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