A long time without blogging as I've been busy

I was assigned to another project to help out and do a small programming enhacement ( ignoring the Mythical Man Month advice that throwing extra staff at a project doesn't help ). Played around with the program to get familiar with how it worked and soon had it crashing. And crashing. And crashing

Not good

Looked at the spec for the enhancement I was meant to be doing and found lots of gaps in it as well as a huge hole which meant it wouldn't actually work.

So I was able to spend my time testing the program instead of programming which has been great.

I wrote a very basic test plan so I was able to focus my testing efforts and could also give the boss some idea of progress but I did warn him that the more I tested the more ideas I was getting for testing.

There was almost a proper release cycle set up as well - a release would be made and I'd do a smoke test, bugs reported as fixed in that release would be tested and closed (or not) and I was even running some regression tests which proved to be well worthwhile as it picked up some old bugs coming back.

However this meant that my time spent testing the area that I was supposed to be testing went down though it did mean the program as a whole was moving forwards and not backwards.

At the last project meeting the boss asked if extra testing resources would help.

Sure they would

Except by testing resources he means the woman that writes the documentation and the support guy that does the training. Neither of them are professional testers or trained testers or even think like testers.

Would he ask them to help out with the programming as a programming resource ?

No

So despite all the Quality talk of the last few months it still seems that we're not walking the walk