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>