What does your job look like at bol.com, what are your responsibilities?
I am a Test Engineer and Scrum Master in one of the scrum teams within bol.com. Furthermore, I am one of the Emergency Response Officers. As a Test Engineer, I monitor the quality we are responsible for as a team. I do this by conducting manual testing, developing automated checks (in the best fit framework), monitoring test results and designing test scenarios with the Information Analyst based on acceptance criteria. As a Scrum Master, I keep an eye on the scrum process and I help the team remove obstacles, so that everyone is as good as possible and can do his or her job. I work closely with the Product Owner to ensure that we work on the right stories with the highest priority. Often, as a Scrum Master, you are also the gatekeeper of the team. You protect the team and always try to get the team to a higher level.
What is your biggest challenge within your role?
Within bol.com we do a lot of knowledge sharing. You can evolve in any area you wish. For me, the biggest challenge is to not get involved in too many secondary activities in the test area.
What are the most important skills you need in your job?
For a Test Engineer, having a critical eye is important and not just taking everything for granted. Keep thinking for yourself, with a broad view and try to think out of the box. On the other hand, as a test engineer, you must also have an eye for detail. Because we are in a DevOps environment, where automatic testing is important, a technical background is a prerequisite. As a Scrum Master it is important that you can oversee things and that you can structure and protect the team.
What developments do you see in your field?
You see a strong shift to automated testing within the test field. And that’s just what I like. With my technical background, I like to develop automatic checks in the appropriate framework. At bol.com we generally lead the way and this is also the case with this. So we already came a long way with test automation. But of course we can always improve.
Within bol.com you get a lot of freedom in doing your job, what techniques you’d like to use and what career path you wish to take. I’m not only part of a scrum team but also in various subgroups, i.e. researching new frameworks that can be used to develop automated checks or identifying skills that testers need or want to improve. We also organize external knowledge sharing sessions through our Techlab and Meetups.