Wednesday, January 18, 2012

SOPA, wikipedia and black days...

SOPA --- This term is doing the round these days and a lot has been written about it already. Today, wikipedia have termed it a black day for themselves.

I interviewed myself today; the objective was to execute only 1 test case to test implementation of the SOPA act when it gets implemented and try to break it in the 1st try. My test case is listed below:-

Test Case --- Search for a wiki page that has blacklisted material and has been in existence for a few years; confirm that the material is blacklisted on the wiki; Do a google search and visit Google cache and check if that information is available. My guess is that it will be available; (I had posted a blog post 2 years back, deleted it a year and a half back and this post is still visible in Google Cache)

Does that mean that there will be a Google Black Day too with Google users protesting to protect their data, if SOPA were to be implemented? :)

Sunday, January 8, 2012

Corporate Lies and Timesheets

All testers have filled timesheets; most people fill out timesheets stating that we work 8 hrs in a day. That is today's biggest lie from the corporates. We all know that it is never ever possible to work exactly for 8 hours 0 mins and 0 seconds; obviously, it would be for sometime more than that or less than that. When questioned, the project manager would cleverly counter that claim stating that he did not work for 8 hours, but that he did 8 hours worth of work on that day; The argument claims that he might have taken sometime more or less, but then the work that he did was work that's worth 8 hours. That becomes the 2nd biggest lie.

If he had the ability to do 8 hrs of work in less than that time, then how could it be 8 hours worth of work? To answer this, the senior project manager would claim the development of components that reduce his working time and improve productivity. And then he would bring in the magic word "automation" to claim that they were able to automate that much amount of time to reduce productivity.

That's the 3rd biggest lie; most automation that's been developed would be screen capture components. The 3rd question is if it reduces the working hours, then why does it not improve billing time and gives the client reduced billing time? To answer that, the client would most probably say that they will reduce billing time, but the tool that's being used is created for intelectual usage and the company has to pay for that tool usage.

And the conversation goes on... The conversation, which started with a focus on quality, ends due to money. In the end, money wins and quality loses!!!