Just Nicky

Monkey tasks to fill the time February 23, 2006

There was a requirement that was supposed to have been tested & wasn’t. Guess who’s just spent the last day digging back through documents that pre-date my involvement on the project to try to find out what other requirements haven’t been tested?

Something appears to have happened in late 2004 - a whole heap of requirements appear in one document and then not in later versions. And there are other requirements which magically appear that I can’t find in earlier documents. Of course, almost everyone who was on the project then is no longer with the company, so there’s nobody who really knows what happened.

This is what I hate about inheriting other people’s work. I don’t have the history on this project, yet I am expected to answer for things that happened before I was involved. I inherited a detailed test plan which had already been used once and it was agreed that it would be suitable to use again - so what wasn’t tested this time around, wasn’t tested the first time around either and no one queried it then. And I resent doing stuff a trained monkey could just so they can find someone to point the finger at. The thing’s live for heaven’s sake. Regardless of what was or wasn’t tested, it’s all out there and stuff is going to come up that no one thought of - that’s what happens when things go out into the public domain. You have thousands of testers who are going to think of & do things that you would never have expected.

My boss is still in Sydney. I emailed him this morning & asked him to ring HR. We’ll see what happens next.