Just finished onboarding and all I have to work on are test cases - Is this okay?
Just finished the whole onboarding phase, but my team's product is supposedly very close to a quarterly release. Therefore, my manager/onboarding buddy are planning to just have me start off with test cases. What do y'all think about this? Would this be normal due to the timing, or is this a hidden sign of a lack of confidence on their end?
Discussion
(3 comments)- 1
5 months agoChief Technology Officer @ UrgentIQWriting test cases is impactful. It helps to bring you up to speed and learn about the codebase and structure. I always have new engineers focus on unit tests and improving quality of tests based on any missed edge cases they may come across. Then slowly start tackling some features.
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5 months agoTech Lead @ Robinhood, Meta, Course HeroI wouldn't worry about this - The reasoning they gave seems super sound to me, and I've seen this happen before.
As Michael mentioned, writing tests is good. It forces you to think through the edge cases and general "breakability" of the code. From my experience, operating within the realm of bugs (debugging, writing tests) is better for understanding a codebase than adding feature code.
Adding feature code is often very simple as you're building on top of the existing codebase, and if it's written well with good abstractions/plugins, you shouldn't actually need to understand the existing code too much to extend it.
On the other hand, dealing with bugs forces you to understand the codebase as it is and deduce the end-to-end flow as we talk about here: Once You Get This, You'll Be Able To Fix Any Software Bug
You should take it a step further and try to expand the scope:
- Can you come up with more test cases on top of the ones your team put you on?
- Can you add more monitoring/logging to tests to better detect regressions and measure impact?
- Can you fix flaky tests or delete now useless tests?
More thoughts here: "What do mobile testing strategies look like at top tech companies?"
- 05 months agoEng @ Taro
I don't think it's necessarily a bad sign. It could be as simple as the team having a brainstorming session for new hire tasks before you onboarded, and they realized they were lacking in unit tests. It's a good way to get familiar with the codebase without causing any incidents.
Most teams are pretty forgiving with new hires, so they probably wouldn't lose confidence so early. I would just make sure to be pretty diligent with getting the unit tests done as quickly as possible. I imagine they will have some tasks with increasing complexity lined up for you after you finish writing the unit tests.
