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A typical test day in OneNote

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Last week I had a typical day in the test team. Here's a sample of what happens.

  1. Finished a test pass against SkyDrive. We do these on a regular schedule and this just happened to be my time to complete this testing. We call them "Pod" runs, but even though I was there when the phrase "Pod" was coined, I am not 100% certain of that term's history. In any event, this took a few hours and I finished before most folks started arriving in their offices. I'm the odd person that gets here early in the morning.
  2. Next up was a quick status meeting and I gave my status that I was done a little early, so could help anyone else that needed it. No one on the test team needed help.
  3. One of the developers was out and (insert long story here) was unable to log in remotely to build a private release with a bug fix she had. She had her changes saved, though, and I was able to apply them to my machine and kick off a build.
  4. Once that build was done, I kicked off an automation run to verify the changes. This will take a few hours so I won't be here when it is done.
  5. Various management overhead - finding folks to complete other tasking, planning ahead for the next few months and the rest of the year, etc…
  6. Caught up on my blog! I'm writing this on a Thursday and getting ready to post it on Monday. A rare chance to be ahead of the game.
  7. Investigated an automation run. We get these every day and today happened to have a result that I was particularly interested in. No new errors in the run, but I still double checked the results to ensure we are not missing anything here.
  8. Finally, updated some manual test cases that have been automated. Some of these cases date back several years and it is always nice to see manual test cases get taken off the "to do" list.

And that was my day.

It also occurs to me that I may need to redefine what “typical” means since this is actually a fairly rare occurrence. It always seems like the items above are my plan for the day, but my plan always gets changed significantly as the day goes by.

Questions, comments, concerns and criticisms always welcome,
John