What a mess...

OK, remember in my last post how I raved about my new job as a QA Manager at a different company, but within the same virtual world? Forget about it. It's been a total mess from beginning to end. The week after I quit my job as Test Lead (to the day 1 week after I signed on as QA Manager), the site manager of the new company came to see me. Due to financial issues, the American owner of the company ordered all new hires to be immediately let go, including myself. In reality that meant that my time with the new company would be over before it even started! To make things worse, my old company could not take me back since the financial issues I just mentioned also meant that outstanding payments from the Americans to my old employer could and would not be finalized, leaving them short of cash. So I went from new job to no job in just a week.

This, of course, sucked major ass and I instantly started to look for a new job somewhere else. Fortunately for me, the market is practically screaming for good testers at the moment and it didn't take long before I connected with several new potential employers. And wouldn't you know, the one company I wanted to work with the most also wanted me, and even though they haven't set up their regional office here yet (they will within a month), they agreed to hire me and pay me while I stay home and wait for them to officially open (or when I get an assignment, whichever comes first) just to make sure that no one else hires me. How about that?

There will (most likely) be no more testing of virtual world platforms though, but that doesn't matter one bit. However, I doubt that I will find the time to keep this blog updated (I barely do now), so even if I don't shut it down right away, don't expect a lot of activity here in the near future.

But then again, you never know...

The times they are a-changin'

Once again, it's been a long time since I updated, almost 2½ months actually. A lot has happened during this time. The biggest, and by far most important change is that I've become a father again, to a beautiful daughter. Any fathers (or mothers for that matter) out there know exactly how great that feeling is.

Another big change happened today. I quit my job as Test Lead! A month from now I will start as QA Manager with another company. Since it's a business partner to my current company I will still work on the same product, but not on a platform level. Instead I will focus on the quality of the content provided by the new company. Exciting times indeed! Perhaps I will miss the more system oriented testing I'm doing today, but I just had to get away from that workplace. The stress that nearly took me down last fall is still present and it's not a good environment for me. But a fresh start with a new position at this new company (where I already know almost everybody) is what I need.

Yup, this will be good.

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...

Sometimes it sucks to be me

I know I've been late with updates here but no excuses this time. I've been forced to cut down on activities for a while due to health issues. Fortunately I realized what the symptoms actually were in time, before it got even worse.

What's wrong with me? Well, it seems that I don't say "No" enough. That, and the fact that I take a lot of pride in my work, has been one of the reasons I finally hit the wall, stressed out to the max. But I will solve this, don't worry. I've already quit one very time consuming extracurricular activitiy - I'm no longer a board member in the housing cooperative. Neither will I spend extra hours at work just because management doesn't listen to our status reports and/or warnings. My primary focus is now my family and myself.

So, other than that, it's pretty much business as usual. The participant community still whines a lot, not seldom without good reason but ever so often about things they just don't understand (not calling them dumb or anything, they just don't have all the info). Management still don't fully understand what testing is all about and I find that my colleague and I still are expected to work miracles.

There were some good news for the company last week though, which potentially could mean a lot of improvements for us. But I'll try not to get too excited before I actually can see those improvements with my own eyes.

Back in Black...

...black being the color of my mood. This is just not funny anymore. After the vacation I was actually quite happy about going back to work, for some reason thinking things would have changed to the better. But no. Hell no.

Test is still an underappreciated part of the organization, a necessary evil, that management has decided to ignore as much as possible. When looking at the release plan for the fall, it becomes painfully clear that they either have no idea how much work we have to do for each massive update and leaves us with no more than five days to test, or they simply don't care if everything is tested or not, as long as we meet the release date.

To paraphrase Darth Vader: "I find the lack of professionalism disturbing".

I've actually reached the moment where I only wait for the upcoming, already paid for, conferences. As soon as they are over, I will do everything to get away from this underappreciated, extremely underpaid, job and find my luck somewhere else. The current situation is simply not good for me.

Charging the batteries

I know that I haven't been very active here lately and I apologize for that. This spring has been nothing but chaos at work and my motivation recently reached a new All Time Low. Fortunately for everyone involved I'm now on a much needed four week vacation, time that will be spent re-charging my batteries and hopefully my motivation as well.

