IT Werkz Sometimes

I’m working for a pure play web company right now and it’s kinda neat. I thought I was good at webby stuff but there’s still a whole pile of stuff I’ve learnt and need to learn.

We had a new release the other night which was a bit stressfull as you can’t tell your users to not use the system while you’re upgrading, as this lot probably gets about 10k hits an hour. They also do agile, the scrum variety, so jack shit is written down which can lead to some confusion. They are definitely into the ‘we haven’t got time for all that. Charge!!!!’ thing. In fact not only is it a paperless office and a documentless office – where’s the printer? what the hell do you want that for? – they even hate the term ‘requirements’. They prefer ‘backlog item’. I just don’t get the daily scrum meetings though. I always wonder what the heck I am doing on them. Telling everyone that yesterday I tested something and today I’m gonna test something else isn’t exactly rivetting, in fact it sounds like I’m barely doing anything. If you mention any bugs you’re immediately told to take the conversation off-line, so I don’t bother.

There are a couple of guys there that have been on the project for a couple of years and when they do regression testing it’s something to behold. They work unbelievably hard and charge through the regression scripts at a gallop. Trouble is they keep missing problems such is their intensity to mark all the scripts as passed. More like rubber stamp testing. The last 2 or 3 sprints they had before me and this other guy pitched up hadn’t gone so well and the test manager actually went to the testing agency and said something like ‘get us some experienced people’, so they got us and the sprint we have worked on since we started has worked pretty well. Apparently all the top guys are happy, so that’s something. It wouldn’t surprise me if they only real difference was that we trapped some of the missed issues that the regression testers failed to be tripped up by.

They just don’t get some things though. The developers have only ever worked on web pages and have no idea of anything else and if we suggest any neat ideas to improve any processes you’re initially met with a blank look, and I mean very blank. Then when they have thought about it for a while they come around to possibly having an interest but still give us a load of resistence. They think we can’t possibly know anything about IT even if your resume is in their face, they just don’t understand anything but web. I still like it though.

The Epson DX8450 is still painfull in that it doesn’t feed paper too well and the HP PSC2355 has completely given up the ghost, well it’s got a permanent carriage jam problem.

The cost of print catridges is so much I’m going to look at getting a laser printer that has very expensive cartridges but that do last for years with my kind of usage. If I get a laser without the scanning and copying functionality they are relatively cheap but that does mean that I will need to keep the old Epson connected so that it can do that stuff. Now which laser do I get?

On Linkedin I belong to a load of testing groups and I get email whenever someone posts a question. So many of these questions are banal beyond belief and some are just downright begging letters for others to brain dump testing knowledge on some hapless group members. I know it’s supposed to be a forum for people to share knowledge but jeez it’s so one way.

I’m starting to look into getting a new PC with Windows 7. I have installed 7 Ultimate on an old laptop but it runs like a dog and hasn’t got the hardware necessary to do the XP virtualisation thing. I might get some more memory for it. My old XP PC also runs out of steam soon enough after starting anything and the power supply fan starts up in a vain attempt at letting the processor do something. That PC also needs more memory and a bigger power supply. The Vista PC also needs more memory, currently with only 2 gig. When I start VM’s soon enough that PC’s power supplies fan starts up, so that PC also needs more memory. This could get expensive.

(More of this stuff? Wake me up when it’s over. Ed)

Experienced-based testing
- Strengths
— Works in short timescales
— Enables reactive and flexible testing (tester learns from results of previous tests)
— Often applied where there is minimal documentation
- Weaknesses
— Poorly documented
— Relies on experience of tester
— Unpredictable application by different testers
- Examples
— Exploratory testing
— Error guessing

Scripted vs unscripted testing
- Exploratory testing, while often considered an unscripted approach, is a systematic technique, while ad-hoc testing is the testing equivalent of ‘hacking’.

Non-functional testing
- Strengths
— Evaluates quality characteristics
- Weaknesses
— Often overlooked
— Poorly understood
— Often needs specialists
- Examples
— Performance testing
— Usability testing
— Reliability testing

Specifying Software Reliability
- Probability of Failure on Demand (POFOD)
— the likelihood that the system fails on demand
— POFOD = 0.01 (or 1% means that at least 99 out of every 100 requests must be dealt with successfully
— The Sizewell B Primary Protection System has a requirement of POFOD = 0.001
- Mean Time to Failure (MTTF)
— the time between system failures
— MTTF = 10 to the power 3 hours means that the average time between failures is no less than 1000 hours
— the Flight Control Software for the Airbus A320 and Boeing 777 has a requirement of MTTF of 10 to the power 9 hours