Last week was the first full week of my internship, and the project I was given was nearly ideal for the purpose. I was given an initial set of test cases for one of the products I will be testing (called Content Translation) and asked to review, edit, and expand it, while at the same time using it to actually test the product as it passed through various test environments on its way to production.
The reason that this project was (and continues to be) so ideal is that it teaches many important things simultaneously. First, it is teaching me how to write test cases — how to organize them on a spreadsheet, group them logically, think out the prerequisites, and plan the flow of the tests in the most efficient way possible. Secondly, it is teaching me the product itself — after all, you can’t test something if you don’t know how it works! You have to dive in and use it, trying every bell and whistle until you come to understand everything the product is supposed to do and all the ways it can behave. Finally, the project is helping me to understand the process of testing. This particular product has a set weekly cycle. Changes first happen in the developers’ local environments, and on a certain day those changes are merged into a non-production master, and the whole thing is tested. The next day, the release is moved to another test site that is a perfect replica the largest of the wikimedia-based wikis (Wikipedia, of course), and there it is fully tested again. The day after that, the release is deployed to a limited number of (smaller) production wikis — and it’s tested AGAIN. Finally, if everything is good to go, the next day the release is deployed to ALL production sites, including Wikipedia.
In the week ahead, I will continue working on Content Translation while taking on a new product as well (not sure which one yet).
Onward!
BarbV 