The electrician we were using the week before last has not phoned to confirm he will do the other work, as promised, next week. I was recommended another guy who did come around this morning to put up 3 heavy duty centre lights and a couple of other things.

He bought his tools in and his ladder and then says that it can’t be done as there is no earth connection. Also that the whole house probably needed rewiring. He also asked whether I had a survey done when I bought the house and that I paid too much for the house.

Can you believe the nerve of the guy. Its not that he even knew how much we had paid.

I had a complete survey which said that in due course the house probably would need rewiring, just like any other house. So what’s this electrician guy going on about. I reckon he just decided he didn’t want to do the job.

I think I might put an advert in yellow pages to fix peoples computer problems. £100 per hour and I will only work on PC’s owned by electricians and plumbers. And I might not always turn up or finish the job.

Quote of the day

‘It’s amazing that the amount of news that happens in the world every day always just exactly fits the newspaper’ Jerry Seinfield (1954-)

Yesterday I heard that a particularly complex application was put live despite having numerous defects.

It turned out that it had been tested reasonably thoroughly and numerous bugs found and fixed. The problem was that fixing one bug resulted in other bugs being created. This is a classic situation where there was some basic design issues and also some serious communication problems between the developer and the designer.

Eventually someone senior decided that the software had been tested enough and it was to go live. Needless to say it mashed up their data pretty good and they had some serious problems for months afterwards.

Not sure how I feel about someone saying the software had been tested enough. I think they were fed up with the tester finding bugs so decided to stop them doing so by removing the software from the test arena and springing it into the live arena. Sort of care in the community for software.

Why someone is allowed to say it has been tested enough whilst bugs are still being found beats me. As for putting it live…jeez. Its like Ford releasing a new car that they know doesn’t work too good and that, if they do release it, they are going to get caned by the customers and magazine reviewers but, hey, lets release it anyway. Do that too much and you’ll be out of business. Probably be a laughing stock as well. 

Quote of the day

‘If the automobile had followed the same development cycle as the computer, a Rolls Royce would today cost $100, get a million miles per gallon, and explode once a year, killing everyone inside’ Robert X Cringely

Its obvious with that wonderful thing called hindsight that the lack of test management software whilst testing the previous software version, led to a bit of chaos.

For instance I think I am the only person who is aware of the defects that have been raised, and certainly nobody else knows which defects are open or closed. Also some of the tests are being rerun as I write but there is no log of who is doing what and whether the test runs are successfull or not. I did create a log but nobody else is interested in adding to it.

We also have no idea, short of reading the scripts, to determine which requirements are proved in which script.

The next lump of code to be tested is far more complex and I think without some test management software, Test Director, that we will fail. There will be no management of the testing process, no formalised defect raising and tracking, no history of who has run what. It will be chaotic.

Many test scripts will need to be run varying from pure specific functionality, user type access to functionality, high level scripts describing the process of moving large amounts of data from one database server to another server, yet another script to check that the old system is not trashed by its conversion to the new system, etc etc. Without TD this is not going to work.

Quote of the day

‘Imagine if every Thursday your shoes exploded if you tied them the usual way. This happens to us all the time with computers, and nobody thinks of complaining’ Jef Raskin (1943-2005)