Ah the Joys of Software Testing
Nov 16 2007
In case you haven’t heard, I am not fond of software testing. If you want proof, just check out the following posts I wrote the last time when I had to test software.
So now I’m at it again because we are about to release a new feature for Baby Insights…which is very exciting because I’ve wanted to release one of these features pretty much since we began Babble Soft. In fact the pain we experienced from this particular issue when our son was born 5 years ago was the single driving force for creating Baby Insights. Hint: the lack of this much needed activity (or inactivity) in our lives was often used as a means of torture back in the day.
Erin (my husband who works full time elsewhere and couldn’t help me with this particular issue) strongly suggested we do this feature with an expert in the field. I slowly realized that given that I’m wearing a gazillion different hats, finding an expert (who is super busy but would still somehow want to partner with an unknown company) was not going to happen. So I figured I’d do it backasswards and build something and then let an expert discover us and tweak the feature later. Doing this violates pretty much most of what I’ve studied, been told, and read about when starting a business which is “This ain’t the Field of Dreams honey…you can’t build things and they will come.” To them I say “Um…well…we’ll see about that!“
Now for a couple of great comics from Blaugh which I discovered from a post written by Pelf on Pearl’s Interesting Observations blog. The first is funny and it’s even funnier because I can’t fire myself for being honest about my distaste for software testing and my ‘build it they will come’ frowned upon strategy. 🙂 The second is funny (to me) because when you test software you are pretty much glued to your computer and dream about anything endorphin related! But oddly enough, I don’t drink coffee.
I hear you. There are few things I dislike more than QA, though I am certainly the least detail oriented person in our group, so it works out.
As for build it an they will come, if your community is communicative and you have a good avenue for discussion, it has worked well for us in the past. We did a lot of agile development with blip.tv and the community was awesome. We set up a google group the more communicative of the users to discuss support, bugs, features etc and it is still humming.
Thanks Shane…that’s good to know. We haven’t completed the community aspect of our feature set, but it’s coming soon! New parents are usually a pretty communicative bunch. 🙂
When we get to that point, I’d love to get your advice on how you attracted your initial community of users to begin with.
Aww.. Thanks for the mention 🙂
No problem Pelf! I was delighted when I discovered bLaugh through your writing. I always looks for ways to include humor. A smile/chuckle goes a long way in bringing out those endorphins. 🙂
ah, software testing isn’t that bad. It can be rather fun when you find something. After working in QA for two years I found that release and packaging is the more tedious part.
Hi baglady – it can be fun I guess if you find something because it’s much better that we found it than a customer! Since I’m doing way too many things, when I find something it means I’ve got to go back and verify the fix soon after. 🙂
Thank goodness right now I don’t have to deal with packaging. Our applications are accessed and sold directly from our site.
We do offer cool gift cards that we can ship for people to give as baby shower gifts but there’s not a whole lot of packaging around that!
But if BabiesRUs happened to want to sell our software of the shelf…I guess that might be a good problem to have!
Thanks for stopping by! Love your baglady name 🙂