The Story of an ETL Tester
It's a wonderful evening today, and as I am grazing through the LinkedIn meadows for interesting posts, my inbox gets a message from a total stranger . She is a technical lead of Data engineering team in her firm. And what i liked most about her , she is looking beyond her development boundaries unlike many to understand ETL testing , so that she can use that knowledge to create better products or rather quality products.And as we were conversing about various facets of ETL testing came up this question about , how I became an ETL Tester. And the answer to this question is the following article.
NB: You won't find anything technical in here. As the title says , it is a story about my career progression.
Before , I began my corporate life , I was doing my most favorite role, being a student - I studied in Cochin University and from there got placement and joined a company which is into TTL ( Travel , Transport and Logistics) Domain as a fresher. They trained me as a Java Developer . Then after doing a bit of development , i decided to switch to Testing , because more than coding i was interested in business and dreamt of being a BA . But luckily or unluckily , there was no opening , but a tester vacancy popped in. I grabbed it , and I did manual testing to understand the product that I working on . But even though my distant dream of being BA was lurking here and there and I kind of become more interested in Testing. So , then after trying Manual testing for quite some time , I decided to tell my manager that I needed a different work to get over boredom. That's when they were looking for an Automation tester. With my Java basics knowledge , I started using IBM's RFT ( Rational functional Tester) tool for automating some of the stuffs. The good part of creating a framework was done by a senior guy , so the fun of doing new things didn't last long , and again I asked my manager I wanted to do something else. Luckily my manager was kind enough to me to give me another opportunity and introduced me to the world of data testing.
It was new to me. My job was to support and devise new strategies to test a Data Warehouse project. For me and my lead , it was a new world , but we both were enthusiastic about the new challenge. That is my first steps into ETL testing. At that time , I also didn't knew what ETL is etc. But after that i have never looked back. We worked on Microsoft SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) , SQL Server Analytics Services (SSAS) .We delivered the project with good quality.But as it goes in life , good things don't last much, my reporting manager changed.
After that my manager changed , and I was not happy with my new manager . I decided to part ways with my first love due to that reason. I didn't think of a team change then , I got tired of him and decided to look for more greener patches.And then the second firm came in. As I had just 2.5 years of experience then , my recruiting manager thought that , i might be useful to him in different ways due to my experience in multiple facets of testing.
Luckily for me , at that point my client decided to build a warehouse , and I was recruited to that team. After joining the team , I realised that I was the first person to the team. So that's where the real learning begin. After around 1 month of time , my current lead joined. He has a vast experience in this domain. I had quite a lot of unlearning and learning again the concepts . That has been my turning point .
The moral of the story is that you have to be hardworking, be a student always and should identify a right mentor. For me I had them aligned at the right place on right time .
There is more for me to achieve , the hunger to learn and work is still kicking...
This has been my 5 years of Corporate Life!