Second day on the new contract and I had a couple of meetings with people and a couple of sessions where within a 2 hour period I was expected to become an expert at the Pharmacist software we will be throttling in the next few months.

To learn how some software works is one thing but to even start to understand the pharmacy side was another. I was told later that the ‘teacher’ in the situation was told to make it ‘very intensive’. Anyway I spent the afternoon trying to replicate the software use I had been shown in the morning, and just about managed to do that. In fact it was better than that as I actually stumbled upon a couple of defects, one where a report was printing wrong data and a couple of system crashes. Of course these were ad-hoc tests, run in a very uncontrolled manner. What I call ‘discovery testing’. Not sure whether that term means anything to anybody else, but I like it. Hmmmm…I wonder what gobbledy gook I could generate if I stuck a question on ’what is discovery testing’ on the Microsoft testing forum, or any other for that matter?

And talking of forums why are there so many people that read forums but never post?

If you look at the number of viewers of posts compared to the number of actual responders, the viewers figure is many times the latter number.  Are these numerous viewers too scared to post in case they get shot down by the over-zealous moderators? Could be. But then if you look at so many of the threads they are just round upon round of chaos and confusion. I’m not sure you can actually glean much usefull information from some of them. I’ve had numerous emails from people who actually regard them as hilarious (They are funny sometimes. Ed).

I just don’t get it. It’s as if the people that run these things actually want them dumbed down and just leave a load of confused threads, sometimes barely in English, to perpetrate total anarchy. I read them sometimes and usually come away a bit depressed by some of the threads. I’m pretty sure a lot of others read them as kids read comics, solely as comical entertainment. Maybe I take them too seriously.

Visited the SQA Forums yesterday and stuck up half a dozen entries, of which half were removed by el modo.

This has happened several times in the past and no doubt will happen again in the future. I’m sure I’m not the only person who has their entries removed by the fearsome moderators. I think some of these forums just love the more, how shall we say, chaotic type questions. There are always loads of entries that veer off topic and which are then moved to the correct thread. Then some bright spark posts a response to that newly planted entry and that entry goes off topic and back to the original subject, at which point the thread needs replanting again.

When I look at some forums I do see some very odd threads and some are just nonsense. For instance one person was asking how you test the search results of a Google search for the term ‘software testing’. I mean, get a life, what sort of question is that. Several commendable people did try and help the poor guy but for heavens sake. 

Apart from possibly checking that the first few hundred returned pages were about ‘software testing’ I can’t think what else you could check for (Can I hear the sound of logic being chopped? Ed). Google returned a result count of about 58 million pages and we have no idea how Google stores this data, let alone whether it’s correct. For all we know halfway through the search the Google code, in an attempt at coming up with a hit count higher than anything Yahoo could produce, could have gone off topic and buried itself in a thread/count for a search on Paris Hilton.

The odd thing is that these, embarrassing at the least, questions are actually left there on the forum. Why? To perpetuate the confusion? 

Another guy was almost demanding to be told how to do some kind of testing and obviously had no testing experience so could never give anything back to the forum. I did enter an entry on how it was supposed to be a forum where discussion took place and not a one-sided request for a complete brain dump on a subject. Needless to say that entry was pulled. Go figure.

The arrogant initial question is still lurking there ready to pounce and trip up some hapless reader.

Quote of the day

‘Military justice is to justice what military music is to music’ Groucho Marx

I rediscovered SQAforums.com the other day, which is a forum for discussing testing subjects, and man is that good value for money.

It’s not so much a discussion forum as a generator of confusion. Some of the invoked threads are more like begging letters for knowledge, others are written in barely understandable English and a few are just plain gibberish. One guy was going on about the German work permit rules. Give me strength.

Like so many forums somebody invokes a topic for discussion and others decide to chop logic and submit contrary opinions. They talk about it and then talk some more and then a bit more and when finally the subject has had the living daylights beaten out of it and all arguements have been trashed to pieces what’s left? Everybody’s sort of standing around looking a bit dazed thinking ‘I thought I knew about that subject, obviously not’. You need an iron constitution going into them places. I have submitted a couple of posts in a vain attempt at straightening out someone’s hopelessly twisted logic but I bet I didn’t.

I have been testing software for many years and at many sites and do think I have a pretty good understanding of the various terms used in testing but I have a feeling if I read too many of the SQA Forums discussion threads and got involved in them sooner or later someone will try and convince me that really I have no understanding of system testing at all.

One discussion concerned the meaning of the terms test specification and test case. And it seems that these terms have different meanings at different companies. The same can be said for the terms: test plan, test requirement, test script in that there is no definitive understanding of any of these terms. So when somebody invokes a thread on test scripts there will be about 3 or 4 different understandings of that  term. Hence massive confusion. Pity the poor moderator trying to keep that lot in-line. Sorta forum of chaos.

I have been trying to understand the Deep Log Analyser statistics and I can’t. This app’s only source of data is the log files, so I figured they would have to match the statistics displayed by the hosting company which obviously also uses the same raw log files. And do they match? No. One shows half the site visits of the other. There is obviously some confusion (What more of that stuff? Ed) between site visits and page views.

A single site visit could result in several blog entries being read. But are these different entries considered to be different pages? Unlikely as a ‘page’ of this blog actually displays 8 blog entries and as reading them merely involves the use of the scroll bar then no different ‘pages’ are displayed.

I have a feeling that if I only have a single entry displayed on a page then all of these nonsense statistics will go away. The trouble with that is that I will then have 2 side bars from hell with all of the adverts, hanging way below the single blog entry (You mean those tramlines filled with the adverts you’ve flung up, in a cockamamie attempt at an advertising campaign? Ed).