Brandon Holloway is a Quality Assurance Engineer at ThreeWill. He has over 10 years of QA experience in requirements gathering, risk analysis, project planning, project sizing, scheduling, testing, defect/bug tracking, management, and reporting.
Danny serves as Vice President of Client Development at ThreeWill. His primary responsibilities are to make sure that we are building partnerships with the right clients and getting out the message about how we can help clients.
Transcript
| Danny: | Hi, this is Danny Ryan and this is the Work Together Better podcast, today I have Brandon Holloway here with me and he is the master tester, what should I call you? The man with the plan for testing? Or? |
| Brandon: | Sure, as long as it doesn’t make Lisa mad.
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| Danny: | There ya go. I just wanted to talk to you real quickly here. I know you’re on a project right now where you’re helping out with an effort of a Jive to Microsoft 365 Migration, so I was just interested to just hear from you, what types of testing you’re doing? What does it look like, and how are you involved? What are you doing as a project member for the project that you’re currently on?
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| Brandon: | Yeah, well there’s kind of two parts to it right now. One part is testing the tool itself. It’s still kind of in the early stages of us doing migrations and the tool that’s constantly being worked on and fixed and updated so we want to pull in different types of content or change the way we do downloads or uploads, things like that, I have to go in there and test the tool’s capabilities to do those things. But of course, on the other side of that, there’s also testing the actual migrations themselves. Basically, how I do that is, first we’re going to download all the content from Jive, right? |
| Danny: | Yep.
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| Brandon: | We got all the files, all the binary files, all the places, the accounts, the people, all that information that we got, that we have into a database. Once we run those downloads, there’s a bunch of log files output that comes out of that. I test against that. I make sure that there’s no errors, and spot check place accounts, people accounts, different things like that in Jive versus what’s in the database. Just make sure our accounts look right and after that, after we have everything that we need, then comes the upload. That is a little bit more in depth, when we’re pushing it out to SharePoint, the process usually takes longer. We’re running more back files. The group from Jive, they go over SharePoint as sub-sites.
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| Brandon | What we’ll do is group them in different waves. So if we have a wave of 50 places, or 50 groups, we’ll split that into 5 batches of 10. So it’s going to take a while to upload all of that content, and as that’s happening, we have different spreadsheets that take the output and compare accounts and make sure that we’re not running into errors and things like that. We have a run book where we keep up with our progress, so we can all work on it at the same time.Cause there’s lots and lots of batch files that need to run to get all of our data over into SharePoint. Really, kind of high level overall, it’s more of a backend type testing than I’m used to. To get the deal with the sequel, get in the database, run queries, all that kind of stuff. Which, I kind of like doing that kind of stuff. I don’t get to do a lot of that. |
| Danny: | That sounds like the difference between white box testing and black box tests. That sounds sort of like classic white box testing, which is where you’re testing the internal, the how something works, the workings of an application internally than it is black box, where you’re looking at the beginning product in the end you don’t really know what’s happening in the middle.
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| Brandon: | Right. Yeah. I would definitely agree with that. It’s not just looking at a nice pretty UI and front end like the customers would be seeing. It’s more in the backend, white box. I definitely agree with that. |
| Danny: | It sounds like with the tooling itself, one is, I’m happy you’re on the project and Lisa’s been involved with some of the other projects as well. We’ve been doing this over probably 5, 6, 7 years that we’ve been working with the tooling. I think we’ve just been fortunate we’ve been able to pull you on to a project like this, and with that I think it’s great to see how you’re attacking it.
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| Danny: | Are you also looking at this where you’re looking at the initial Jive, everything that’s in Jive, and just looking to make sure that everything moves over? You’re sort of doing it at a high level where you’re making sure that … I guess doing more tradition black box types of testing. Are you doing that as well?
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| Brandon: | Yeah, of course. That’s certainly part of it. Taking what we have in Jive and looking over what it translates to in SharePoint and making sure all of our … like the different binary files, like the larger ones, you want to definitely check some of the larger videos and things like that, make sure, ’cause they kind of upload in pieces. So, you want to make sure things like that so, there’s definitely some front end black box testing going on there as well. |
| Danny: | I guess you’re making some changes to tooling. Is there new content types that we’re adding?
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| Brandon: | I know in particular we started pulling job votes.
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| Danny: | Okay, that’s a new one. We haven’t done that before.
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| Brandon: | Right and there was even an issue there, where we were only pulling up to 25 job votes. [Chris] actually noticed this. That’s a lot of the testing. A lot of finding things, is kind of purely by accident.
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| Danny: | Serendipitous testing?
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| Brandon: | Yeah. We call it exploratory testing.
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| Danny: | There you go.
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| Brandon: | Explore and see what you find. So yeah, there had to be some tweaks made there and we re-run the test, and we see that we’re pulling in more votes and things like that. There’s a lot to it, but it’s definitely something new and exciting for me. I know that you said we’ve been doing it for a while, but I haven’t been on migrations that long and I’m definitely learning new things every day. |
| Danny: | So you’re enjoying, it’s a different type of project, but you’re enjoying though?
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| Brandon: | Yes. Definitely.
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| Danny: | Good. Awesome. Glad to hear that. Well I appreciate you taking time to do this, and growing and learning and going after it and applying what you already know to this new project type for you. I appreciate you giving us the update today. Thanks everybody for listening, and have a wonderful day. Bye-bye. |
