Nuts and Bolts

I'm settling down at the moment after a couple of days away ...

Two part post here :-) First bit is about the latest wonderful Pixar film, Bolt. Second bit is what I've been up to for the past few days ...

Testing finished a little earlier than it may have, so I was able to sneak back for Pizza & Film :-) The entertainment was Bolt, the story of a puppy with superpowers. Amazing film, will definitely be wearing out the dvd of this one :-) It's not often a film brings out a tear or two and this one came extremely close several times. As a dog person, they do a fantastic job of getting the character Bolt on screen.

Lots of laughs here too amongst the story. Well worth watching.

Film also means pizza :-) Was wondering for a while as to whether our waitress used the pen that she had wedged into the hairband that was keeping her hair in a ponytail. Rather imaginative place to keep a pen, although I dread to think how many penmarks she has on the back of a very pretty head.

Part 2 !

My work occasionally involves witnessing requirements testing. We do that at our contractors' sites, as it doesn't make much sense to bring the equipment to the witnesses when the witnesses can go to the equipment. What it means is a trip up and down the M4 and a day or two in a hotel room. I'm fairly used to knowing what to expect now, so I arrange things to keep the boredom away. It's a bit of a disconnected experience, as I'm not too interested in spending £10 on wifi access for a day or £20 for a week. Maybe if I was away for a week but not for a couple of days :-)

What do these sessions usually involve ?

I like to keep the variables down to a minimum, which means not depending on the train (counter intuitive that isn't it ?) and using my own car instead of hire cars. There's a couple of problems with hire cars with work, one is the insurance conditions and the other comes through the whole hire thing ... One colleague this week arrived late due to a problem with his hire car, the other had to find it ... as it hadn't been dropped off at his house. So taking my own car means cutting out a big variable. I'm not the best Morning Person, so I try to arrange things so I don't have to think when going out the door. If I pack on the morning, I'll forget something critical - guaranteed :-)

Why do I dislike trains ? Cost for one, reliability is another ... The trip there and back by car will cost my employer about £65, going by train would at least triple that, plus taxi fares for hotel<->office. Plus there's usually about 3 changes needed with the associated chance of missing one and getting stranded. The train companies could do with looking at themselves and thinking why people ignore them. (However, I would use the Underground in London!) Oh - Car also means IpodFM :-)

The testing itself involves sitting in a lab with lots of computer equipment, watching the testers run through a script that is intended to test the functionality of the software. It's pretty painstaking stuff and the tests are pretty detailed. Things like a test that is scheduled to take 6 hours to check whether a system can display a map properly or seeing if all the options on your word processor work properly.

That's kinda what we do in this testing, making sure the software "Works As Intended". That's an absolutely magic phrase I've nabbed from World of Warcraft, which gets used to describe all those little bugs where things don't work quite like the user wanted but it is working as written in the system. Computers are very literal beasties, they have no self-determination, so every one of those bugs/features that crop up have been put in by a programmer.

It can get a bit boring though, so to stay focused we do a few things to keep the brain working. One I do is to check off all the requirement statements as we go, which is going beyond what I really need to do. These events aren't really presenting the kit to my organisation, it's a relationship of Customer -> Contractor -> Subcontractor. I'm representing the end customer but the real acceptance is Contractor accepting from Subcontractor, so I'm one step above that. Which means I only sign off a subset of the total requirements being tested.

That's one of the methods ... The other is :

Biscuits & Coffee !

Of the strong black variety. And chocolate on the biscuits if you get into the selection box early enough. (There's a few notorious chocolate biscuit fiends involved :-)

Evenings can be a little strange. I tend to avoid dinner in the hotel as I object to paying too much for food. Even though I'd get it back on expenses, I still get the objection to being ripped off. I'm chubby enough to be able to miss a dinner or two, plus the cookies I raided helped :-) But I was glad to have the pizza earlier. My evenings were chilled out with the cricket on the telly, plus about 250 pages of Matter by Iain M Banks. Bit of a struggle that one as there's not as much of The Culture as in most of his Culture novels.

So now I'm back and it's time for the detox ... 3 days worth of strong coffee plus horribly unbalanced diet means dehydration and unbalanced metabolism, so I'm now trying to still the shaking hands (kidding!) and chilling out to iTunes music. Plus a bit of Blog too :-)

Early night probably tonight - haven't turned my main PC back on yet so I doubt whether I'll be exploring any more of the story of Commander Shepherd in the game Mass Effect.