Day 9 already? Feels like we just started sending these to you, but here we are on day 9. In today's installment of onboarding emails, we'll talk about our QA practices, how we like to track bugs in the wild, and our BWTC Brand team!
Quality Assurance aka Finding all of the bugs
Bitwise Tech Consulting has a killer QA team lead by our own Destiny Cedano. And when we say killer, we mean that they will tear your app apart and break it in ways you couldn't have imagined. It is awesome and has really helped us to raise our quality around here. It is important that we do multiple QA passes throughout a project's lifespan, especially prior to client demos. We want to put our best foot forward, after all. There's nothing worse than a new bug popping up right in the middle of a demo, which they love to do. Before QA can do their thing, an Acceptance Test must be written. It is the responsibility of each developer to make sure that thorough Acceptance Tests are written for each feature that they build in an application.
As you are completing features and their respective Acceptance Tests, make sure to coordinate with your PM to schedule QA time. You can contact Destiny to get QA time on the books. At a minimum, we should make sure to perform a QA test pass before each project milestone demo.
Sentry
Error handling and tracking can be a real pain, especially for production applications. Sentry is an easy to install, multi-stack solution that will not only track errors, but help users provide feedback if an error does show up. Sentry can be installed on either the client, server, or both, and sends very detailed information to the Sentry dashboard. Sentry can pinpoint which line in your code is causing the problem, as well as provide information on the user’s browser, OS, and where they encountered the error.
Sentry also provides the ability to create different teams and projects, so when an error occurs the appropriate team is notified. This can reduce the time it takes to respond to problems, as well as not spamming everyone’s inbox.
BWTC Branding...They make us look good!
The BWTC Branding team is composed of a group of marketing wizards that do everything in their power to make us look good. From online marketing to our many web presences, they are responsible for our public perception, as well as how we are positioned amongst other development firms. Part of that means crafting content that demonstrates our thought leadership and expertise!
From time to time they may ask our developers for ideas for white papers or blog articles, and we'd like to encourage you to participate in those. Remember the mentorship principals we shared with you in the Day 3 email? That extends to how we inform the public and our customers about how we do what we do, and why it's a good idea to work with us. Have an idea for a white paper or a blog article? Shoot it over to Celeste Barron and she can help you bring that idea to life!
Day 9 Checklist
As the story goes, we almost weren't able to put our billboard on top of South Stadium. When the city tried to stop us, we were able to prove that historically there was always a big billboard on top of the building, and we should be allowed to continue the tradition.