I got to do a two-week work placement at BBC Scotland, and it was amazing! The whole experience was very informative and rewarding. I learned how the technologies I have been learning are powering one of the biggest websites of the world, and I was also specially happy to put some of the theoretical knowledge I gained around testing, into good practice to see how it applies in the real world. I learned a lot and got to participate in various tasks, scrum ceremonies and shadow some amazing team members. The main advantage though is that - coming out of the two weeks - I felt confident and empowered to pursue my dream of becoming a software tester. I also know now that BBC is my dream employer, and one day I will work there :)
During the two weeks, I was lucky to shadow different teams:
- Home Page team: I paired with an Automation tester that was working on Puppeteer with Jest, and that encouraged me to install Puppeteer and write my own test suites for BBC Home. I also attended 3 amigos meetings as well as a retrospective and I got to witness how a tester can be involved in the process of creating/evaluating a user story and the kind of questions they ask at planning when there is a new task coming, and to get a bigger picture on what needs to be done from a tester perspective. Sometimes those questions lead to a spike that needs to perform further discovery.
- Topic Team: I found this team very interesting as their goal was to unify all BBC pages and create consistent components to use across the organisation. They want to tackle some problems like some teams are working on the same tasks twice without any of them knowing about the other. So they started by creating a tagging system for the new added assets based on their topics. The tester role was to work on chromatic testing where he was making sure of UI consistency all over the different BBC web pages where tests are auto-generated from storybooks and added in the CI process. In addition, accessibility testing was also one of the tasks and made sure that it met the user requirements.
- Platform team: I paired with a developer working on API testing using Postman and finding solutions for API documentation and testing. We were evaluating Postman, and came to the conclusion it was not an efficient tool to use for Continuous Integration and automated documentation. That’s why they created a folder to be shared between the team to vote for the best tool between Postman, Swagger, Insomnia and Selenium. The result was in favor of OpenAPI 3.0 (formerly Swagger). The whole process and exploration was really valuable for me, and touched a side of testing I didn’t have any experience with beforehand.
I also paired with the Archive team, working on decommissioning some legacy systems. It was interesting to learn about how many different systems exist in a place as big as the BBC.
There are too many people to thank for this opportunity, but I want to thank Noreen Adams and Rachel Fiddes for arranging this opportunity, and everyone who gave us some of their time in the two weeks at the BBC, but especially my two favourite mentors: Loic and Theo ❤️
I came out of this experience confident that:
- I definitely want to become a Software Tester
- With hard work, I can be one.
- I love the BBC, and want to work there some day :)