October 5, 2012
Dear Everyone:
I’ve been having a nice quiet, productive week.
Getting through one
Test Script after another with few, if any,
roadblocks. It may be just a
coincidence that “Ludmilla” is on vacation this week.
And you may be wondering:
If Functional Set 3 (FS3), the latest, and last, phase in the
Project went into Production last week, why are we still writing Test
Scripts? Good question.
In a cart-before-the-horse kind of scenario, many
“tests” actually took place before there were any Test Scripts to
follow. Or they were
quick-and-dirty lists of “steps” to-be-determined-at-a-later-time.
Now that things have “calmed down” a bit, we’re
in catch-up-mode. Because
those Tests have to be “in place” before the next “upgrade” in the
software. It’s a Compliance
Issue.
Two Things:
1.
Where there’s software, there will always be upgrades
2.
It’s not a question of if
you get audited; it’s only a question of
when
And when that audit comes, you want to be
prepared. Have all your
ducks in a row, so to speak.
That means having all your Test Scripts in place and ready to go long
before said upgrade takes place.
So I’ve been working on Test Scripts for Phase 1,
which has been in place for months now; but the Scripts kind of fell by
the wayside in all the rush to get through Phases 2 and 3.
Needless to say, all the changes in Phases 2 and 3 had an
inevitable affect on the Scripts for Phase 1.
What used to go North goes South now.
Another problem:
Test IDs. Originally
set up for testing, these IDs tend to be hijacked by the programmers
whenever they want to, well, test something.
I ran into a similar issue back in my training days, when the
programmers would “borrow” the Training Environment to use as another
“testing sandbox” to try things out without messing up their own test
environment.
Now many of the Test IDs are so “hosed” that
there’s a movement to scrap them altogether.
Too much upkeep.
But then there’s that specter of the Auditors
looming on the horizon.
Those Test Scripts have to be in place and they have to work at a
moment’s notice. And that
can’t happen unless the Test IDs are in place.
So next week, when “Ludmilla” comes back from her
vacation, we’ll be having a meeting to decide which Test IDs absolutely,
positively must be in place and how to keep them pristine.
In preparation for which I’ve started a “matrix”.
(Insert your
Keanu Reeves joke here.)
Really, it’s just a chart listing all the “known”
IDs (213 and counting) down the side and all the Tests across the top.
This will give us an idea of just which IDs are really,
really used in which Tests and which ones have been hanging around
“just in case.”
We’ll see what “Ludmilla” thinks of it next week.
In other news…
Yes, I did watch the First
Presidential Debate on
TV this week.
The Big Question:
Would “Mitt the Twit” really cut the legs off
Big Bird?
At some point Twit pronounced that he “liked” Big
Bird, but would cut funding to Public Television (PBS) to reduce
The
Deficit.
For those of you just returning from
Intergalactic Travel, “Big Bird” is a reference to a popular children’s
show on PBS called Sesame Street, which debuted about the time I started college (back
in the Stone Age). “The
Deficit” is a reference to how much money the US Government spends each
year (too much) in contrast to how much it receives each year (not
enough).
Whenever a politician wants to curry favor with
taxpayers, he/she threatens to “cut something”, usually something not
terribly important to the politician’s political base.
Back in the mid-90s, the favorite “whipping boy” was the
National
Endowment for the Arts (NEA).
Someone sat down with a calculator and computed
that the NEA cost the “average American household” approximately $0.64,
or the cost of two First Class postage stamps (postage cost less back
then.) So cutting 64 cents
per household is not much.
Do you see the fallacy here?
They took the annual amount provided to the NEA and divided it by the
number of households in the
United States. Not by the
number of taxpayers.
This is known in mathematics as “comparing apples
to oranges”.
But you can make statistics say anything you
want.
For instance, the
National Rifle Association
(NRA) is fond of quoting that more people die in automobile accidents
than by firearms each year.
First of all, the one has nothing to do with the other.
Second, people do not buy cars for the express purpose of getting
into a fatal accident; people do buy guns for the express purpose of
shooting something; or someone.
Getting back to Twit’s threat to demolish Big
Bird: The cost of PBS,
compared to The Deficit, is miniscule.
It would be like claiming you could put out a five-alarm fire
with a squirt gun.
Love, as always,
Pete
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