Weeks 2 and 3 At QA Academy

Week 2
The first week flew by, if only weekends were 4 days instead of two, feels like I had no rest traveling home and back but worth it for some real home food! Week two started with a scrum, PEAKAT has slowly adopted the planking scrum so they hardly last more than three minutes. PEAKAT also saw an addition of two new people, who we had to get up to date with the project. The newbies brought our class count to around 40 people, again feels a lot like being at uni.

Friday was probably a student's worst nightmare, work hand-ins, a test and to top is all off a presentation too! but at the end of the day it really was not as bad as I thought, the presentation went well (except the grilling at the end) and the test seemed quite simple. Look forward to the feedback on Monday.


Week 3
Week 3 started with the news of casual month for charity, I thought what we wore was casual as it is but I'm not complaining, if only I bought more t-shirts and shorts from back home! The presentation feed back was very helpful and got some good ideas to help make our presentation more interactive but still stay professional. Got 69.7% on the EA test which was average but happy with that considering it was basically a university module crammed into two weeks with all the socialising and hardly any revision time.

Week 3 also had the welcome party! It was mid week but free drinks are welcome any day of the week. The welcome party was a blast but was surprised how long the two grand tab lasted considering how many of us were there (118 apparently) and how much us QA employees like drinking. The welcome party ended with a nice 'dine in' session with the PEAKAT group, a much needed meal to end the day.

Thursday, the dreaded forty odd back to back presentations of different design patterns! Was not looking forward to that with a mild hangover, we managed to get through them within three hours probably the worst three hour experience at QA to date. But other than that week three was great finally got to practice some java which was surprisingly easy to get used to, probably because I have c++ experience. We were given the task to make the battleship game which we worked on all week with a code review at the end of the week with the trainers.

First Week At QA Academy

 

After a hectic week of finding a place to stay in Salford and one last five hour coach journey from Leicester, my home town, I had officially moved into my temporary home and ready for my first day at QA academy.

The thought of my first day in a “real life” office was daunting, as I slowly made my way up five flight of stairs. As soon as I entered the office I saw a few familiar faces from the assessment day which put me at ease. After meeting a few more people we were taken into our “classroom”, where after a brief introduction we got straight into the training course starting with a lecture on ‘Enterprise Architecture’. We were put into groups and were given the task to come up with a team name, we went for “PEAKAT” which was basically the first letter of all our names put together (very creative, I know). My thoughts after the end of the first day as a QA Trainee was, “this feels like being at first year of uni all over again”, and that was great! PEAKAT then decided to meet up and have dinner at the Dockyard to end the day (PS the Mexican bean burger may taste nice but a cheeky nandos is still my favourite).

On the second and third day of training we were introduced to a fictional company that required consultancy services from us. I really like the way QA academy have structured their training to incorporate the theoretical knowledge of Enterprise Architecture as well as allowing the trainees to get first hand experience in the tasks involved when providing consultancy services. I personally prefer developing software over the business interactions but this process has already taught me a lot about Enterprise Architecture.

Thursday was full of interviews, where I ended up picking the worst two people to interview, Kitty the flirty intern and Chris the angry team manager. It was a weird but an entertaining experience, feel sorry for Elliot who was role playing Kitty’s part. After work a few trainees decided to go to the depot climbing centre, where I found out i’m naturally talented at rock climbing.

Thank god it’s Friday! A day full of just catching up on work and moaning about how tiring working 9-5 everyday is, especially when you’re used to waking up at 12pm instead of 7am. I feel like writing a blog without any reference to pool would be a crime. To be completely honest I am probably the worst pool player from the group but still managed to win three out of the four games i’ve played, got to love flukes!

This week was full of lots of new experiences and I have learnt a lot about myself, one being my blogging skills are terrible and I look forward to other adventures QA academy brings. :D