Today, Anna-Marie and Bryce are already halfway through their internship here at GRAYBOX! They are both amazed at how fast it's going by. Over the past two weeks they have been focusing on the tasks that interest them the most. Bryce has spent the last two weeks going deeper into QA. He branched out from Quality Control, i.e. Ghost Inspector, and got a broader glimpse of Quality Assurance. During their meetings, Jacques introduced Bryce to Jira and the role it plays for the QA team. Working alongside Jacques, one of the most interesting and appealing parts of the QA role is how embedded he is in the development process- working closely with the dev team from development to release. With Jacques leaving for vacation on Wednesday, Bryce was able to play a larger QA role for a few projects and offer support to the dev team.
Bryce learned about how Jira is used to track progress and how stories or bugs are assigned to QA. While exploring Jira, he saw how different teams approach documentation. He's prioritized learning about Jira through Udemy and other online sources to get a deeper understanding of its interconnecting role for product management, issue and bug tracking. One of the most important points Jacques emphasized was the importance of building and maintaining a supportive relationship between QA and developers.
Anna-Marie has been focusing most of her energy on what she loves - writing code and working to build out the time audit automation project we've been assigned. She has figured out how to run PHP Unit to test functions, and has written most of the functions (and gotten them passing) that will be necessary to run the application. She's also learned how to make a mock database that helps test the functions that are working with the database.
One thing Anna-Marie has noticed when it comes to researching PHP online is that there is a lot of conflicting information out there. The language has been around for so long that you really have to watch out for dates when you are reading tutorials. It's very easy to get very old information that won't work anymore. Luckily the other developers have been super helpful. Tom and Daniele both took time to give her direction on the mock database, dependency injections, type hinting, and loads of other useful tips.
It's been a fun four weeks. It's hard to not be happy spending warm, summer days out on the sunny decks at GRAYBOX while learning things that are both interesting and challenging. They are excited to see what is in store for them in the upcoming month!