Friday, January 20, 2012

MIA - well I have been in action but not really missing...

So, 2011 was a busy year working with SharePoint. We did a major site upgrade where the old public site running on IIS was moved over to SharePoint, that was a major effort and took a lot of coordination with a lot of people. It came off really well, and has been successful since not many people noticed the underlying change, only the new look of the site. To me, that is a major success.

In addition I went through the task of learning SharePoint, as well as it's Search functionality, we had it going well for awhile then things just stopped. We still have no idea why, but it's been slightly educational in learning how things work. A nice environment where people just jump into things, help out where needed, and take the time to learn. That's what makes this job great.

Testing was a big focus, not only because we added a new person to help test last year, though she moved on it was good to sort of settle things and document much more. Teaching is always interesting since everyone comes in with a different focus and idea, that helps me readjust my thinking when I start to train someone. From that I have more wiki pages, more places to document what we have been doing and more documentation on just everything. I also got a start on automated testing, I now have a Framework with SpecFlow where I am now using BDD to create automated cases for Functional and Acceptance testing. First time the Acceptance Test was used after a deploy we found an error, that is success to me.

I needed to add goals for the year, which I am bad at, for myself I have overall goals but they get subsumed by whatever is going on at work at the time. Priorities come up and I need to learn something, say about writing a PowerShell script here or there, always something new. Though I think I am better now at focusing more on what I need to do and I will be going through that as a task for 2012. Should be an interesting year and I hope to do better about recording things here as well.