A Day in the Life of an SDET : Erum Saba Huma Hamid12:00 AM 0 comments

Erum Saba - SDET II, Kindle Reader Team at Amazon

Erum Saba, SDET @ Amazon

Erum Saba is a Software Development Engineer in Test (SDET) II at Amazon in the heart of Seattle city. Amazon is the largest internet-based retailer in the United States (US) and at the core of many technological innovations and cutting edge technologies related to electronic commerce and cloud computing. Erum is currently part of the Kindle Reader team and her responsibilities include building and maintaining automated test frameworks for the product. Before joining Amazon, she was an SDET at Microsoft for more than six years and had worked on some of Microsoft’s major product lines. She is a FAST-NU graduate from Lahore and has experience of working with two of the largest, most challenging and most desired US tech. companies. During both her jobs her focus remained on building automated test frameworks. Erum loves working at Amazon not only because it offers her a challenging and rewarding work environment, but it also gives her an opportunity to impact the life of millions of users around the globe. Amazon also offers flexible work hours and an ability to work remotely from home and for Erum and other working mothers like her, this is considered to be a huge benefit.

Amazon.com

Erum has a small, beautiful family, which includes her husband, one toddler age daughter and an infant age son. I reached out to her to find about her daily routine at work as an SDET at Amazon.

8:00 AM - After the usual morning routine of getting up and ready, I drop both my kids at the daycare. 9:00 AM - I’m already at my desk after beating Seattle's morning rush hours. I always take the time to check my emails first thing in the morning and reply to the urgent ones. Then I track any blocker bugs in the database to make sure that there have been no issues during the night that need to be resolved urgently.

10:00 AM - To stay abreast on the technical happenings and news, I have subscribed to a few technical feeds. I quickly read through the interesting articles, as it is important for my job!

11:00 AM - At Amazon my team follows the Scrum methodology of software development and works in two-week sprints, which involves coding, testing new features and fixing bugs. Each day my team holds a daily scrum meeting to sync up on the progress and work prioritization. I join my team for a ten-minutes daily scrum call to talk about the following:

• What did I do yesterday that helped the development team meet the sprint goal
• What will I do today to help the development team meet the sprint goal?
• Are there any impediment that prevent me or the development team from meeting the sprint goal?11:10 AM - Get back to my desk and work through my daily backlog items (these are the items that have been assigned to me).

1:00 AM - LUNCH TIME! Amazon is located in the heart of Seattle, which offers an amazing culture with diverse cuisine options. I choose a grab-and-go lunch and eat it at my desk while working, but sometimes I join my team for lunches mostly when we have a birthday or promotion to celebrate. It gives me a get away from my computer; especially when if I am struggling with a programming issue. I’ll have eureka moment whilst I’m out and about.

Seattle skyline

2:00 PM - I grab a cup of tea and get back to work. I am either writing code or fixing bugs or providing support to clients and answering their queries. If I am coding, I put my headphones on and listens to the music because music helps me settle into “the zone” and concentrate better on the coding problems I am trying to resolve.

4:00 PM - I finish a feature and test it thoroughly. It is then ready to be sending for a code review by the entire SDET team and have a final sign-off. Meanwhile, I deploy it to our test environment so that our QA team can test it. I run an automated regression test suite, which ensures that I have not inadvertently broken the existing functionality of the automation test framework. Sometimes, it happens and running a regression test really helps to catch it early! :)

4:30 PM - Once every month the Kindle Reader Team gets together to share the latest happening within the company or industry. Sometimes we talk about any interesting future work coming up or someone will give a talk on something they’ve learnt, which might benefit the rest of the team. These sessions are always very interesting so I try not to miss them. I usually grab evening coffee and attend these sessions and try to as participative as much as I can.

5:30 PM - I start to pack up and to head back home. While I pack, I coordinate with my husband on who is picking up the kids as the daycare is close to our home and it is easy for either of us to pick up our kids.

6:00 PM - As soon as I reached home, I feed my kids and I play with them. It is usually mommy time!

7:00 PM - It is now time for my elder daughter’s swimming class. My husband takes her for swimming every alternate day and I take care of the little one at home.

8:00 PM - We all get together and watch TV for an hour while I serve dinner at the same time.

9:00 PM - I start cleaning up and close my kitchen

9:30 PM - I put my kids to bed so that we all can have a fresh start next day.

I keep checking my work emails via my phone and if something urgent comes up, I remotely connect into my computer from home and address the issue. Overall, I love Amazon environment as it provides me ownership and freedom to accomplish tasks in my convenient work hours.

10:30 PM - It is now time for me to go to bed!

A Day in the Life of is a series of posts to share experiences of female technologists and professionals currently working in the computing industry. This is an attempt to inspire young female graduates and students in the field computing, technology and engineering. It is hoped that these posts will give them a little flavor of what to expect from their daily routines if they choose to work.