I've now been in my new group for 6 months, so it is no longer new. :-) Time has really flown by, but I think it is important to do a gut check at least quarterly to make sure that I'm liking where I'm at and also to make sure that I'm contributing and doing a good job. Some of the questions I ask myself are:
1. Am I making a positive difference?
2. Is my work interesting?
3. Am I helping those around me do a better job?
4. Am I growing my skills (technical, leadership, communication, etc...)?
5. Am I happy with my overall situation and what is the outlook?
6. Are there areas for improvement, either for me or for my group, and what are they?
The answers, not necessarily in any order are yes, I'm making a positive difference, I am helping those around me do their jobs better, I am growing my skills in many areas (java, ant, cruisecontrol, jameleon, selenium), I am happy overall with my situation and the outlook, and there are areas for improvement (but I won't list them on my blog). For the intersting work I've helped the team move the test case repository over to a better tool. I've also helped improve testing infrastructure that will save lots of resources and time as well as add to test coverage. The process (high level) goes like this:
1. Developers check code into the repository.
2. The code is pulled out of the repository at the same time every day via cruisecontrol.
3. The JUnit tests are run.
4. Code coverage tools are run against the code.
5. The Functional Tests are run which will:
a. Pull down the latest official build.
b. Install it.
c. Setup the test environment.
d. Run all automated tests (via GUI and API)
e. Generate reports based on the results.
f. Uninstall product and cleanup.
6. Generate overall results of JUnits, Code Coverage, and Functional Tests.
All of this is done with cruisecontrol, ant scripts, jameleon, and selenium. The automated test case building blocks (tags in jameleon speak) are written in java while the automated test cases themselves are written in xml. These are very cool tools which allow us to create more test cases as time goes on and add them to the automatic process which will in turn allow us to have more and more test coverage for our products. So for me overall, so far so good.