Quality Engineering Onboarding

The instructions here are in addition to the on-boarding issue that People Ops will assign on the first day.

Copy the Quality team onboarding issue template into a new issue in QA Team Tasks and complete the issue.

General team resources

GitLab QA
Tests
- Testing Standards
CI infrastructure for CE and EE
Tests statistics
- Redash Test Suite Statistics
Insights dashboard
- Quality Dashboard
- Quality Dashboard Documentation
Triage
- Triage Onboarding
QA Runners
- QA Runner Ownership Issue
Projects
Code Review
- Quality team's code review checklists

Slack channels

These internal Slack channels may be helpful to join.

Department
- #quality - general department channel
- #quality-weeklystandup - Weekly standup update channel for Quality
- #g_engineering-productivity - Engineering Productivity team channel
- #triage - channel to aid in triaging unlabelled issues
- #qa-nightly - channel with semi-nightly end to end test results
- #qa-staging - channel with daily staging end to end test results
- #qa-production - channel with daily production end to end test results
- #qa-performance - channel with performance testing results
- #triage-automations - channel for pipeline notifications from engineering productivity automation
Company
- #product - observe and interact with members of the product team
- #development - provides awareness of broken master, environment issues and other development related status items.
- #is-this-known - find information about canary failures or bugs
- #questions - ask questions and see other questions (and the answers) from other GitLab Team Members
- #thanks - give and see thanks for the awesomeness that GitLab Team Members do
- #people-connect - interact with people ops

Manager

Engagement Quadrant

The engagement Quadrant is designed to help you and your direct report evaluate how they currently feel about their work. This is not intended to be a performance evaluation tool, but rather a self-introspective mechanism to help frame the conversation.

Low knowledge & High excitement: When we are excited on starting something new but unaware of all the things needed to succeed (unknown unknowns).
Low knowledge & Low excitement: As time progresses if we haven't made progress on acquiring knowledge (sustained unknown unknowns), the excitement is also lowered. We need to expedite on attaining additional help to unblock.
High knowledge & High excitement: We have made progress on learning what is needed to be productive/proficient while feeling engaged and excited. This is the optimal state.
High knowledge & Low excitement: When we are already proficient at the current task but it may not be as challenging. We should have a discussion to identify the next area of interest.

When starting something new, the goal is to discover unknowns and learn them quickly so you can move into the High knowledge & High excitement state as fast as possible. Then keep iterating/improving so that you are still challenged and stay there.

Organizational psychology resources

Organizational psychology is the study of human behavior and motivations as it relates to work.

Adam Grant - Organizational psychologist professor from Wharton
Dan Pink - author of Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us
Camille Fournier
Claire Lew - CEO of Know Your Team.
Dan Ariely - more behavioral economics than organizational psychology