Just saw a terrific position up in the city testing derivatives. Can’t think of anything better, testing one-on-one with the developer and user really complex processing. Real agile stuff. They even want SQL, Test Director and Unix, which is perfect for me.  

No point in phoning up about it as there will be a little guy, who may be very young, who knows absolute squat about IT development guarding the phone and deciding who to put forward, the agent. And there’s as much chance of him putting me forward as a one-armed blind man in a dark room trying to shove a pound of melted butter into a wild cat’s left ear with a red-hot needle.

Microsoft has confirmed that in Windows Server 2008 beta 3 that it will begin building Windows Server components the UNIX way: Command line first, with GUI tools built on top of the command line stuff. Erm…haven’t we been here before?

There is a breed of tester that shies away from problems, an attitude that doesn’t sound unreasonable except that testing software is supposed to be finding problems. No these guys don’t want to be connected with system failings at all. All they want to be able to do is tell the management that yes the software is fine and can be released on the expected live date. Some weaker management types love these guys.

This is the quintessential rubber-stamper (RS) and look down with scorn at those who find bugs and defects, in other words those people who actually make the system work. The RS’s sole reason for doing his work is to ‘prove the system works’ and of course they do do that.

When testing they only apply good data that has a flying chance of working and running the system in as gentle a way as possible to give it every chance of working and then being able to turn to the management and say ‘the system works’. And he can say that despite all those pests forever trying to find holes in the system and knocking over servers.

Not sure if these RS’s are trying hard enough to make systems rock hard. I wonder what the RS’s attitude is when running their home PC’s and they bump into a Windows ‘feature’, they probably scream blue murder that it hasn’t been tested enough. Having cake -> eating it.

I wonder if peoples reticence in migrating to Vista, or even just getting a new PC running XP, is because they have accumulated so much data on their old PC that they’re worried about how to get that onto a new PC.

They’ve probably got a choc-a-block PC full of all their Word docs, spreadsheets, emails, pictures, music files, movie files, Internet Explorer links and game settings and that stuff is important to them and they don’t want to lose any of it. They’ve also probably got a bit of a nagging feeling at the back of their mind on what’s going to happen if their old PC fatally crashes.

Backing up data under XP

I suppose the first issue here is that backing up data is such a pain. Many of us know that we don’t need to backup everything, only user generated data. Now that might make sense to you and me but to a lot of users it isn’t necessarily so. All they want to know is that if something goes wrong that they can get back to base camp OK.

Of course they can write all of these files to a CD or DVD, and make a backup of that too if they have any sense. But these files are splattered all over their hard drives and the regular user is not necessarily going to know where they are stored, and why should he care where they are stored anyway. Most of the software he uses is written by Microsoft, as is the operating system, so between them they should be able to backup all this stuff, and it should be very simple and intuitive,  yet it just isn’t that simple.

Of course Vista does have a backup utility, as does Live One Care. Running in default mode both of these utilities do seem to be looking for all of these relevant files, plus more than you might expect. As a test I have just started both of these utilities to see what they would find. And oh boy, they found a lot. As this PC, I’m using right now, has been updated to Vista from XP there is a folder of old XP Windows files which included a lot of movie and music files. Nothing wrong with that except that the backup process wants to backup those files too, and because there are so many of these files, the total backup size is going to be numerous gigabytes. This would therefore necessitate a backup over more than a single disc. Not a good start. 

You can see that this is starting to get a bit complicated and maybe the user will start to lose confidence in all of this. Of course he can find his local geek to help him, but do we still need to rely on these guys. Shouldn’t backing up be a bit more user friendly and intuitive?

The test to do here is to check that the files to be backed up using both the default Vista backup utility and the One Care version are exactly the same, but life’s too short for that kind of thing, and unless the backup engine is the same I bet there are differences.

And what happens when the PC crashes and you try and restore from either of these backups of just user data. Is it going to work perfectly? Another test from hell. So much for regular backups in XP or other Windows variants.

Data migration to Vista

I think what the user really needs is an absolute bullet-proof, rock hard migration function built into any new version of windows. I know that this can all get very complicated by having multiple users of a PC but any new function for the migration of data should be performed on a user by user basis.

This is almost more important than any other new functionality within a new version of Windows. A lot of people would buy a new PC, having allowed Microsoft’s Windows to have gently trashed their current PC during its lifetime, just to get a stable version of Windows, like when it was originally bought. Provided the new Windows version manages the data migration perfectly so that the user has his old stuff on the new PC and it works 100% correctly then they’ll be happy. Imagine, you get a new Vista PC, run a migration application on both old and new PC’s and all your data and settings are on the new PC, just what everyone wants. And if by any kind of miracle Microsoft have actually managed to produce some further functionality that actually works well, then that’s a bonus.

Weather here is a bit warmer so spent morning messing in Santa Monica and afternoon in/at/on Venice Beach.

Quote of the day

‘A little inaccuracy sometimes saves tons of explanation’ Saki (1870-1916)