hodgepodge

I am back with my posts on my TCS - the company I am working for. In my last, I did talk much (yeah! I know I know, nothing at all) about my work. It is almost 8 months that I returned from ILP and 6 months into project. In my last post I talked about a person to whom we had to report when we came to Kohinoor Park. Fortunately or unfortunately he turned out to be our PL .And most importantly we people got used to our new place that is e-Park. On our first day we were asked about our B.Tech projects which primarily consisted of basic description of the project and technology used. We were expected to be committed to this project group (called GGIG) for 2 years, at the least. We stared at each and threw little giggles at each other. Welcome to the board, our PL heralded.

We did not get individual systems for 2 or 3 weeks and till then we had to accommodate ourselves at whatever places that are left unoccupied. We played musical chairs sans music for a change. We finally settled down with one permanent station (a computer). One day I was asked to attend a training sessions on IBM testing tools. ‘IBM’, sounds good even to a deaf person but not to my ears. Reason is pretty simple and petty as I never heard anybody saying anything good about this particular field. I wonder how software is made without testing which means it should be of utmost importance to anybody on earth, but still people never admit the grandness of testing as a domain. Whatever it is, I attended these sessions after my PL assuring me that this is only "training". What a joke. The truth unfolded in a week after that.

It was hard imagining me as a tester. Now before assuming me for a unwise, stupid man let me say that I never thought that testing is something that I am not meant do but just feeling how can I test something else when until now I did not test myself(do not read too much I meant by character and sense)completely. Weird and up surd. Period. Anyway no use in thinking about all this. I started testing one product of our group, manually which involves basic flow of the software and functionality. What I found out after my 3 months stint in testing is, what we need is not great brains but even greater common sense and patience to be a good tester. I never know for sure if I was ever good tester, even for a day.

I can scream aloud even from our campus terrace that I really had a wonderful time while I was in testing team. I joined testing along with 2 of my other friends from ILP and so we 3 new faces added (or brought, I am not particularly sure) some variety to the testing team as a whole. We thought we joined at a very good time as entire group started using the tools that we learned and we were showing some self pride that we actually mastered IBM tools as if we are the first and only persons to do so. But still that made sense as many people did not hear much and if some tool from IBM is unheard, we thought we are lucky few. FEW CHOSEN ONES. Ha Ha Ha….. I know this sounds crazy and petty. But that is how it was. I personally could get to know the petty office politics and how relations are maintained among some associates. That was fun too.

We slowly started making reasonably good progress in mastering our tool. To be exact there is nothing to master. As it is a automated tool we just have to record a “script”. Scripts are a program or say a file that is recorded when we browse any website or URL. Our tool’s main objective is to give the performance of that particular site, which is then depicted in the form of graphs and tables.

I stayed laid back in testing for about 3 months time by which I kept hearing all not so soothing words, from all people (which includes my friends’ n relatives). My friends in my team kept on saying testing is equally good; one has to just gain expertise in whatever they do. As saying goes, Grass is always greener on the other side. I was no different. I am as idiotic like anybody else to believe in that. But never mind. I was pestering my PL to put me in some development project and one day to my surprise he readily accepted and I packed my stuff to land up in a development project(my new place is just a few cubicles away). But all was not as expected and planned. It took me good 3 weeks to understand that project technicalities and by that time, I suppose, things were winded up. I am back to ground zero ……….