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There Is Some Good News

 Firstly I need to apologise for the radio silence, I had hoped to blog a lot more about how my experiences with self-learning. The self-learning has taken a bit of a back seat in the last couple of weeks because the good news is, I have started a new job. It has been a surprisingly quick process from the interview to being offered the job. The slightly tricky part was going through the various checks that my new employers were asking for. The tricky part was trying to track down someone from one of my previous employers for a job reference. The company that I used to work for no longer exist, they have been bought over/sold/evolved into another company. Fortunately, I was able to supply one person who still works there to provide a suitable character reference. I started work on Monday as a Test Analyst. I will be doing "System Testing" for a Testing services company that is doing the testing for a large financial company. I have worked in a similar company before so I am rediscovering what it is like to what for a service company. It is like putting on old pair of baffies* ( * Scottish word for slippers)  

The onboarding to the company has been smooth as it can be given the current situation. I have sat at home sitting on numerous online meetings. Getting access to various applications/drives is taking some time, but this would always be the case for large financial companies. Other members of staff who went through this before I did have remarked that it has gone a lot smoother than when they did it the first time around. At the same time, I attempt to do a lot of reading and attending 'hand over' meetings. It has been quite a week! 

I am going to have to get used to working in a "Waterfall" way again. My last two jobs were very much in the "Agile" way. I have to say of the two methods my preference is agile, but I do not discount waterfall. If done properly it is an effective way of delivering software in large big bang quarterly releases. I have been in a couple of honest meeting with other staff I am going to be working with and there are some very familiar-sounding gripes that I recognise from my past experiences of working in large financial software development projects. What does sound very promising however is that communication and collaboration seem to be very good and the company I am working for have a lot of people who are recognising the challenges and want to to change them.  I am looking forward to contributing to improving processes and getting testing done more efficiently where possible.  


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