Onboarding Process in Wrike QA Automation Team
Hi! My name is Alex and I’m a QA automation manager at Wrike. In this article I’ll tell you about the onboarding process in our team.
I joined the team 11 years ago as the first QA automation engineer. During these years we built a QA automation team of amazing developers. Together, we develop the unique test ecosystem for our product, which lets us manage high-quality Wrike code.
Stones, water, and mechanisms
Before I dive into our onboarding process, I want to tell you a short story about my life. When I was around five or six years old, my parents traveled with me to the sea. One day my dad walked with me along the shore; it was full of smooth and polished rocks. I asked him, “Who made these stones so perfect without any sharp corners?” He told me that it was nature — just water and wind that rubbed the stones against each other. I was shocked. It was an incredible discovery for me.
A little bit later I found out that there’s a special tool known as a tumbler rocks machine that looks like a can with a drive unit. You put rough stones with some powder and liquid into the machine, and after a few hours you get perfectly polished rocks. Just imagine: Water and rubbing make perfect rocks.
It’s possible to get the same result in two different ways: on the one hand, during many years of natural influence and, on the other hand, during a few hours of machine processing.
You may be asking what these stones have to do with the onboarding process. This comparison is about teamwork, the right engineers, and the right values, which we put into the right onboarding process.
Problems that we had in our onboarding process
Around five to six years ago, when we started building our team, the process of onboarding was a little bit messy. New hires had to learn many things and some of them were in live or production processes. It was stressful for them and looked more like a survival school rather than an onboarding process.
Just imagine: A new hire participates in the deployment process with their colleagues and something goes wrong. In our case the deployment process is a significant part of delivering new features, solutions, and improvements, and everyone who participates in this process can feel pressured to deliver a workable code without bugs. It’s like when a new firefighter tackles their first fire;they have theoretical knowledge but not practical experience. So in our case new hires face new challenges and have to decide what the deployment team should do: Move on to the next steps or stop and cancel deployment. Fortunately, these cases were rare, but it was a problem that our new hires weren’t ready for.
With each passing year, we thought about how to improve the onboarding process. It was important to know the first steps for each new hire and understand how to share the information they need. In this track the onboarding process was born.
People, studying, and feedback
We have three crucial parts in our onboarding process: people, study, and feedback.
People. I’d like to rephrase Jim Collins’ quote, “Great vision without great people is irrelevant,” to “Great teams without great people are irrelevant.” One half of success is hiring talented people and the other is enabling them to flourish within the team.
We trust our people and are deeply convinced that one plus one doesn’t equal two; it’s always three, four, or maybe even 10 in some cases. I believe in synergy, which gives us the right collaboration with the right people and allows us to make great things.
Studying. We care about our new hires, teach them, and share everything they need to know about Wrike, testing frameworks, and technologies. We’ve created tasks for lazy diving in our context and prepared our engineers for productive work step by step.
During the onboarding process, we want our new hires to take advantage of their strengths and improve their weaknesses. Why do we do it? I’ll tell you a story about two common approaches to improving skills. If a student excels at music and is weak with mathematics, oftentimes their parents will try to improve their math skills. Conversely, some parents will go all in on further improving their child’s musical talents, since the child already shows promise. It can be easier to outshine others where you have a competitive advantage. I wouldn’t say one approach is better than the other, but it’s important to consider that there’s power in balancing both.
We strive to help our new hires identify their strengths and improve their skill sets, and help them find the product team and projects that suit them. The right combination of place and tasks means we have highly passionate and motivated colleges.
Feedback. Feedback is one of our main focuses. It’s an amazing tool for opening a new hire’s potential. It’s important to have open and transparent feedback from both mentee and mentor. It can look like negotiations between a pilot and controller at the moments of taking off, flight, and landing. Everyone focuses on their job and it’s best to work with one another to achieve success.
New information, types of work, team and skills can be acquired naturally like stones being shaped by the sea. But with our onboarding process, we help new hires get all of that done faster and more smoothly during the often difficult first few months.
During the initial onboarding, we begin our self-improvement as a group of incredibly talented people, sometimes having heated discussions and making some noise, but ultimately working together. This way, we polish each other and our ideas. And the results are beautiful stones.
