After a summer away in classes at UNB, I made my return to IBM. This journey would last a year, four months full-time co-op, four months part-time while I took a full course load, and then four more months full-time. During this time I found myself taking on more responsibilities, gaining a deeper understanding of the product and tech stacks that I was using, and fostered my interest in managing development projects.

When I returned to IBM I was no longer working as part of the Integrations team. I started on a brand new team called Quality Assurance Fundamentals, or QAF for short, a subset of the regression testing team. The purpose of the new team was simple, automate all core functionality which would result in a severity 1 bug if it were broken. Although IBM is a mature company with a large degree of automated test cases already, we wanted to create a single suite of tests that could reliably be run every single day so we could identify issues as early as possible. The team had a bit of a twist, all of the members were Co-op students.

I began my first four months as a member of this team along with three other team members and a scrum master. Of the five members of the team, only two of us had worked at IBM previously. Having past experience meant I spent a large amount of time teaching and coaching my fellow team members how to use our automation tools, how to use the product, and what kind of participation is expected of team members during agile meetings. I learned at this time how much I really enjoy team collaboration and helping others reach their goals.

During the first four months as a team member I spent the majority of my days planning, developing, executing, and documenting automated tests. I would be required to meet with subject matter experts to create test cases that adequately covered core functionality of my assigned feature. Next I would be required to develop the test including creating test data and resolving bugs in the automation framework. I would need to monitor the execution of these tests to report any bugs that are found in the tests back to development. Finally before any test was considered done it needed to be documented in a manner that anyone else could pickup and understand the test.

Towards the completion of my first 4-month work term, I accepted an offer to work part-time through my next 4 months of classes as the scrum master of the QAF team. As scrum master my duties would expand to include facilitating all agile meetings, removing roadblocks from my team members, and reporting regularly on test execution and sprint burn-down rates to my supervisor.

I thoroughly enjoyed the tasks I performed as part of my scrum master duties. I was able to build on my soft skills like communication and leadership. I continued to perform this role when I returned to IBM full-time for four more months. I continued to grow my skills as both an automated tester and a scrum master.

I’m very happy that I was able to get experience as a scrum master while I was still in school. It is a unique corner of the technology industry that doesn’t get much exposure as a career choice in university. Agile development practices and effective processes in general continue to be passions of mine to this day.