This morning I read a tweet from James Bach, pointing me to a blogpost by Parimala Shankaraiah, the "Curious Tester". In this post she writes about interviewing/recruiting testers and that got me thinking about the time we recruited my colleague, a little more than a year ago.

For a long time, I had been the Lone Tester (Hi-yo Silver, away!) at the company, constantly swamped with work. As we were gearing up for a major, and I mean Major, platform update that summer we really needed to expand the test department. If not only for the increased scope of the update then because of the fact that I was going away on paternity leave. You may think that was extremely bad timing, but the fact is that the original release date for the update was before my planned leave (which I booked six months earlier). But the update was postponed, and rightfully so.

Around the same time as I booked my leave I also flagged to management that we were in desperate need of another tester. A wanted ad was posted and I went through a lot of applications, picking out quite a few interesting ones. But for some reason management didn't want to hire at that time after all, and it wasn't until a month before my leave that they realized they were about to become "testerless", right before the update! So a new wanted ad was posted and we had to rush through the whole recruiting process.

Again, I read a lot of applications, threw away quite a few right away due to the fact that they had misunderstood the actual job (and location for that matter). I can't blame anyone but our own HR department for that though, the ad was very vague. Since our product is a Virtual World, or a "game", many people thought we wanted beta-testers who could work from home. This was not the case, obviously.

We (the Development Manager and I) picked out a few interesting applicants and called them in for a quite informal interview. Several of them had some decent testing experience but "failed" (harsh word, but I'll use it in lack of a better one) in other areas, like not being interested in games etc. For me, the personal chemistry was a very important thing since I was supposed to work close together with this person every day.

To be honest, it didn't look good. But then a friend of mine gave me a tip about one of the applicants they had interviewed for a Customer Support position. While he wasn't chosen for that position, they felt that he had "something" and thought that he could be of interest. I said "OK, ask him to send in an application asap".

The application was on my desk when I came in to work the next day. This was a young guy with a lot of experience in MMORPG:s, playing and beta-testing. No other testing-experience, but man was this guy thirsty for knowledge! He wrote that when he got the call from my friend he didn't really know if he was interested at first but googled for "Software testing" to find out what it's all about. He then described how he lost himself in blog after blog and how he definitely wanted to be a part of this world. So we called him in for an interview...

You know how I mentioned personal chemistry earlier? Well, this was it. I quickly realized that this guy shared my values, ethics and sense of humor. He was also very well-versed in MMORPG:s and usability and had an honest interest for the work of a Software Tester. It was decided right after the interview that this young man, if he so desired, was to be my padawan...

He said yes, fortunately, and was literally thrown right into a pile of work. He's been doing an excellent job from day one and we work really well together. Hell, hadn't it been for him I'd most likely be burnt out today.

Release problems - a real test on the nerves

So, we released quite a major update the other day. As usual, I didn't feel that we had enough time to test everything (when do one ever have enough time?) but even so I felt quite satisfied when we shipped.

Didn't last long though, the following night the whole production environment went down for several hours straight! When I came in next morning I was pretty nervous that this very serious issue was caused by something we missed during testing, but after a few hours of investigation it was stated that it was caused by a hardware failure. As soon as it was found it was easy fixed and won't happen again. Most important (for our self esteem anyway), it wasn't our "fault".

Of course, there's been some other issues as well, but it looks like they're mostly caused by design errors. Several of them were questioned by us during testing, but we were assured that "that's the way it's supposed to be". The outcry from the community seems to have changed their minds though...

On a sidenote: just read the new presentation of the new iPhone 4. I must say that I was only mildly impressed. Sure, the new screen looks great but the camera is still sub standard. Video chatt? Let me tell you something, I rarely want to see the ones I'm talking to. And if they could see me, I wouldn't be able to do faces whenever they say something stupid ;) The data transfer rate is clearly designed for the American market (slower than ours). But hey, the release of this version will mean that the 3GS version will become even cheaper and I will definitely pick up one of those.