TA Professional Perspectives

... has little to do with methodologies, tools and projects. Obviously, testing software is a technical endeavour, which is ever more critical and complicated in this other world we are building with every screen, application and system. https://cdn.pixabay.com/photo/2014/08/25/22/54/pen-427516__340.png But testing software is also a tremendous opportunity to test oneself as a human and as a professional. It teaches life skills! The defects in you ... are you going to find them? be bothered to report them to yourself? be able to realistically assess their severity and ramifications? Will you know how to manage them? how to fix them? a workaround for now or the maybe the painful, costly or radical solution? The list of life teachings from testing software gets longer than I initially thought! Patience Let me not rush to conclusions; it may not be what I first think it is. Some defects are deep or devious. I will repeat the test and document the findings for the benefit of the...

I couldn't believe my years this morning (Feb 03 2020): this CBC journalist interviwing a specialist about the problems of IT systems delivering pensions to Canadians and saying that "these systems are so old, [that] they are mission-critical".!!!???  Intonation is key here! These systems were mission critical since their day one. They have not become mission-critical because they are old! And while this ineptitude should be addressed with CBC (if I find the time to dig up the name of the program), the issue of aging IT systems is definitely worth of an in depth look in a future article. Very old applications are still the backbone of IT systems in many very large institutions. Some worth reading articles on the topic: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/complex-impact-fintech-legacy-systems-banking-susan-visser/  (2017) https://cdn.pixabay.com/photo/2012/02/28/15/38/black-18320__340.jpg

https://cdn.pixabay.com/photo/2012/10/24/06/51/date-62740__340.jpg Once upon a time the IT world set up a colossal effort to address the existential threat put by miscalculated dates when the century would turn and computers all over the world won't know how to plug in the missing century digits. The challenge was successfully met and the story ended then and there. It was called Y2K. Young and youngish IT professionals did not experience it so this story is now forgotten. The proof is in the proliferation of incomplete and confusing dates such as 09/03/06. It looks like no lesson was learned when it comes to date standards and usability issues. But at least the magnitude of the Y2K managerial effort, which made and unmade careers, would deserve a commendation twenty years later. I don't think it happened in the media - social or otherwise. Hence this article:  https://www.batimes.com/articles/mingled-dates-still-pervasive-the-forgotten-legacy-of-y2k.html