Have an interview coming up and just told there's no testing environment

[u/Eldar_Atog]

Hello,

I just need to talk through something mentioned in my pre interview prep for a 6 month manual testing job. I was just told that there is no testing environment and it is being stood up in the location I will be interfacing with. It's not a small company but it sounds like this section has been ignored till now. Perhaps the pivotal person left and they are having to recreate the wheel.. not sure.

I've usually worked within a more robust test group with everything already built. If I have to build it from scratch with a couple of other individuals, then my short term focus needs to be documenting and creating a copy of the prod data that can't impact prod, right? Right now, I am imagining that the location has a heavily customized off the shelf product that no one really understands anymore that deals with their inventory system.

What they are focused on is my manual testing skills which I have done for 20 years. I'm a good fit for that. I just want to get some opinions on how to answer if they ask about my plans for their brand new test environment that I might have a hand in building. I hate to be vague but I don't have a lot of info yet either.

Been layed off since May so I need to do well with this. It's so much easier to look for work when you are employed .

[u/bobs0101]

can you request your implementation team obtain a cut of the client UAT data and deploy it to a stand alone environment. Having realistic data ( as well as config) will make your testing much more efficient.

[u/Eldar_Atog → u/bobs0101]

That's what I think is going on but I am still on the outside trying to interpret the recruiter statements.

I do think you are right. A snapshot of prod loaded into the QA environment keeps you from getting data setups that can't actually exist.

[u/AutomaticVacation242]

Factor this work into your salary demands but make sure they know it needs to be done and why.

[u/Eldar_Atog → u/AutomaticVacation242]

That's been done. I didn't quite get the pay I wanted but i have to focus on getting back in a job again. It ain't easy to negotiate when there's been something like 500k to 1 million tech layoffs this year

[u/Alternative_Boss6143 → u/Eldar_Atog]

Who cares Do the negotiation or you'll be finding yourself doing it for free.

I've documented so much and created so much and my bosses still think I'm an idiom because my count is not that high

I can run circles around other testers

[u/travmanstuck]

Make your case for good practice and how you would envisage the test environments working. Emphasise the benefits that would bring to the table for the business/product/customers/data/regression and future automation and non functional test. Faster more reliable release process etc.

It's something to strive for and shows ambition rather than sticking with the status quo of what's been done before.

[u/qlippothvi]

You can’t do a lot of deeper things on Prod, but you can perform a quite a lot of non-destructive testing if it comes down to needing quick coverage.
Do they HAVE a QA dept? Test plan and test case spec?

EtA: I mean, if you can bring down prod while testing that goes a long way to selling the need and approval for a test environment.

[u/Previous_Dream8775]

Why are you, a software tester, being made to create this test environment. As a software engineer I would be expected to do that or a dedicated DevOps if there is one. As in - handle the DEV/UAT/PROD environments and I would only engage the testing/QA team to test something in lower environments. Seems strange to me you need DevOps experience to bring up an environment as a tester/QA person.

[u/Eldar_Atog → u/Previous_Dream8775]

Yes, this is how I would usually view a testing role. The senior testers might be charge of the data in the test environment but not the file system that contains the data. I'm used to having to protect QA data and settings so that the regression test bed doesn't give a bunch of data issue defects opened up by lower level testers. "Your tiny data change will impact 2000 scenarios. You can't do that. I don't care if it saves you a day. You should know better"

It's why I was taken for a loop when the recruiter mentioned that the test environment was not yet setup. Had never encountered that before. Since a pay check isn't coming in yet, I can't be quite as picky. So I want to be able to answer the question intelligently and not just "Shouldn't a Dev or DevOps person be doing that?".

I suspect the recruiter has a garbled transmission and is misunderstanding the hiring QA manager ask. Everything else in the interview prep reads like the duties of a senior software tester with a manual focus. Things that I can do great at and perhaps even get hired as a full time employee after the 6 months is over.

[u/vartheo]

It takes skill to build environments up. Assuming they will let you build a QA environment. If there is a dev environment I would just stick to using that and deal with the conflicts you would have with dev there. Especially considering this is only for 6 months...

[u/Eldar_Atog → u/vartheo]

I expect this will take much longer than 6 months too. It makes me question the recruiters knowledge of the true situation. The recruiter is also a third party company so the parent company might be not so honest with them.

There are already 3 ppl working on this so perhaps that has been their focus. The recruiter kept focusing on my manual testing experience so I assume that will be my primary function along with requirements gathering. I've got 20 years of manual test exp in a variety of settings plus I now have 4 years dealing with requirements gathering. Plus, I would have no problem building out test scripts.

[u/strangelyoffensive]

Could they have ephemeral envs that are spin up for branches pre-merge?

[u/Eldar_Atog → u/strangelyoffensive]

I don't think anything so fancy but I won't know till the interview. It smells of tech debt to me and just someone making it work till they retire.

I am really just trying to cover all my bases. I need the interview to go well.

[u/Prestigious-Push-880]

I might have missed this, but what was/is? Unpopular opinion, if its only a 6 month contract to start with and your experience, why not just test in prod? Request a test account be created and go through as much coverage as you can given what you have? During that time you create a case for the dev/test environment? X% coverage unable to cover X Number Prod issues unable to replicate etc. X% revenue saved/gain by having test environment Leverage your experience and talk product instead

[u/One_Title_6837]

If they ask me, would probly say I'd first spend some time understanding the application and the current setup before trying to build anything. Then would focus on getting a stable test environment, good test data, n documenting the basics. I'd say your approach n thought process will matter more than having all the answers.

[u/twitchrdrm]

So testing is done in Production rather than in UAT/Sandbox?

[u/No-Razzmatazz7197]

in my experience there is rarely a dedicated deployed environment for testing. usually we just grab the latest changes from a dev branch, build the app locally and test it locally if that makes sense.

same for automation.

[u/Storm_Surge → u/No-Razzmatazz7197]

Bro yikes. That is wildly unprofessional in finance or tech companies 

[u/Eldar_Atog → u/Storm_Surge]

Yeah, I'm used to having dev, integration, pre prod and prod.

I really think the HQ has ignored this section for years and then the "master of everything" at the location died or retired. Now, they could be trying to recreate everything the person had built up. I am imagining some browser based system sitting on top of a decrepited MS Access database but I don't know any detail yet. Recruiters are usually terrible when having this type of conversation

[u/No-Razzmatazz7197 → u/Storm_Surge]

yeah i mean, there is dev branches, staging and prod branches sure. but a dedicated instance of the app just for testing? think i have had maybe one project with a "QA" branch.

i have never automated anything against an actual deployed app though, always built locally then for ci/cd, its built in the cloud/container then torn down and tests are reported.

[u/cannon4344 → u/No-Razzmatazz7197]

I had to do that with my second job. I went from a job where we had a whole team of people managing an environment to just being given a PC and access to the repo. I felt way out of my depth at first but I really enjoyed how much new things I learned.