April 16, 2026

Here's One Simple Trick I do as an SDET to Ramp Up Quickly at a New Company!

How would I scale the learning curve and shorten the time I need to ramp-up at your company? How would I verify that I understand the material? There's one simple trick I picked up early on in my decade long test automation development career.



The first thing I would do, after being embedded in your development team, pore through all your Confluence documentation, and study the official documentation of the automation toolsets we use: I would start building a parallel side project using the same toolsets, to deepen my knowledge on what I am learning on-the-job.
  • Who made this testing tool we are using?
  • Who initially created it?
  • How has it evolved?
  • What was the initial problem it tried to solve?
  • What inspired it?
If its an open source tool, I examine the code to see how the toolset tests itself.

With the help of the software testing community I find the experts who are writing the blog posts, the articles, the technical talks describing how the tool can -really- be used.

Who knows? Maybe in my seven-year tenure as a former organizer of a Boston-area software testing community, I already know them!

I then start compiling my research notes. I start blogging about the toolsets, comparing notes with others in the software testing community, relaying the information I have collected back to your company.
  • Your documentation about the toolset becomes better.
  • Brown-bag sessions start appearing.
  • Articles get written on your corporate blog, raising your team's external profile.
  • Stand-up training sessions get scheduled so manual testers can get up to speed writing their own tests.
And it all starts from me creating, then blogging, about a simple toy project.

I am currently #OpenToWork for a full-time permanent remote role as a Software Development Engineer in Test. Coding samples and framework walkthroughs are on the Programming Projects section.

Happy Testing!

-T.J. Maher
Software Engineer in Test

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