First week at Atlassian

As usual, when the blog is not updated it is a sign that I have been up to many other things lately and the blog is one of the things I needed to cut down on. The reason for the downtime this spring is obvious, I have been busy packing my life in sweden into boxes for a move down-under to Sydney, Australia. Apart from packing, there have also been plenty of other related things to do before leaving the country. I was also featured in Computer Sweden for my move (in swedish). And finally I arrived, joining Atlassian last Monday.

I wanted to share some initial thoughts on this first week, but then I stumbled upon my current flat mate Benjamins blog post about his first week, written a week ago, and it actually resounds very well with my feelings at the moment. So take the time to read it here.

Apart from all the new stuff that just comes with being the newcomer as described by Benjamin, I also want to mention where I am in the company. I will be a part of two teams, the Fisheye/Crucible product team and the QA team. This setting might seem strange to some, but actually its quite similar to how Ive had it before. At Jayway Ive seen the benefits of having a strong specialist team to fall back on for competence development and strategic learning and discussions. And for those things to happen, there is a need for continuos communication and a feeling of belonging also in that team.

QA team – Quality Assistance team

First of all, I think it is important to state that at Atlassian QA explicitly stands for Quality Assistance, which is something that I really care for. And second, in my first week I have actually got the feeling that it is not only something stated, but also something lived up to. I will most probably be writing more about that later. The rest of the team is what Ive seen so far just awesome, and frankly I can feel the pressure of living up to these standards myself. It will be hard work, I can tell. They are also very helpful and all my questions are just taken so well, even those that get pushed back at myself to figure out =). The team already has bunch of things nicely packaged about how testing should/could be done within the company, but throughout the week I also realized that the evolvement on those things is done in an amazing pace. And I like that a lot.

FECRU team – Fisheye/Crucible

Fisheye and Crucible are two of the products that I have never used before. I also have a feeling that they might be the furthest away from the role of the tester in terms of me being a potential user of them in actual projects. But this is something that I am looking forward to exploring. Especially being tools for code review, I will need to learn and practice to actually do code reviews. At the moment I see this as a meta-bonus when it comes to my personal development as a tester, so I will probably also get back to that later on. Apart from the product, also these people have made a great first impression on me. And since most of my time will be spent with them, I hope I will meet their expectations at least later on. Even though my first weeks will be very much learning about all the new stuff, I actually got around doing some testing this week. And it did not only deliver stuff that I misinterpreted, but also gave input for some minor code changes. I am eager for what is happening further on.

ShipIt!

This first week I also got the chance to see the pure dedication of people throughout the company with the ShipIt event.  I had an idea myself for something that I could have done, but with some initial investigations I realised that there were already similar things going on within the QA team, so I decided to put the idea on hold so that I can do some more investigations and instead make the next event. Also, I was of course deep into all the newcomer learning stuff this week that I had a hard time focusing enough to be able to develop it.

Sydney

Outside of work I have a huge city to explore, with all its special features and cherry picks. I haven’t had very much time yet to see much, but the things Ive seen so far have just been amazing. All I can say for now, is that I have a feeling that I will like this place. The company harbour view apartment doesn’t either do anything to change that in any negative way.

And of course, today I attended my first Sydney testers meetup, which was nice.