So I am pretty sure the field is not working

For the past few days, I’ve been out field testing the security program around the various shops in The Hive, because the testing within The Monkey House is not proving to be all that helpful.  

There are plenty of reasons for this, the chief of which is that we don’t have the security set up that most of the shops do, because The Monkey House has very little of value that is worth stealing, and is also not open to the public in the way that shops are (and have to be, otherwise what is the point of having a shop?). 

So while we can run the system in an in-house test and get some results out of it, we can only really get results to show whether the basic code and basic functionality is working as it should. We feed a series of test values in, and watch what happens on the other end.

The real world doesn’t work like that – there are all sorts of external stimuli that we can’t simulate properly in testing because – well because it would cost way, WAY too much to implement the software and hardware to be able to simulate an actual real world model.

But this is what field testing is for. The Hive has five testing stages – developer (where we test the work as we write it), alpha testing (where we test it again, but using a proper, formal testing method), beta testing (where someone else tests what we have written) and field testing (where we test it in a customer environment) and finally acceptance testing (where we give it to the customers to test while we look over their shoulders). 

This field testing was a little different than the usual type though – there is a problem in one of the subsystems of the security program that is proving nigh on impossible to nail down within the Monkey House because it is something to do with the way it acts different depending on the source of the data. We have tried solving in The House for about four weeks (on and off, when I wasn’t doing the DRM related stuff) but have got no where. 

So the last two days, and possibly the rest of this week and some of the next, I am going to be out and about in The Hive, testing it in various stores and situations. 

Which, I know, sounds exciting and dramatic, but honestly is really quite dull. 

To give you some idea of a test run, I walk in to a shop (say the travel agency), stand at the entrance and run the test cycle, then move to somewhere else in the shop and run the test cycle, then move to the next shop and do it again. Sometimes I have to run three or four cycles in a given shop to get a proper set of data. 

(As most maths teachers will tell you, you can extrapolate a straight line from two points, but you can’t do it with a curve).
 

The first few test runs today have provided us with some real world reaction data we can examine, but – as I said – we are going to need a few more days of testing to try to nail down why we are having the problem we are having. 

Still – I suppose there are worse to spend the day.