Breaking shit sounds easy, but it’s not. It’s actually pretty hard. The reason being because there are people just as smart as me, if not smarter, designing this specifically so it doesn’t break.
hunter006
March 27, 2009
My job as a SDET
[hunter006 is a co-worker of mine. We are, in a sense, on opposite teams. It’s an interesting relationship. I give the other team full access to every detail of the design and implementation. All the documents, all the source code, all the threat models then at any time completely and honestly answer any questions they might have about the system including things like, “Where do you think the greatest weakness are?” And “How would you go about breaking this?” Any success they have means more work and possibly poor performance reviews for me.
On the other hand, if I do my job right they will work their butts off, not find anything worse than typos in the documentation, and have their boss constantly screaming at them because they haven’t found any bugs. If they haven’t found any bugs then they aren’t doing their job, right?
Large bug counts, if found by you, are good on performance reviews. Large numbers of bugs assigned to you are bad. Currently I have one bug assigned to me. It’s about a year old and I’m pretty sure someone else fixed it a long time ago when they were working on something related. I just haven’t gotten around to verifying and closing it out or assigning it to him. Son James recently told me in his group the average is about 70 bugs assigned to each developer. He has about half that.
I just got new tester assigned to my portion of my current project. She’s a sweet young thing and I had a meeting with her earlier this week to explain the design and suggest ways to test it. I didn’t show her the proof I have been writing software since before she was born. I’ll save that for later when she is putting in long hours and still not finding enough bugs to keep her boss off her back.–Joe]
There’s so many things that could be said Joe, but the most important is that it’s been a pleasure working with you… and that I’m lucky I’m in the position I am, otherwise you’d be making me look bad 🙂
You should get something like a hat or shirt that says, “I’m your huckleberry” to wear to those meetings.
Neither Barb (who is usually really good with vocabulary, phrases, and “old stuff”) had any idea what the phrase “I’m your Huckleberry” meant. I went looking for an answer.
In the present context we liked this answer the best.
Of possible interest (this will only make sense after following the above link) is that one of the houses right next to the Boomershoot site is a composite of three old buildings remodeled into one. One of those building is referred to as “the old Holiday house”. It turns out that some close relatives of Doc Holiday used to live in the area. The Doc would frequently visit. If you attend Boomershoot ask me to point the house out to you.
Kilmer did a brilliant job in that mnovie, though that last scene in the linked vid was just a bit over dramatized.
When your job is to point out co workers’ problems, one of your co workers’ jobs becomes that of avoiding you. Reminds me of Feynman’s chapter on lock picking. He found he was able to open combination locks at Los Alamos when they were left on the last number of the combo. When he started pointing out this sort of thing, you know, for national security during a war, people started keeping him away from their locks!