on a curriculum for testing day 1, where Michael Albrecht and myself will be instructing and coaching the team in SBTM
• worrying about test environments, users, external test systems, test data, ...

Fun? Hell yes.