I began my work at Jackpine by going through their site and getting used to how it worked, reading 101 Powerpoints, etc... I discovered very early on that there were numerous acronyms and vocabulary words I would need to understand before I started a task that could be considered even somewhat productive.
The next few days I was assigned several “test cases” for Quality Assurance (QA) which meant going over a test of some kind I could execute on their quality assurance version of the site. I went in and acted like a user, trying different things and searching for bugs. I eventually moved to admin and team manager based test cases, where I would again log into QA but this time as an admin or team manager and once again try to do different tasks and making sure that there are no bugs. The purpose of logging in as different users is to make sure that based on your permissions (standard user, admin, team manager) that you could only do certain things. For example a standard user should not be able to make changes like deleting projects or authorizing new members, however both of these should be easily accomplished through an admin account.
After the first week, I got the hang of QA and started to work on more complex test cases. Most of these involved using the command line interface (CLI), or Terminal. This is essentially the code that is behind everything I was doing in QA. With the command line you can freely roam around your local computer as well as different environments (like the one I used for test cases). Once I was in the correct environment I would test out different commands (again, with different users that have varying privileges) to make sure they worked as intended. If I find a bug, I write a tracker explaining the details of the bug as well as the priority of the issue (1 being super high priority and 4 being low priority). This scale is based on how directly the issue impacts the customer.
I have done a lot of teaching myself and working through things that were initially complicated. The employees here have been more than welcoming and willing to help me with issues I encounter. I have slowly gained familiarity with the things I am doing each day and how they connect to the mission of Jackpine.