ShoppingCart Experience - 1
It had been nearly two and half years before i moved out of the JVP team. After succesful hunting in those two and half years, i was ready for a new challenge. After about 2 weeks of QTP training, i was presented with the oppurtunity of working in US for Shopzilla. Well, as usual, i agreed without thinking much.
When Ramesh, Onsite QA Manager; first sent me the responsibilities list, i was dumbstruck. There were so many things, that i had no idea of. Like "unit testing", "testing from command line", "API testing" and so on ... The reason i was chosen for the job was becoz, i knew Java. Pretty funny, huh???
Well, i finally arrived in US on a warm and sunny day. Walked the nearest beach after hours of my arrival ... boy!!! it was glorious ... but, in a corner of my heart, i was already missing my family, friends n bangalore.
My first day at Shopzilla was pretty funny!!! i was so scared of working in a new environment with different kind of people ... As we arrived at the office, Ramesh said "people here will say, how r u? more than once in a day. don't get irritated." it sounded funny to me.
I first met Prakash, senior QA from RelQ. He was time sharing b/w two projects, but i was brought into take over one of them. Prakash explained the basics to me and to be honest, nothing was entering my head at that moment. Met Mine (pronounced as Me-ne), Director of QA. She is a four and half foot lady, full of energy. After this, we proceeded to a conference hall, where my project's iteration planning was supposed to start.
Iteration planning is planning the tasks for the next iteration. Iteration is a specific amount of time ... It can span b/w 1 - 4 weeks.
I met my team for the first time in there. Gauthier Groult (pronounced as Gu-tee-rr), Project manager, Director of Engg and Business Owner; William Hawe (we call him Bill), Senior Developer; Juan Paul Ramirez (we call him JP), senior CM engineer. Everyone greeted me warmly. Gauthier is French, Bill is european and JP is mexican. Including me, the team became a mixture of races :)
It took me quite some time to understand the whole idea of Iterations, Stories, Tasks, Agile Methodology .... (i will not try to explain all those in here). But, with time i started to understand those terms and the things related with the project.
My initial work was to review the code that Bill writes and help him in improving the unit tests. Gauthier had a policy... Watever can be tested, should be covered by unit tests. So, the importance for QA was set very high. And people expected me to scale to their expectations. But, i was given ample time to achieve it. Gauthier would ask me everyday as to how i am progressing, was i finding anything difficult, would i need any help and so on.
The code was in Java. Hence, i did not find it difficult to understand it; but the frameworks like Hibernate were like Greek and Latin. I had never done Unit testing in my life and there i was, going through complicated Java code. At first, i doubted myself as to whether i can ever understand all this. But, as time progressed, dark places started shedding some light.
Bill was very helpful in making me understand the code. I could call him or IM him anytime and he would help me solve my problem. His Unit test coverage was pretty good, but i tried to add my own, where i saw some lacking. JP was the other person, who shared his time b/w different teams. JP was like the tech-wizard, always working in command prompt (i rarely did tht). He would help me in trouble-shooting, when Bill was not available. Together with Gauthier, we were progressing slowly but towards a definite goal.
Then arrived Steve Corwin (we call him Steve), Senior Developer and Bill's Friend. He was going to be our second developer. Another Java Expert!!!
Also, at about the same time, in came Chann Ann (we call him Chan), senior CM engineer. Chann became a part of our team and JP was taken out to concentrate on other projects.
This marked the birth of the Team that was later hailed as the "Best Team in Shopzilla".