English“What are you doing now? Where are you working?” is a common question from someone you have not meet for quite a while.
“… I work for a small international company … we develop data governance software which is then used on data intensive projects … I am responsible for analysis part of one of the modules … we are a fastest growing tech company in Central Europe … we also provide business intelligence consulting services … etc. etc. …”
„Okay, and what exactly are YOU doing?“
I could say that “every day is different”, “it depends”, …
Well, it really depends (e.g. last fall I traveled a lot) but let’s be more concrete today.
Here is what I did this week.
- Training new colleague. Michal, a new product analyst, has joined our team two weeks ago. I was explaining to him advanced features of Glossary, the piece software I am doing analysis for. Advanced Inheritance, Composite Attributes, Parent Attribute Definition… – these were the words with which we did the magic.
- Preparation for iKariera. We will be present at job opportunities fair which takes place at ČVUT on March 30. Hence we discussed how it will look like, what we need to prepare, we put together questions into our competition… I was also preparing a scenario for Glossary screencast so if it goes well then at the fair you might see our software in action. Come and step by at our stand and participate in competition to win prizes J
- Use cases and Activity diagrams. Analyzing new behavior requires creating/updating our analysis model in Enterprise Architect. The backend behavior of the application is very complex and everything is very interconnected. Therefore, this task is very demanding in terms of concentration, it just requires full attention so I decided to avoid all interruptions and work on this task from home.
- Support for development team. When the developers have questions about the expected behavior of the application, we – analysts – are here to answer them. I had a nice inter-city chat with Petr, Filip and Radek who work at Simplity office in Brno.
- Testing of new features. Together with Marek, our skillful tester, we took a look at a new version of Glossary and described bugs to be fixed.
- Reference – we had a short status with Petr (our CEO) where we are with development of new Accurity module for maintaining code lists.
- Design of multireference components. I finalized functional specification of a new user interface component and handed it over to the development leads. I also brainstormed some ideas for new model of UI components and passed them to fellow analyst Terka.
- Lunch with Ondřej who is working for Career centre of ČVUT. Besides meeting a friend of mine I was very curious how the center can help us to find people we are looking for.
- User guide chapters for new features. Developing new features requires extending our user documentation. I reviewed Marek’s draft and provided him a rich feedback.
- Analysis status with Tomáš. Tomáš is our product division manager and we meet on weekly bases to discuss where we are and align what the next action steps are.
- Test environment. It turned out that the size of data in the test environment is too huge for automatic test running on it. We had to delete something.
- German lesson. Our company benefits include language lessons. The times my German was better than my English are over (well, they were over like 12 years ago), but I am getting better and better.
- Preparation for certification. Professional trainings and certifications are another company benefit. I committed myself to attain Oracle SQL certificate by the end of March. I slowly started to study. It reminds me my university years, study and pass-the-exam skills are about to be recovered :-).
- Short talk to Torsten. Torsten is CTO and also business owner for Glossary. He was in Prague after long time and we had a short chat about current status. I look forward to continuing next week.
„I like weeks wich do not have too many meetings and there is enough space for real work :-)“
Imagine your working week looked similar. How does that sound? Let me know.
Ondřej Kubera
Analyst
[email protected]