Skip to main content

Days 21-23 2022: Truth In Software Testing


The Truth And Nothing But The Truth


Friday I had my brain melted by a 5 and bit hour Zoom meeting. We were attempting to do a full end to end walkthrough of the process/Application we are testing. To use a theatre term is was a "Dress Rehearsal" for next week when we get the business users to do the same thing. It took that long because the application is still riddled with bugs. As well the bugs there as many environmental issues. At almost every point of the process, there are problems. There was aghast team leads on the call who had never seen the application in full flow. The reality of what we have to do to get it to work left them shocked.

Our team lead joked with us that they were not allowed to use certain phrases. Phrases like "Environmental Issues" or "Application Issues." are best avoided when they are talking to the business stakeholders. It got me thinking about how progress gets reported in Software Development. A lot of the time managers it is often trying to sing a tune the Stakeholders wants to hear. All the Stakeholders want to hear is the crafted pop song. The reality? A producer has spent a night feeding the singer's tuneless voice through an Auto-tuner. Everything is great till that singer has to go on stage and sing it live*. (* there are some rumours to get around this certain artists use backing tapes even live)

I have never been in senior management, so I have never had to do the song and dance routine for the stakeholders. I understand that sometimes there may be a need to "parse" reality now and again. I have been on a couple of projects where this parsing has gotten to be the norm and it starts to warp reality.

Truth and Transparency should be at the base of any Software Development. Bending the truth only hurts the project later, and is not good for the people working on that project. Bring the stakeholders in early as possible and show them the reality. You will get a better project that way.


What are your thoughts and experiences?
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Feedback.

Yes, indeed I am still very much unemployed. I have had a couple of video interviews that have sadly been unsuccessful. One of the interviews I did was with someone I used to work with so there was no hiding place in that one. There were two pieces of telling feedback from them. The first was that they thought that maybe the learning curve in the job might be too much for me. They thought I was too "Product based" and they were "Project-based" which I absolutely understand but I think I could easily transition to that kind of work process but they obviously  did not feel that. I should cotton on to that in the interview but did not at the time. The second piece of feedback was actually quite interesting and did make me sit up to think. They thought I was too negative about my previous employer and my experience there; which as I have already documented was not exactly a happy one. This has got me thinking about how do you go about talking about previous employment e...
Post a Comment
Read more

Day 19 of 2022: Feeling a Bit Useless

Imposter Syndrome kicking in It might be mid-week blues or me having an off day, but today I felt like I was not good enough for my job. The old confidence took a but of dunt when I lost my job a couple of years back. I am not sure I have worked that through the how's and whys of what happened. That might be for another day, I am kicking that particular can down the road. Today I felt as if was not contributing enough, I am trying to feel my around and a complicated Software Package. It is a bit like being in a dark room. I am also blindfolded and there is a voice yelling "Why haven't you found it yet-get a move on". One crumb of comfort is that I am in this situation with other people who are in the same predicament. We keep bumping into each other and saying "Have you found the door yet", "Nope" and off we bumble. When I lost the job, I did contemplate "I am cut out to be Tester?" Today I found myself contemplating that question again....
Post a Comment
Read more

Day 25 of 2022 : Behind the Walled Garden of Delights

In Your Garden of Delights.. The other day I noticed a story about Disney clawing back a lot of their content is on Netflix. It would appear the days of shared content across platforms is diminishing. The streaming providers want to keep you in their walled garden for as much as possible. If you are a serious tv watcher you are now going to have to subscribe to at least three if not four providers. All that to watch your fave film or TV show. My arithmetic is not that great but it would be safe to say that would be not shy of well over £350 a year. Ouch. We have Prime and Netflix and we do watch them a lot. I had Prime when it was Love Film and £4.99 was a good price. When Amazon came along and waved their wonga at Love Film I continued to only pay £4.99 for years and years. It was down the contract that Amazon had to fulfil. I have since upgraded to a Prime user so now fork out £7.99. My wife decided to pay for Netflix, as she wanted to watch a certain show for a bit. I have to be hon...
Post a Comment
Read more