Episode 28 – How Dmitry Sharkov nurtures and mentors test engineers

There is an increasing need out there for test engineers and people who can wear two hats at once: software developing and test engineering. So, just what is a test engineer mentorship all about? Listen in to episode 28 of Mentoring Developers to learn more.
Dmitry’s Bio:
Dmitry Sharkov is a software creator, fitness instructor, agile coach, and a digital & martial artist. He can be found on Twitter at @dmitrysharkov. That’s a fascinating set of attributes!
Episode Highlights and Show Notes:
Arsalan: Today we have Dmitry Sharkov, he’s a very good friend of mine. He’s a mentor, a senior developer, and a fitness group guru. So, I know a little bit about you and I know that you work with junior developers, but I would like to hear from you what you do, what your background is, and what you are about. How do you describe yourself?
Dmitry: First and foremost I see myself as a programmer and developer. That was my background from the get-go. These days I trained test engineers. In the last few years I’ve started to drift more towards test automation as a focus mostly because while I love writing application code, it didn’t set me apart like test automation does. Focusing on testing wasn’t something that too many developers did. So it gave me an opportunity to move into a mentorship role and to help geeks become bigger geeks, so to speak.
Dmitry: What I’ve been doing lately is leading a program that trains developers to be test engineers. So, they still write code, but its code that tests other code. It trains a developer/tester mindset so that they can wear both hats at once. So, that’s where my focus has been recent, as far as technology goes.
Arsalan: I know that in a lot of organizations, including Microsoft that there is a team of these automated testers. There are these organizations who don’t like to higher manual testers who click around manually by hand and pass or fail a system based on whether or not it’s working, according to specifications. They are these programmers who have that mindset of testing and they write software and code that executes the code that they’re trying to test. That’s very interesting that you’re involved with that. How did you get started with that programming?
Dmitry: I started programming around 10th grade by just writing stuff on our horribly overpriced TI ’83 calculators. Our high school had a programming course that exposed people to writing Basic on those calculators. So, I took classes on programming in high school. Then, we had one in C++ and they offered one in AP computer science, which was just a lot of C++ programming at the time.
Dmitry: The reason I decided to go into that was a combination of three things. It was very gratifying to write code, getting it to work here and there, and then getting to see your product in front of you immediately. It was more difficult for me than other stuff that I did and I found that engaging in a way. I looked at what careers would make sense from a market perspective and technology didn’t look like it was going anywhere except becoming more widespread and needed. So it made sense and I knew it is something that I’d like.
Arsalan: So, you knew that you wanted to do programming but did you know how to proceed? Did you buy a book and try to read it to understand it? Did you find a mentor? Did you take classes? How did you get started in this?
Dmitry: Initially, it was available and it was offered. It seemed like an interesting sort of thing and was different from your typical high school curriculum. After taking those classes, I went down a fairly generic path. I didn’t really pick up any books on jumpstarting my career in software development. I just enrolled in OSU and selected computer science and engineering as my major. So, it started in high school and just continued on past that.
Dmitry: Even in college we had instructors that became almost like mentors.

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