Did I mention that we had the opportunity of a massive contract if we could set up the interfaces between the system that is currently in use by a group of practices and our amazing easy-to-use fabulously intuitive (or not) new system?
Well, what has happened is that justintimeJack has been pulled off his bit of the development work so he can concentrate on working out all the interface code. JustintimeJack is going skiing next week. He’s very excited about it. Every time I pass his computer I see that he is checking the current snowfall in France. Oh I am so so sorry Jack, it’s snowboarding not skiing. You are sliding down an icy and cold slope on one bit of laminated fibreglass, not two (yes, I know it’s not fibreglass, I am merely giving all your cold-weather sports pedants the opportunity for a brief moment of superiority as you get a photo taken of yourself drinking marshmallows soaked in cocoa in your hot tub).
I, with my well-known talent for knowing what the user wants to do, am writing the test plan. I like test plans.
What does this one involve?
This one involves creating a massive number of spreadsheet records, containing every possible combination of hours and rates and holiday and part-timeiness and whether they’re a partner or not, and whether they’re claiming civil partnership adoption allowance and so on and so on and so on.
And running them through Jack’s conversion algorithm to see if they all come out in the right place with the right rates on them.
And then adding the record where it fails to bugzilla along with a description of how I managed to make it break THIS time, and assigning it to jitJack along with one of the highly-amusing states that the developers put on a bug.
These can be summarised as follows:
Not a bug
Can’t be arsed
Can’t recreate
Duplicate of xxxx
Only if they pay us more money
If we have time
Crucial
Deal-breaker
And of course, all the ones that people spend all the time on are the ones they find interesting and the deal-breakers, where smoke is emerging from Ian’s nostrils as yet again Nick explains why he did three of the “if we have time” bugs rather than the dull but crucial one.
And I get re-sent endless copies of can’t recreate – often with a “which version were you running it under” or “where’s the file”
to which my replies nearly always “the latest” and “It’s attached”.
Anyway, my skills at describing exactly what went wrong this time are going up by leaps and bounds. Let us celebrate. We nearly managed to complete a whole import export and re-import data cycle. Doesn’t that sound fun?