Here’s one way to stay technical and not hinder production-level projects.
You play the role as an extra QA engineer. You can bring a new perspective since you could have interactions with customers or internal business units who use the software your team creates. You will be able to write and improve tests from the user’s perspective.
Your engineers should appreciate you won’t be a showstopper for production. Your time is harder to control and your team can’t always depend on you to deliver critical features on a deadline. You might not have a constant block of time to write code so nobody needs to rely on your work.
I’m a fan of writing tests because I can begin to see the “big picture.” I’ll examine tests other engineers have written and try to improve them. Integration tests are also a good way to see how the system comes together.
My tests also act as impromptu code reviews.
If I catch something, I can either attempt to fix the issue on the spot or if I believe it’ll take too long – I’ll ping the engineer responsible. Overall, the system is more robust. I have a better understanding how things fit together, helping me guide decisions when we need to sort out boundaries around code ownership for different teams. I also remain technical. My team doesn’t get blocked on me. This is a win for everyone.
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