Joining SIS at Hull

In December I interviewed and was a successful applicant to become a member of the SIS (Student Information System) Transition Software Tester Team at the University.

I joined the SIS team at Hull to gain industry experience working with delivering a large project which is evolving. I also wanted experience working in both testing and live environments and prepare me for working in the future, as well as adding to my studies with real world experience (as life doesn’t follow the textbook!)

Although software testing isn’t the field I want to go into after University, the agile methodology with everybody gaining an understanding of and the ability to do every role I find really useful, and think it gives team members a better understanding of their colleagues’ abilities. In addition to this getting a perspective from what a tester sees will allow me to become a better developer.

Last Monday to Wednesday the team went on the BCS ISTQB Foundation Testing course which was really interesting and covered the fundamentals of testing asking why should we test, how do we define the objectives of testing and the types of test we can do. I also achieved the qualification after passing the end exam.

We also discussed how every project is different and agile does not suit every project so each project needs an individual analysis and looking at how we can manage testing in a team.

Although the course was aimed to assist us in our overview of testing, I’ve found it really insightful overall in understanding how large a process creating or updating software is, which has widened my understanding of the software lifecycle.

This also has assisted with my Software Engineering and HCI module as we’re now going over in lectures some of the content we discussed in detail in the training.

You can see more about what I did here (including a quote from yours truly)