It's been a while...

Haven't updated here in quite some time now, simply haven't had the time for it. I've been completely swamped at work, trying to make as much as possible of our ridiculously unrealistic release plan for the fall/winter. I didn't want to update the blog in my spare time either, after the "breakdown" earlier I had to shut off all things work just to get back to my old self. It feels a lot better now, except for a "stress-stomach" which, I've learned, I just have to learn to live with. Thanks a lot, what a nice bonus...

After a lot of nagging I finally managed to get an intern to my department, if only for three months. No previous test experience (except for open beta-testing) but with a lot of gamer experience, which actually is very useful. I hope it will work out, the main reason for getting an intern at this time (not that we don't need one ALL THE TIME) is that I'm going on paternal leave for December. Yup, the family is growing, expected delivery within a few days. Exciting indeed!

We had a disaster of a release earlier this week. From the very beginning, I warned everyone involved that this is a very critical release with extremely high impact on our users and therefore it has to be thoroughly tested for an extended period of time. My request was unfortunately denied, somehow the release date was more important than quality. The result? As I said, complete disaster. Nothing worked according to plan and several of the issues were things I already raised my warning flag over. To make things really perfect, I couldn't even be there for the chaos since I had to stay home with my sick child. All I could do was to watch from the outside, and on the forums follow the fiery discussions about bad testers etc. If they only knew the truth behind the story... Sure, I partly blame myself for not making the "people in charge" change their mind about the release but at the same time I don't know if that would've been possible in the first place. They still have very little understanding about test and I do believe that they confuse testing with checking. Oh well...