If you’ve been reading my blog for a while, you know you’ll know that I like to write about things that will not only help future me, but other people as well. Having recently started a new role, I’d like to take note of some things that I’ve done as part of my onboarding on various projects. I’ll probably edit and add to this at some point. Here are some things to explore and do when onboarding at a new company / project.
Domain Knowledge
Let’s start with the obvious – context. Here are some ways you can get to know the context of your new environment, and what kinds of topics to look into:
- Onboarding sessions:
- Company organisation, business, and product overview
- Team / project business and product overview
- Team / project technical overview
- Integrations
- Incoming and outgoing dependencies
- Skim documentation for useful nuggets of knowledge and things to investigate further
- Purpose, vision, mission, strategy
- Ways of working
- Target users / problem space
- Key goals, targets, deadlines
- User personas
- Stakeholders
Access
You’ll discover what you need access to as you go, but you can save time by requesting the what’s necessary as early as possible. Some things to ask for access to include:
- People management tools
- Company communication tools, group emails, channels, calendars
- Work / ticket tracking tools, projects, boards, etc.
- Documentation tools
- Collaboration tools
- Product environments
- Repositories
- CI/CD tools
- Cloud services, logging and monitoring tools
Building Relationships
Do not underestimate the importance of building relationships! Not only will this help you to integrate into the company / project / team, it will also help you to better influence quality and testing. You can get started in these ways:
- Intro sessions with
- The project team
- Other quality and testing specialists
- Key stakeholders
- Other interesting people across the business
- Join coffee chats / office days / lunch meetings / company events
- Intro at company-wide meetings
Kick-Starting Quality and Testing
If you’re joining something completely new, or somewhere where they haven’t had the benefit of a quality and testing specialist before, there may be a lot to do, and that can feel overwhelming. Begin with these areas to help get off to a great start, and make a positive impact quickly:
- Setting expectations
- What are you hoping I can bring to the role?
- What are some of your doubts regarding the role?
- What are your biggest challenges?
- Where do you need support?
- What’s the one thing I could do to bring the most value?
- What are some of your ideas for improving quality and testing?
- Investigating the status quo
- What’s working well?
- What needs improvement?
- What are the biggest risks you see?
- How are quality and testing currently handled
- In the team / on the project
- Across the business
- Documentation:
- RiskStorming
- Present introduction to exploratory testing with SBTM
- Paddling pool tour
- Test strategy
- Dimensional plan (if you’ve already done a RiskStorming session, then I wouldn’t recommend also making a dimensional plan at the same time, as this could be too much and pull focus)
Personal Development
It’s easy to get caught up in serving the project / team, but it’s important to attend to your own success too. Here are some easy ways to keep your personal development in the picture, and things to clarify:
- Participation in communities and knowledge-sharing sessions
- Identifying context-specific learning opportunities
- Pairing and shadowing
- Training budget and process
- Feedback mechanisms
- Review and promotion process
- Brag document
This list isn’t exhaustive, but it’s something to get going with, and covers a lot of elements. What else do you do / look in to when onboarding? What does the best onboarding process you’ve seen look like? Let us know in the comments.
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