Finally escaped from my last contract and good luck to them.

I have no doubt Mr Magoo will be there for a while yet, terrorising the weaker staff and bolting together his slapdash test systems which via testing are made good. As far as I am concerned the project was a bit of a failure. They had huge timescales for the development of the system yet it will almost certainly still be late going live and however well they test it, and in the short term they will trash it to pieces, and however well they develop and make good the test system, the system that is built for the live servers will be yet another beast and will no doubt include numerous defects found in the test system and fixed there. Obviously a configuration issue. No wonder the management wonder why they bother testing systems.

Several tmes I made suggestions on improving some of their process’s and usually the suggestion was initially well received but there were people on the project who weren’t interested in any kind of change, so their response would be to have meeting about it, round up the usual negative to change suspects and then at the meeting kill any idea stone dead. This has apparently been going on for years and until such time as the negative to change types are removed they will hold the project to ransom.

One other sad thing is that up untill this project I had on my resume a statistic that all of my previous 3 projects had gone live on time and under budget. That statistic now has to be removed which is a shame.

Starting a new contract tomorrow with a pharmaceuticals company, and what  do I know about that business, but it is much nearer home so that’s good.

Yesterday when I plugged my iPod into the charger/synchronizer I got a message on the PC that the iPod disk needed formatting.

I ignored that message, the iPod sort of switched itself off, then it rebooted itself. After about 5 minutes it recovered and was working OK. If I had OK’d the original message would it actually have reformatted the hard drive? And if so how easy would it have been to re-sync iTunes with the iPod afterwards. That’s a horrible question to get if you’re a regular user and don’t really understand the format process.

No smoking inside, just remove the walls

It’s been a month since they banned smoking in bars and pubs and I think it’s had a surprising affect on a lot of people. All the vehement anti-smoking people in the months before the ban were getting a bit smug but now the ban is in place a lot of bars and pubs are empty. Something’s definitely been lost in the atmosphere in the pubs (Yeah, the smoke you idiot. Ed). But outside the smokers are all sort of bonding and appear to be having a better time than us inside. Also, awnings are starting to appear outside, as well as a lot more tables and chairs. Next is due a lot more outside lights, then heaters I suppose. Jeez, it’s getting almost like inside.

I have just seen an outside bar/pub, which was circular with a roof over just the bar area. That allows people to actually smoke at the bar as it is still outside. Well, that didn’t take long did it. Now there’s more smoke floating around outside than inside. Not sure if the anti-smoking people dare utter a peep.

Just checked my Sitemeter stats for today (13:00 GMT) and their count of visits to this site has missed at least 80% of the hits. Worse still, I have just had a look at the Sitemeter who’s on page, who is currently viewing the blog, and it says there have been no visits for the last 20 minutes. I also checked this page 20 minutes ago with the same result. If I look at my blog log file, which registers all visits, including spiders and feeds as well as normal visits I can see a lot of activity. Am I paying per month for this the more professional version of Sitemeter. Why do I beat myself up with this garbage. The staff at Sitemeter can justify these lousy stats, but I betcha they don’t use their own product to accumulate visits to the Sitemeter site.

Test Director questions

I look in the SQAForums every now and again. They have numerous threads on different subject of testing. When you look at many of the questions posed it is pretty obvious that a lot of the posters have absolutely no software testing experience at all and ask questions so wide that they need a complete brain dump on the subject to answer the question. There was one question either in the interview questions thread or the Test Director thread where somebody wanted to know answers to a TD interview. Sounded like he was going to an interview at a company which used TD and he wanted answers to any possible questions. Didn’t he have any knowledge of the product? Has he never used TD? If not then why were this company interested in interviewing him? Maybe they had just bought the TD product and wanted to hire people with TD experience. Sounds more like the blind leading the blind to me. Shudder.

Oh to be a fly on the wall at that interview.