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.