Testing Times

A long, long time ago in the computer age, people thronged to know the body and mind of a computer - feeling the mouse, typing junk with the keyboard, connecting it with the internet, with hopes of spying into the next door neighbhour Pankajam's bedroom and henceforth seeing the entire world. Instead, we slowly learned that we could create email addresses, and consider ourselves important by including it in our visiting cards, and substituting it instead of our postal address in application forms. This forced others to include a separate field for email address in forms...anyway it got too technical.

Now people needed to do something with computers. Since there was already a thing called 'hardware', coming up with 'software' struck some people as a brilliant idea.

Now they couldn't develop software just like that. They needed people to also to test it, whether or not there existed a customer base. And so, it came to be that the entire bunch of people who were recruited, now had to be given something to do. The managers thought and came up with a brilliant idea - split them into 2 groups - 'developers' and 'testers'. I think they were made to stand in a line and were asked to call out numbers, and like even numbers were made developers and odd numbers were made testers or something like that.

Developers were at the heart of a software. I can give you a fair definition of a developer - n. /~develop-er(rors)~/ - 1. One who develops errors, and in turn develops a particular contempt (expressed with a constipated look) for people who find them. 2. One who often comes up with something less surprising as "This is a known issue!" to the tester.

So now that we have a fair idea of what a developer is, the definition of a 'tester' is obvious to the reader and further ambiguity about the term can be clarified by having an animated discussion with your 2nd standard/grade English teacher.

Anyway, in the battle that ensued between these two sexes, testers decided to 'develop' a test plan called 'Time Tested Techniques' :

1. Ask for the device.
2. Get the device.
3. Make sure you have the device. This is called 'unit testing'.
4. Check mail.
5. You must be hungry by now. Start thinking about lunch.
6. Repeat step 3.
7. Its high time you think more about lunch.
8. Repeat step 4.
9. You better go for lunch now!
10. Its only human to feel sleepy.
11. Further your ambitions, by looking at the device with head bent about 47 degrees downwards, with your hand bolstering the head. You know what to do next!
12. You're now in the 'evening' of the software life cycle. Wake up when you realize this.
13. Are you bored?
14. Repeat step 8.
15. You're now on a mission to find the bugs. Its natural to think about the bed bugs that bit you last night. Whatever!
16. So what if you found the same bug?
17. Do yourself and others a favour. Leave for home now!

And that is how, testers went through such testing times and became more and more indispensable to the software industry, and started reserving their brain cells for thinking about finer aspects of life such as lunch, email and sleep.

Alright, I hope a new generation of 'odd numbers' are inspired now!