Another week out in the field

The last two days of field testing did not go as well as I’d hoped.

While we were doing some testing in The Christian Book shop, we (the owner and I) noticed something was going on with one of the detection subsystems. Something that hadn’t shown up in the Alpha and Beta testing, and definitely hadn’t shown up in the developer testing.

So I spent a little while going back over all the field testing, and in some cases, redoing it, then sat down and worked through various "paper runs" of the software as it was programmed.

Paper runs are pretty much what they sound like – you decide on a set of input data, then run through the source code line by line and write down the variables and so on as they change. It helps to check the theory behind the code and to make sure there is nothing really stupid going on. 

Mostly it works because if – for example – you wrote the code to take two values, add them together then multiply them by a third, but the code actually takes two values, multiplies them together and adds the third  ( so you want a * (b+c) and you actually write a * b + c) then you would notice almost at once when you are doing it on paper, but probably not notice at all when you are running it on the computer.

Anyway – the paper runs revealed that one of the assumptions we’d made was actually only true half of the time. The other half it would be false – the result was actually the exact opposite of what we wanted.

Which pretty much meant that I spent most of the latter half of Thursday afternoon and almost all of yesterday rewriting the sections where the assumption made a difference, and also rewriting the part where we use the assumption to get the result.

It took most of the time to do it, and consequently there was only a little bit of time available for basic alpha testing. Which means that the next week is possibly going to be spent doing yet more field testing.

Part of me thinks this is a good thing – getting out and about, talking to customers and most importantly not sitting in the office all day – is kind of fun. But it does mean that I am not going to be able to help Jane and Monique with the DRM testing – we are almost at the point of the latest release being sent to customers – which I am feeling kind of guilty about.

(This relates back to the Jets and the Sharks thing I mentioned earlier.

I am pretty sure there are a few people in The Hive who are rooting for The DRM, and The Monkey House as a whole, to make a huge mistake somewhere along the line that would justify closing us down. I can’t be sure – no one ever says something like that outright, but the odd snide comments, the odd questions raised about some of the project we work on (usually anonymous questions – no one ever wants to go on the record slagging off another part of the company) suggests that there is a silent minority (possibly very small, possibly even only one or two people) who are just watching and waiting for their moment.

And so the fact that I not there to help ensure the DRM goes off okay makes me feel a little guilty, even though I am pretty sure that Jane has it and will do it perfectly well (as she always does!)

The major upside of the field testing means I will probably get home late this coming Wednesday, so I won’t have to deal with the fallout an general annoyances of International Paedophile Day.