Somebodies written a test strategy document and one of the reviewers keeps asking me questions about it.

So I had a quick peek at it (why wasn’t I asked to review it if I’m such a know-all, because they know I’d probably rip it to shreds). Its seems to be a mash-up of a document written by a highly paid by-the-day Test Consultant, who almost certainly Google’d for its contents and a document that roughly reflects most of the work processes they do now.

And it ain’t pretty.

Looks like we have a whole slew of new ‘experts’ now that the company want to do what they think of as more structured testing. I think the experts have been webbing about all over some testing sites and consequently their testing nomenclature is all a bit confused. I did write recently how they were all confused about the types of testing and who does what. Now they are very confused by titles like ‘test pack’ and other testing titles.

In fact they were very, very confused by that one. When the reviewer went to the author and asked them what a test pack was they were pointed to a pile of print. Apparently the author was under the assumption that a test pack was the evidence of a print run.

According to the strategy the high level Test Plan document is supposed to contain test conditions and test scripts. We also have a beast of a document called a Test Scenario which includes test objectives plus the test scripts again. And there’s a lot more nonsense where that came from.

Lets just hope they don’t discover ‘test cycles’. Lord knows how they’ll use that.

And when they get the Mercury Test Suite they are going to have a lot of fun squeezing their methodology into that. In fact it could be quite depressing for them as they stretch, pull and squeeze Test Director to work the way they they want it to. I’ll give them 6 months then they’ll abandon it. Apart from the defect management side of it, which they’ll like.

Quote of the day

‘I believe that people would be alive today if there were a death penalty’ Nancy Reagan (1921-)

Will be able to have another go at using the darn Nero 7 later after the AVG and XP nonsense of the last few days.

It does seem that if anything is installed like Nero 7 and Dreamweaver 8, which I have installed recently, there are ramifications sooner or later. After the install of those two apps when I was in Windows Explorer and fired up Chkdsk and checked the ‘Scan for and attempt recovery of bad sectors’ checkbox before running it. For some reason it could not run right away but it did schedule Chkdsk to being run on next boot up.

Which it tried to and failed. Rebooted and it found problems. Got to the end of its mashing of the data and after the next boot it took 20 minutes to start. Ran SFC which tidied up Windows but not well enough as I ended up running XP Setup which did sort things, mashing AVG on the way out.

Back to Nero and Dreaweaver from now on.

Quote of the day

‘Behind every great fortune there is a crime’ Honore de Balzac (1799-1850)

AVG anti-virus is not happy after the XP setup. I’ve noticed this before.

If I’ve had to rerun XP Setup, after the reboot any previously installed version of the free AVG certainly doesn’t work very well, in fact it begs to be uninstalled. So I tried that yesterday and got a new cryptic error message stating something like ‘previous run not completed, reboot pc’. So I did and again attempted to uninstall AVG with same result.

I wonder if this has anything to do with the fact that right now I can download Windows Upgrades but they won’t install even though I have been validated since the XP reinstall. You betcha it has.

There was a work around for the AVG uninstall mess. I went busy on the phone for 30 minutes. That’s all it took. Reran the AVG Uninstall and it did so. No consistency there.

Today I reinstalled AVG (don’t I ever learn) which went on OK and afterwards tried Windows Update and it worked.

What conclusion can I draw from this:

1) Rerun XP Setup which goes OK but messes up AVG

2) Try and uninstall AVG which fails for a couple of hours until a particular keyboard combination has occured in any 1 minute then uninstalls OK

3) Whilst AVG was upset Windows Update does download stuff but won’t install it

4) Reinstall AVG OK and Windows Update works again.

I’ll be glad to see the back of the Registry (Might be an idea to un-install AVG before running XP setup so we don’t have to hear these daft stories. Ed)

Quote of the day

‘Happiness is having a large, loving, caring, close-knit family in another city’ George Burns (1896-1996)