You're never too old to Mentor

One thing I did in my last position was bring in a new programming language to the group in order to generate a test harness that would help us out with some of the sore points we had, but while I did that I brought other people into the test harness project to help out.  Adding in new people and a language, Ruby in this case, meant that there were going to be things people did not understand, no matter how much I could document in all the scripts we had there were some that had little information in them.  So how to handle this?

Well I could have documented it on a wiki, and I had.  Of course the first place most of the documentation on the scripts should be is in the scripts themselves, but I inherited about 95% of the code that had built up over years and as I said, I tried to document when I could.

I could give people books and web sites to learn what they needed to know, this was really done without my interaction as everyone took it upon themselves to learn what they needed and I also made my library open.

The third way I saw was to help people learn, so I needed to mentor people.  I took time on occasion to show people how to write certain scripts, I did monthly talks about some parts of coding (but that was already a long standing practice in this company).  Sitting down and taking time to go over small scripts with my co-workers, I sometimes gave them easy projects to do to get them used to the coding, giving advice and answering questions about how things happened.  I learned a few things in the process as well, which is always a bonus, but it worked out well for my colleagues who were able to come up to speed quick and make an impact to the coding needed to transition to a new test harness.

So why are you never too old?  Because the people joining me on the project were Senior and Principal level QA staff who were coming from testing the GUI to writing scripts that they could use to make their own testing better.  None of us were Junior level people, or interns, so no matter what level you may be there is always something new to learn.