I’m on a project where they do agile development, scrum and a whole wack of exploratory testing.

The scrum meetings are just as I had read about them, a 6 minute standing chat around a table by 9 developers and 3 testers, confirming what they have done in the last 24 hours and what they intend to do in the next 24 hours. Nothing wrong with that, I suppose.

They definitely don’t do documentation. The only documentation we have is the acceptance criteria, written by the end user. In fact they have so little documentation that when I asked someone to print something for me the other day, she couldn’t actually print it. She had no printer driver installed on her PC, as she has never had to print anything before as there has never been anything to print. She has been on the project for several years.

Have struggled to level 30 on WoW.

Quote of the day

‘My idea of an agreeable person is a person who agrees with me’ Benjamin Disraeli (1804-1881)

A cousin of mine has found me on Facebook and was she underwhelmed by my page.

She found no pictures and one friend. A bit pathetic. I stumbled around my Facebook page and uploaded a couple of pictures, both of which were probably too small. I don’t really get the Facebook thing. It does seem very open. Seems that you publish everything about yourself for everyone to see. Hmmm…

Talking about stumbling, I’ve managed to get to level 27 on World of Warcraft and am battling away in Duskwood with all its ghouls, flesh eaters, plague spreaders and other horrible creatures and it’s not easy as there’s never anybody else about to party with. This means I am having the devils own job of completing quests in Duskwood. Suppose I could just abandon those quests and hack away at the creatures in the Redbridge Mountains where there are more other players.

Yesterday I asked someone to invite me to their party and the leader said no. They were all level 18-20’s. I thought they would have liked my help, being on level 27. But the leader was dead set against it.

Maybe the idea of my character being female and that many levels ahead of him, and therefore being able to help and save him, was something he didn’t like. Anyway, who cares. I did get the feeling I was talking to, at most, a 14 year old boy, and he obviously thought he was talking to someone of the same age.

Reminded me of being at school.

I’m still reading Arthur C. Clarke’s and Stephen Baxter’s book Firstborn and there’s precious little Clarke in it, mostly Baxter. Most of the book is a return to the subject of the Discontinuity from the first book of the three – ‘Times Eye’, and boy is this stuff confusing, but then it was confusing in ‘Times Eye’ as well. The chapters jump about like billy-o and it makes me want to draw up flowchart of the chapters to see if that makes any more sense. Maybe it will finish with a Clarke flourish. 

I had an interview for a position yesterday and it didn’t go well at all.

I was interviewed by 3 people and they sat on the opposite of the table very close together staring at me. Their body language was a bit negative. They were suspicious and they were the committee of death, ready to pounce and strangle any idea of a decent interview process. Right from the start it didn’t go well. The company name included the term ‘Human Resourcing Consultancy’. I checked their web site which reflected the company name. 

The first question at the interview, which must have been asked to throw me, and why bother doing that, was did I know what the company did, so I responded with the obvious answer. Wrong.  The answer was that the company had changed and was now a pensions administrator company. Duh! They then spoke about how the system testing was to be performed in future by the users and the job I was being interviewed for non-function testing. Double duh! I’m not even sure the words non-function testing are on my resume so why they wanted to interview me beats me. A complete waste of time.

Their systems sounded very old. Green character screens running cobol applications. That was what I used to program in in the 1980’s. Seems that with this company the 1990’s never happened. Client/Server, never heard of it.

But they have finally bitten the bullet and were getting Oracle 10g and a .NET compiler for the cobol programs, which obviously meant data migration and all sorts of other fun and games, and all needing serious testing. I think some bright spark at the company had a flash of inspiration and decided that the quickest way for the users to do the system testing was to automate the scripts with QTP. Now QTP is great for regression testing but not system testing. I did try and gently explain this to them but they were having none of it. In fact they were obviously annoyed as I had just mucked up their view of the world.

Oh well, they’ll have some fun attempting to system test with QTP. Should keep them busy thrashing away at the coal face for years.

Quote of the day

‘One cannot review a bad book without showing off’ W.H. Auden (1907-1973)