Thoroughly Tested

Zak S worked for a retailer which, as so often happens, got swallowed up by Initech's retail division. Zak's employer had a big, ugly ERP systems. Initech had a bigger, uglier ERP and once the acquisition happened, they all needed to play nicely together.

These kinds of marriages are always problematic, but this particular one was made more challenging: Zak's company ran their entire ERP system from a cluster of Solaris servers- running on SPARC CPUs. Since upgrading that ERP system to run in any other environment was too expensive to seriously consider, the existing services were kept on life-support (with hardware replacements scrounged from the Vintage Computing section of eBay), while Zak's team was tasked with rebuilding everything- point-of-sale, reporting, finance, inventory and supply chain- atop Initech's ERP system.

The project was launched with the code name "Cold Stone", with Glenn as new CTO. At the project launch, Glenn stressed that, "This is a high impact project, with high visibility throughout the organization, so it's on us to ensure that the deliverables are completed on time, on budget, to provide maximum value to the business and to that end, I'll be starting a series of meetings to plan the meetings and checkpoints we'll use to ensure that we have an action-plan that streamlines our..."

"Cold Stone" launched with a well defined project scope, but about 15 seconds after launch, that scope exploded. New "business critical" systems were discovered under every rock, and every department in the company had a moment of, "Why weren't we consulted on this plan? Our vital business process isn't included in your plan!" Or, "You shouldn't have included us in this plan, because our team isn't interested in a software upgrade, we're going to continue using the existing system until the end of time, thank you very much."

The expanding scope required expanding resources. Anyone with any programming experience more complex than "wrote a cool formula in Excel" was press-ganged into the project. You know how to script sending marketing emails? Get on board. You wrote a shell script to purge old user accounts? Great, you're going to write a plugin to track inventory at retail stores.

The project burned through half a dozen business analysts and three project managers, and that's before the COVID-19 outbreak forced the company to quickly downsize, and squish together several project management roles into one person.

"Fortunately" for Initech, that one person was Edyth, who was one of those employees who has given their entire life over to the company, and refuses to sotp working until the work is done. She was the sort of manager who would schedule meetings at 12:30PM, because she knew no one else would be scheduling meetings during the lunch hour. Or, schedule a half hour meeting at 4:30PM, when the workday ends at 5PM, then let it run long, "Since we're all here anyway, let's keep going." She especially liked to abuse video conferencing for this.

As the big ball of mud grew, the project slowly, slowly eased its way towards completion. And as that deadline approached, Edyth started holding meetings which focused on testing. Which is where Edyth started to raise some concerns.

"Lucy," Edyth said, "I noticed that you've marked the test for integration between the e-commerce site and the IniRewardsTM site as not-applicable?"

"Well, yeah," Lucy said. "It says to test IniRewardsTM signups on the e-commerce site, but our site doesn't do that. Signups entirely happen on the IniRewardsTM site. There isn't really any integration."

"Oh," Edyth said. "So that sounds like it's a Zak thing?"

Zak stared at his screen for a moment. He was responsible for the IniRewardsTM site, a port of their pre-acquisition customer rewards system to work with Initech's rewards system. He hadn't written it, but somewhere along the way, he became the owner of it, for reasons which remain murky. "Uh... it's a static link."

Edyth nodded, as if she understood what that meant. "So how long will that take to test? A day? Do you need any special setup for this test?"

"It's... a link. I'll click it."

"Great, yes," Edyth said. "Why don't you write up the test plan document for this user story, and then we'll schedule the test for... next week? Can you do it any earlier?"

"I can do it right now," Zak said.

"No, no," Edyth said. "We need to schedule these tests in advance so you're not interacting with anyone else using the test environment. I'll set up a followup meeting to review your test plan."

Test plans, of course, had a template which needed to be filled out. It was a long document, loaded with boiler plate, for the test to be, "Click the 'Rewards Signup' link in the e-commerce site footer. Expected behavior: the browser navigates to the IniRewardsTM home page."

Zak added the document to the project document site, labelled "IniRewards Hyper-Link Test", and waited for the next meeting with Edyth to discuss schedule. This time, Glenn, the CTO was in the meeting.

"This 'Hyper-Link' test sounds very important," Glenn said. He enunciated "hyper-link" like it was a word in a foreign language. "Can we move that up in the schedule? I'd like that done tomorrow."

"I... can do it right now," Zak said. "It won't interact with other tests-"

"No, we shouldn't rush things." Glenn's eyes shifted towards another window as he reviewed the testing schedule. "It looks like there's nothing scheduled for testing between 10AM and 2PM tomorrow. Do you think four hours is enough time? Yes? Great, I'll block that off for you."

Suffice to say, the test passed, and was verified quite thoroughly.

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