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My Week at Work

So you think you want to be a Systems Engineer? Or maybe programming is for you. On the other hand, you might have set your heart on web design.

But do you really know what the job is? Do you know what the day-to-day activities are? What your responsibilities are likely to be?

Take a look at these real working diaries to see what the working day or week can involve.


Caroline Crow
Job title:
Snr Quality Assurance Tester
Country:
UK

Caroline is Senior Quality Assurance Tester with a large financial. Her role involves testing software products before they are released to customers - large banks and financial institutions.

"My job is to ensure that bugs and other problems with software are resolved before applications are released to clients. You need to have a meticulous eye for detail and patience to do my kind of work efficiently.

At the moment I'm working on a product that will help financial institutions make hundreds of thousands of transactions between one another. It is due to be released to customers next month."

Monday:

Cleared out my inbox and reviewed the emails dealing specifically with current bug reports. Comments by a developer on any bug report I have raised will be sent to me via email - this includes those they have fixed or have decided not to fix for some reason. There are a couple that the developer has marked as non re-creatable. I talk to the developer to check how they tested it. In one case, they tested it on the wrong database type so I reopen the bug. In the other case, the issue seems to have been resolved by later versions of the software.

Tuesday:

Team meeting in the office to update us on status of all projects - we're not on schedule so we'll be working late this week and probably over the weekend.

Some bugs I'd raised with developers have now been fixed. They've been stopping me testing other parts of the system and so I request a new build of the system which will then pick those changes up.

Wednesday:

This morning was foggy and icy and my 30 mile drive to work took well over the usual hour. Skype call with US developers with feedback on why two parts of the system do not behave consistently - raised a bug report to ensure this is fixed. Like most IT organisations we're based in the middle of nowhere and rely on the support of the sandwich van to keep us sustained!

Thursday:

Received new build of the system, installed the client software on windows and server software on the unix box. Created a clean sybase database on the database server and retest any bugs now marked as fixed. Check that the test scripts for this functionality are still correct.

Friday:

Received urgent call from team member on customer site requiring clarification on how to configure some data on a previous release - managed to resolve this over the phone. Continue to carry out regression testing to verify that there have been no unexpected changes to the system. Reviewed release notes and made minor amends before returning to documentation team - leave late, but at least avoid Friday rush-hour traffic!

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Library

Mohamed Zouine
Senior Technical Consultant
Air Magnet
Martina O'Brien
Principal Support Engineer
Oracle Corporation UK
Fran Loughrey
Senior IT Project Manager
UK
Caroline Crow
Snr Quality Assurance Tester
UK
Jaskaran Kalsi
Associate Technical Manager
Europe in Cisco Networking Academy
Justin Stach
Web & User Experience Manager
Zopa
London, UK
Liz
Software Architect
IBM Software Business
Berkshire, UK
Ashraf Rakhi
Call Centre Team Lead
Cupola
Dubai