TA Professional Perspectives

                                  It is the same thing happening when one calls a government office, an appliance vendor, a bank or a telecom. Name it Customer Support, Client Care, Help Line or any other appealing and appeasing name the outfit cares to give to their call centre, you are at the mercy of  whoever picks up the call (supposing that it is being picked up, which in most cases it still is). You called because you either could not figure something out despite consulting google and company FAQ, or your issue is one of a kind, out of this world and well over the power of a chatbot to decipher, or because you are too old to figure it out with these means and you need old-fashion support. But you have to be lucky, incredulous and persistent. Having worked in IT built the resilience and understanding necessary to sustain one's inquiring effort to its successful resolution. Lucky - so that someone picks up the call in a reasonable amount of time. Incredulous - because you shoul

A retirement gift can make one's exit from working life a needlessly embarrassing memory. If a contest were held for the most idiotic retirement gift, I am convinced that a pillow will make it to the top! Which makes me a winner of sorts. Welcome or feared, retirement is an end to an essential chapter in one's life; undeniably it is a big milestone. With life-long jobs no longer the norm, I am among those increasingly fewer people to experience an official retirement ritual. I get that; I didn't expect an golden watch. I didn't expect anything. But when the corporate formula decided my time to go into retirement had come, the colleagues with whom I shared almost two decades of good work, good spirit and mutual support, decided on a little something to mark my departure. So, at the beginning of the last team meeting I was a part of, they presented me with a gift. It was a surprise and I was prepared to be moved and grateful, knowing that such gesture was totally on their

'Your son has had an accident'. I vividly recall the formulation delivered to me over the phone, at the office, by the polished voice at the other end of the wire. Scary stuff no parent wants to hear. Not even if the accident  means that your four-year old pooed in his pants and the manicured staff at the private school across the road won't touch the " situation ". Or shall we say, the incident . The issue , maybe? Anyone who has worked in IT knows that testing is part of life and sh't happens. Not that we call it as such (unless we think there is no upper rank within hearing range). We  used to call it problem , like in "problem report" and "problem solved". But one rainy day, someone, somewhere, must have decided this expression is, well, problematic, and the more precise term defect  became popular. However, defect has a bad connotation (and possibly a smelly rhyme too, given the right typo); our programs are not supposed to have defec

 I have attended dozens upon dozens of professional presentations, IT related or not, and after a while I started noticing how concepts, processes or outcomes are always neatly packed in some good looking graph, diagram or table. Those graphs, diagrams or tables are partitioned in eye pleasing proportions and the illustrated concepts, processes or outcomes are firmly encased in them. Most of the time, there are three or four partitions, equal in size, because this is what the page would hold or it is easier to draw.  The world is chaotic and hard to describe or illustrate. Sure a model of any kind needs to simplify things in order to communicate them. But I can't help wondering, isn't the author succumbing to the temptation of making order in the universe by collapsing stuff into those visuals, as opposed to writing a competent and complete text? Good text is more difficult to do, and even when it is good,  fewer may be willing or able to follow it. Text does not grab attention

Continued from September ... Unfortunately, those were not exceptions. As candidates, we are agonizing over grammar, punctuation and yes, content. But the likes of CIBC disrespect their potential employees allowing glaring misspelling and long but hollow sounding job descriptions. To start with a grossly misspelled first word is indeed a performance and is making this job and CIBC stand out! Do I care reading further? My impression is already formed, just like an employer would form the same impression had I forwarded a resume containing the same typo. Or maybe I am wrong, only employees have to have good grammar, HR and hiring managers, always having the thicker end of the stick, are excepted. Or maybe grammar is not that important after all, someone can still be a valuable employee/employer despite typos and hollow sentences, but if so, why entertain this whole circus? Maybe job descriptions and resumes should just be ATS style, to the point, forget chest-pounding on the employee si

 How not to do CT: a real life experience This article eventually was not published, as the body for which it was destined deemed it too negative. Well, everyone knows we learn more from mistakes than from successes. In my opinion, it is better to publish a "negative" story once in a while rather than yet another positive platitude that will not offend anyone but won't engage the readers either. https://cdn.pixabay.com/photo/2019/10/23/13/47/cloud-server-not-working-4571660__340.png Migration to the Cloud was sold to our client as being the silver bullet to their cost-cutting efforts [Big Mistake #1] and the basis for their continuous business with our firm. A cross-divisional, cross-functional and cross-country team was assembled for this task. I was on the application testing side of things, together with the other co-located developers-cum-testers who had been the steady stewards of this application for many years. Our mission was handed down to us from higher above: