Friday 9 April 2010

Working Girl

So I started my new job on Tuesday (because Monday was Easter Monday) at Investment Solutions (a subsidiary of Alexander Forbes).

It has been really good so far. We work along more or less the scrum programming methodology, although not strictly. In short: work is divided into "sprints" which is a period (2 weeks, usually) in which you complete the tasks assigned to you by the Project Manager.

Tuesday they had a Sprint planning meeting (always occurs at the start of a sprint) and it was good to see how the whole thing worked and the team interacted. I didn't get assigned any real tasks and the system's architect had something urgent he had to finish before being able to tutor me into doing something useful.

So the result is that I've been using the time to read up on the project and company. Documents in my laptop bag I'm currently battling my way through:
  • Online Project Wiki (well, this one is obviously not in my laptop bag)
  • Functional Requirements Document (aka Spec) -222 pages
  • System Architecture document -70 pages
  • Build Process guide -53 pages
  • User Interface Design -39 pages
  • Design Guidelines and Coding Standards -82 pages

BUT the team is really nice and it's excitingly different to my previous job in its type of project and working methodology. Your tasks are all granular pieces of work that should take no more than 6 hours to finish; and you are required to do 6 hours of programming a day. You have to check code into the source control system at least once a day, and before that you have to make sure it compiles and all the unit tests work. What's nice is you work together with the Project Manager to work out what tasks you're to do in the next Sprint and how long you think they'll take. I'm not saying this or my old job is better or worse but it's very different so it's a good learning experience and that's always good for personal and professional growth.

Now I'm just itching to do some actual work so all the technical jargon I've read can start making some sort of practical sense.

On the practical side we've still got one car but my office is literally 5 minutes from Steve's and we work on flexy time so we've worked out a schedule that allows us to travel together. The very excellent upshot of which is, I finally get to control when Steve comes home! :D

More about our epic power and water problems next time.

2 comments:

Keo said...

We need to get you a "Not slacking off, my code is compiling" t-shirt :D

Moonica said...

Ooh, yes please! The unit tests apparently take 20 minutes to run, I thought of that commic immediately when I heard that.

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