Thursday, November 06, 2003

A couple of quotes Charles Dickens. "No one is useless in this world who lightens the burdens of another." Aldous Huxley. "There's only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that's your own self." I think these are good reminders for all of us.  First of all...never underestimate the difference that you make in the world - everyone I know helps others in some ways.  Some more than others.  :)   I think through helping/watching/learning from others we can also improve our individual selves.  Comments10:57:10 PM

As someone that likes testing, this was pretty interesting.  Maybe I should be a "consultant tester."  :) Use of Independent Testers for User Acceptance Testing. For a client project that I just wrapped up, the client hired another consulting firm to provide someone to do user acceptance testing (UAT). UAT is very important in consulting. From the client side, it proves that they are getting what they asked for. From the consultant's side it validates that we delivered as agreed and that we should be paid accordingly. So the client hired one person from a third-party consulting firm, though it is really more of a staffing firm than a true consulting firm. The plan was for him to go through the same source documents that we did, collaborate with the business user, and create tests that sampled the population to make sure we were meeting the business requirements. He was never supposed to rely on us, except for us to explain how we did something to see if it was the cause of a discrepancy. Unfortunately, our client did not offer any assistance to the UAT tester. Without anyone to explain anything, the tester turned to us for help. For a while we were spending 25 percent of our time explaining things to him. That was bad for several reasons. First, we were on a tight deadline and this was an unscheduled task. Second, if we explain how something works to the tester, we are biasing him. We could have told him how to do everything and passed the UAT the first time, but we refrain from such unethical behavior. Part of the reason it took so long to explain things was that our tester did not know SQL. Since pretty much everything he was checking on was SQL-related since it was a data warehouse reporting application, this was a serious time waster. I knew we were in trouble when I overheard my teammate explaining how to run a stored procedure in SQL Server Query Analyzer! Despite this, I think hiring someone to do independent UAT if the client does not have the skills in-house is a good thing. Testers are less expensive than developers in general, even if they are consultant testers. And although he did not find many discrepancies, the challenge of making sure he didn’t certainly drove us on. [Darrell Norton's Blog] Comments10:51:03 PM

How to Exploit the New Cell-Phone Rules (SmartMoney.com). SmartMoney.com - THERE ARE JUST 17 days until wireless local number portability goes into effect. It's definitely something worth talking about. [Yahoo! News - Technology] "The Federal Communications Commission (news - web sites) wireless number portability mandate, which will allow cell-phone users to take their phone numbers with them when they switch carriers, begins on Nov. 24 for the nation's 100 largest metropolitan areas. The rest of the country will be covered by May 24, 2004. " Since I really need a new cell phone, this is pretty exciting to me.  I'm not willing to pay $150+ for a new cell phone when other people get them free and I'm under no contract. Comments10:49:32 PM

Study: Salary gloom ahead for IT workers. Starting wages for techies will fall next year, and pay for jobs that boomed in the '90s will keep on dropping, says a recent study. But there's a bright spot for some in-demand pros. [CNET News.com - Front Door] Interesting numbers here. Comments10:43:54 PM

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