Things I learnt from people who are much much better engineers than I am:
– Take notes. Always. Take detailed notes and keep a record of everything you do. Keep manual logs as well as automated logs if you can. Keep your logs organised by year and project.
– Take a video of your first testing session on a new system. Some of the things will not be reproducible, but you’ll have proof that they did happen.
– Ask kindly. If you think you found a bug, talk to the developers, team leads or whoever is concerned. Show it to them. Ask them what they think. Ask them to explain what may be happening. If you talk to them first, no ticket you write will ever be rejected. They will thank you for it, for writing it down on their behalf.
– Tickets make risks visible. It is okay to receive a promise that it will be fixed. And it feels good when it does get fixed. But bug tickets bring risks to a visible level. They raise them to a conscious level within the organization. Always write a ticket, no matter how trivial an issue may seem.
– No database migration is ever smooth. No matter how confident the DBA, the chief something of something important and the FBI are about it, a DB migration is always highly risky. It may cause hours, days or weeks of outages. So if you are testing for it, no amount of preparation and care is too much.
