6.2The First 30 Days: Learn Everything

Your only goal in the first month is to understand the current state. You are not here to fix things yet. You are here to absorb.

Week 1: Orientation and Relationships

Day 1-2: Environment setup

• Get your development environment running (all repositories, test frameworks, CI access)
• Request access to all tools: Jira, test management, CI/CD, monitoring dashboards, Slack channels
• Run the existing test suite locally. Does it pass? How long does it take? What does the output look like?

Day 3-5: Meet people

• Schedule 30-minute 1:1s with every person you will work with directly: QA team members, developers on your squad, product owner, engineering manager, and DevOps/SRE
• Your agenda for each 1:1: introduce yourself briefly, ask about their role and current challenges, ask what they wish QA would do differently, and ask what the biggest quality risk is right now

Week 2-4: Deep Learning

Product knowledge:

• Use the product as a real user. Go through every major flow. Take notes on what confuses you -- your fresh perspective is valuable.
• Read the product documentation, knowledge base, and customer-facing help articles.
• Review the last 30 days of production incidents. What broke? Why? What was the customer impact?
• Review the last 30 days of bug reports. What patterns do you see?

Testing landscape:

• Map the existing test coverage: what is automated, what is manual, what is not tested at all
• Understand the test architecture: frameworks, patterns, data management, environment configuration
• Read the existing test strategy document (if one exists)
• Run the full test suite in CI and in local. Note flaky tests, slow tests, and failing tests.
• Understand the release process from code commit to production deployment

People and process:

• Attend all team ceremonies (standup, planning, review, retrospective) and observe before contributing
• Learn the team's communication patterns: who talks to whom, who has influence, who has institutional knowledge
• Identify the informal leaders -- the people whose opinions carry weight regardless of title