We managed to get a release of software live the other week and it was on time, a miracle where I am right now.

A whole load of problems came up in the last few days but we got them sorted out. Seems that this happens a lot, everybody gets stuck in to try and make the release get delayed, but it didn’t work this time. I got a lot of goodwill from this release. I was bcc’d an email to the one of the top guys at the company and was it a good reference. Jeez, that’s getting put in the resume.

We have another release due and its a magnitude more complex and, because of the last success, I’ve got no more help. That’ll teach me to be to smart. There are a whole load of specs and they’ve finally been signed off and that is a teeth pulling exercise in pain. Everybody looks at the process of signing off the specs and fails it numerous times. Eventually it got OK’d then I thought I’d have a look at it and guess what? I found loads of problems. Problems that were found in the last release and ended up either as raised defects or change requests and they’ve wrongly been re-spec’d. Why weren’t they found by those people failing the specs at sign-off time? So now there’s 6 major issues that have been sent to the software house pleading with them to amend the specs to reflect the changes. Now people are acusing me of finding problems with the software before it’s been written. He-he. Better now than later I suppose.

I spent the whole day writing test requirements in HP Quality Center and that’s one of the few times when I can listen to the music on the iPhone or iPod. If I’m writing test plans or running tests forget it, no chance of listening to music. Today all I listened to was Jay-Z for about 6 hours, and it was great.

The Register - www.theregister.co.uk - has run some pretty negative stories about the iPhone’s security or rather lack of it, and this has confirmed to the iPhone’s haters that it just a toy and not to be taken seriously. Also some of the article’s readers comments were that there was no way that any corporation would ever consider deploying iPhones to their staff as it just isn’t up to the job.

The thinking is that the iPhone is just too insecure compared to the Blackberry, which can be locked down and controlled by the corporations administrators. Obviously Apple will sort out the security problems soon but nevertheless I can’t see how the iPhone is ever going to fit as a deployed PDA, or whatever they call them these days, by any company as many users just couldn’t use it to its full potential. You’ll end up with some tech-savvy users getting the most of the functionality working whereas most of the rest just will not be able to work out how to do that stuff and will get frustrated.

Can you see any corporation being happy with their staff and their deployed iPhones where the users can install apps direct from the App Store over 3G and where they’re not controlled by the IT department? Don’t think so. And what about loading music from iTunes, downloading and syncing podcasts, watching junk on YouTube, loading photos – well you might get away with that, setting up and downloading personal email from their own ISP, Hotmail, Gmail, Yahoo and lord knows who else. Then there’s downloaded TV programs and movies, and own ripped films with the barely legal AnyDVD and the ever so useful Handbrake. And the apps: GPS trackers, Facebook and Linkedin clients, one-click multi-login chat clients, internet radio clients, traffic web cams, blog readers, RSS clients, RDP clients. Not a chance.

Best give the users a level playing field with a much more basic phone like a Blackberry where they can’t fiddle too much and trash their iPhones or level the network and not be able to install anything.

And all this just to get office email when I’m at home or on holiday. Am I missing something here?