Had a defect to clear yesterday that was so confusing it took me the best part of 5 hours, and that was just to confirm that it worked ok.

How can it take that long? If the original defect had been worded better, in FogBUGZ, then it would have taken less time to clear. If the developers had been at least a little clearer, in their response on the defect in FogBUGZ, then it would have taken even less time, but it wasn’t. The error was in the calling of a third party plug-in which gave various information on prescribed drugs. There were a few problems that had been fixed. One was that an icon that was used for the display of drug information, where the third-party did have information, was wrongly enabled when they had no information. Another problem was where the software was losing focus on one of its windows and in a fit sadism the underlying in-house written software shot one of its own windows forwards and plastered it all over the window that had lost focus. Nice.

With those kinds of problems you really have to test the whole application ground up as it is necessary to test every part of it in case any remedial code has shot something else in the foot big time. I barely knew the plug-in, hence all those hours at the coal face. The plug-in displayed various drug information depending on the drug being enquired upon and the patient it was being administered to. Part of the problem was in finding the correct data so that I could check that the right information was displayed.

On the FogBUGZ system, that they use for defect management they like the idea of the testers, as a response to the developers lip when a defect is handed over, writing a test plan or test approach. This should be quite straightforward in that it is a list of the steps taken to prove the defect has been cleared. For the monster plug-in I described a heavy 15 steps, and according to Word, it consisted of 638 words. Well they asked for it.

Linkedin, and then? 

I’m still getting some invites from people on the Linkedin networking site. I’m pretty sure that this is due to very high profile media talk about social networking sites like Facebook and people are just investigating them to see who they know. I’ve been on Linkedin for a year or two haven’t found much use for it yet. I was stuck with about 8 contacts for most of that time. In the last month or so I’ve garnered another 10 or so. It’s good how when you enter your workplace and dates that it offers possible links of other contacts that were at the same company at that time. Still can’t think what I’m supposed to do with it though, apart from it being a very patchy address book.