Now that the project has been smashed to smithereens, by the only client jumping ship, it seems that my contract will finish earlier than I expected as the team is being downsized to just the permies.

No doubt as soon as we have left we will be blamed for the project going so badly. I did tell one of the testing guru’s, about 6 months ago, that what this project will need sooner or later was a scapegoat. He was a bit shocked by that comment but then he hasn’t been around the block that much so probably hasn’t seen that many failing projects.

Now I have a resume with a relatively short contract on it, which is not good, and I will need to justify that in future interviews. I could say ‘they were a buncha klutzes that didn’t know **** from shinola’ but probably won’t. One of the permies, who left the company last week, and for some reason thinks that I am a decent tester, has gone to work up in town as a test manager. As soon as he left he made contact with me through linkedin.com so maybe something may come of that. It was him who told me about the big ball of mud link and why our project was so similar. I’ve also contacted an agent about some work with IBM in the city and also with a New York bank. The market appears to be a bit better than I thought it would be.

BBC iPlayer

I managed to get the BBC’s iPlayer working on the iPhone and it does work well. It needs a wi fi connection, just like Youtube and the iTunes Store, but provided the signal strength is OK then it works well. As soon as I moved too far from router and the signal got too weak, then the program being watched just pauses. You can re-tap on the play control but if there’s not enough oomph then squat happens. Better that than it trying to continue playing, replacing a pixel a second, for a lousy viewing experience.

I did move the router to two other spots in the house where there was a phone socket and that improved those devices which were now closer to the router, but my other PC’s started getting the bottleneck problem. This included the Vista machine that I play World of Warcraft on, I was disconnected about every 10 minutes so that was a non starter.

We have 4 PC’s, 2 Internet radios and the iPhone. Running all at the same time and all using the net is starting to cause some bottlenecks in data delivery (Well if you must be streaming 2 TV programs, downloading a movie with bittorrent, getting headers from 200 newsgroups with Newsbin Pro, running Windows update on 2 XP machines and 2 Vista machines and listening to 2 internet radios all at once, waddayaexpect? Ed). We have a theoretical top speed of 8mbps but get only 4mbps. If BT fatten up the pipe a bit that would help but is there anything I can do?

Somebody mentioned that to kill his similar problem he got an 802.11n router which has a better range and is quicker at delivery, but I would still be constrained by my ISP’s speed of delivery. I wouldn’t get disconnected from WoW unless of course I was downloading too much from the other devices. And how much is an 802.11n router? Is there such a thing as a 802.11n USB wifi dongle? If so I would need 4 of those for each of the PC’s but the 2 Internet radios and the iPhone would need some form of firmware update and I don’t feel exactly excited by the idea of doing that, especially after my iPhone 1.1.3 experience.

I signed up for the BBC’s iPlayer beta software, which allows you to watch some of their TV programs online from the last 7 days.

Doesn’t work on Vista, no change there then. Tried it on the XP machine and it only downloads the software, after you have logged in, when you have selected a program to watch. The first time I tried it, it came up with a message that I couldn’t use it as it needed Windows XP, Internet Explorer and Windows Media Player. I had the first two, but Media Player hadn’t been setup. Well it had been ages ago but I had so many problems with it that I uninstalled it. So I installed Media Player and rebooted. Tried again with the same result. It’s still convinced I haven’t all of the three required programs, well an operating system and two applications.

I’ve been displaying adverts in the blog entries for the last month and I’m not sure they look as good as the pictures I used to put up. Most of the pictures come from Flickr and hopefully are in the public domain, so that I can use them, providing I don’t make any money out of them. 

Had a big meeting on the new contract today and there is a lot of development work going on and they are hiring like mad. I came away feeling that there’s little chance of me getting them to do any software testing in any kind of structured way, at least for the short term, as they are fire fighting like mad. All hands to the pump and all that kind of thing.

I did overhear one of those macho testing conversations where one of the guys was boasting how he never raises low priority bugs, only big beefy bugs. Which is OK but somebody has to raise the low priority bugs, they can’t just be ignored. Low priority bugs are things like spelling mistakes. We have one defect where a table heading on the screen is not displayed correctly, it is actually displaying the column name e.g. customer_name instead of Customer Name. Not a big issue at all and well below the tolerance level of what many developers are actually willing to fix. So it doesn’t get fixed.

And how does that look to the user, month after month? Slightly annoying. The user thinks that none of the developers has actually noticed the error in the first place, nor the testers when they tested it, and ends up thinking about idiots in the computer room. The user would never be able to understand any reason why those kind of defects are left in the live version of the software. “It’s too small a problem and too easy to fix”, to him that explanation would just not make sense. Hence you get silly on-screen errors like that and spelling mistakes.

I have worked on many projects where they absolutely refuse to fix low priority defects, it seems in an effort to make ourselves look foolish.

center>