A day in the life of a Project(s) Assistant…

Task: A day in the life of a project assistant (me!) at Made by Many

Tools: Main weapons of choice -

• Lighthouse – The place to report bugs and errors that I find and assign them to people who hopefully can (and will!) fix them.
• Taskboard – this contains all the user stories in the past four iterations, who is working on them, how many points they have and what their status is.  It is an easy way for me to see which stories the developers have completed and need me to check.
• Gmail, Google Docs, a MacBook and a notebook.

Optional – copious quantities of coffee, post-its (to promptly lose), Spotify/we7 (prog rock all the way as you can see from my last.fm!), Twitter (TweetDeck is my client of choice) and Pages.

Plan of action

At the moment, I’m mainly working on a fairly large project – V.  My tasks are quality assurance (testing by any other name!) and requirements gathering, along with any other bits and pieces that come along.  I also work on other projects as needed, anything from helping to compile cool walls for workshops, to CMS population for new site launches.

However on this particular day in my life, I was just working on V and its next incarnation – vSchools.

7.00 – 9ish: Got up, checked Internets, missed train, got train, read Metro, slept, survived tube scrum and arrived at work.

9ish – 10: Today as with most days (after the ritual email checking) began with booting up Taskboard, Lighthouse and the V QA test site, to keep on top of testing.

Some new stories had been completed and pushed to the test site so I began to read through them on Taskboard and ran through the scenarios on the test site to see if I could break them.  I’m usually fairly good at breaking stuff (a very useful skill I’m sure..) so if I find problems I either make a ticket in Lighthouse or talk it through with a developer just to check it’s not something they’re already aware of.

10.00 – 10.15: Stand up time – a mini meeting to start the day.  Everyone working on the project stated what they did the day before and what they’re going to do during the day.  No one is allowed to talk until they have the talisman of course.  Being fairly close to a launch, a lot is happening and it’s good to have foreknowledge about changes.

The client had requested that I give a demo of some new functionality later in the day, so I asked for a couple of specific problems be fixed and then pushed to the test site to allow for a smooth(ish) demo.

Demos usually come at the end of each iteration to show the client new functionality and designs that have been built.  However, this particular demo was for some future users of the site to show them what to expect and gather any feedback.

10.15 – 11.00: I sat in on the first bit of a planning meeting before I headed off to the demo (“Agile from the air” photo by Tom). Planning meetings are the vital place where pointing up of user stories take place.  This lets everyone see how much work there is to do and if they can do it or not! I find planning sessions very useful when it comes to testing as it helps me understand the system more.  It’s also the place where I can pass on any possible requirements and suggestions and generally have any confusions answered.

11.00-11.30: Headed over to the client’s office.  Had a brief chat before the demo to quickly run over what people are likely to want to see and what feedback they might give.

11.30 – 12.30: Demo time. As a tester I do tend to know the systems quite intimately so  I am sometimes the best person to do the driving in a demo.  I also find them a useful place to pick up requirements which can then be fed back into planning.  And sometimes there are snacks.

This particular demo went well, the system is still in a test state but everyone seemed to understand this and gave a very pleasing response.  This bodes well for the launch I hope…

1.30 – Rest of the day: Reported on the demo and worked on updating a few requirement documents and user stories based on feedback.  Then I entered epic testing mode as a lot had been done in my absence.  This was punctuated by a few discussions about a particularly gnarly user story and of course regular twitter checks…

And that was my day.  As for tomorrow…well that’s another day (and maybe another blog post!)