1E graduate diary – part five

So, its been about a year since we joined 1E. If you’ve read the earlier blogs, you’ll know we joined the 1E Graduate Programme at the end of last year. If you haven’t been following, take a look! Since then, we’ve settled into 1E and grown into our respective areas.
Along with the help of Mamta “Captain” Singh, we’ve set up an environment to certify our products to ensure our products are compliant with the United States Government Configuration Baseline.
A lot of time has been spent automating our test suites. We largely use SpecFlow and NUnit for automation, with Team City as our continuous integration server. This started off as pair programming and now we’re automating stories independently. We’ve had a fair amount of exposure to build scripts and how the CI server handles the artifacts for further testing.
Mentoring new joiners with regards to product knowledge has been an ongoing experience. As we were mentored when we joined 1E, it has been nice to observe and assist the process from another perspective.
Winta has temporarily taken up a QA lead role on her team, which involves ensuring processes are adhered to, identifying and removing blockers, and being a focal point for QA needs.
We’ve spent a lot of time setting up test environments which include cloud deployments to be as similar to live environments as possible to improve our automation, general testing, and the product itself.
Powershell scripting has come in incredibly useful in our time at 1E, from helping automate deployments, handling back end tasks in our test environments, system administration, and in product specific components.
We use a large lab environment separate from the production side of things for testing everything from performance to automation itself. As part of an office refurbishment, we were involved in migrating the labs including network infrastructure and system configurations.
During our time here at 1E, its easy to see that we’ve grown as both people and employees. We were always treated as full and equal members of the team, even when we first joined as raw graduates, and this has made the transition to working autonomously much simpler than it might otherwise have been. Here’s to looking forward to our second Christmas at 1E!