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Test is Broken Again

“Sam I’ve checked the test environment and I can’t do a search!” Dave stood next to Sam with an annoyed look on his face.

“Shit.” Sam grumbled firing up the web page in chrome and clicking a few buttons and running a search that after thirty seconds returned no results.

“People need to get their shit together Sam, I’ve got the whole team needing to test this new release and we’re up against it.” Dave was slightly red-faced, he was the test manager and his crew were always getting pressured on time to deliver as development overruns were eating into his already tight schedule.

“I know, give me a second, I keep telling people to test this stuff before they hand it over.” He fired up his terminal program and logged into the server Dave watching as he typed commands, years ago that would have driven him insane but he’d grown used to it and understood to a degree the urge to see the job done. Sam typed a couple more commands and looked at a log file that told him the status of the application, a message whizzed past saying the application had started and Sam immediately jumped on the site again and did a search.

“Well, we’re getting results, give me a second let me take it all the way through to payment” Sam knew the process off by heart, do a search, put it in the basket, check the tax, put in the details, next, put in the virtual card, next, get a confirmation page all in all a couple of minutes of effort on his part. After getting the confirmation page he turned to Dave who looked a bit more comfortable and a touch sympathetic. “Looks like we’re up and running Dave, sorry about that.”

Dave ran his hand through his hair and shook his head, “I know it’s not your fault and I’m sorry for having to come to you, but you know, want a job doing, talk to Sam.”

“I’ll have a word with the team again.”

“Yeah, good luck with that. Beer tonight?”

“If we ever get out of here! Let me know if you hit any other problems, I need to finish the config on these new virtual environments.”

“Let’s hope. Talk in a bit.” With that Dave walked off, Sam slunk back into the chair, “fucking hell” he muttered to himself and wrote a few notes on a piece of paper.

  • Remind team about testing environments after releases, restarts and config changes.

He tapped his pencil on the paper a few times as he stared at the paper. The got back to his work exiting the test environment and closing the test site. Only to look back at the piece of paper, he added another not.

  • Why don’t people test things? It only increases the work load as things come back broken.