You seem to have been so very blessed in your testing career.

My own has been cursed with the SME disease. Small to Medium Enterprise, I mean. Small software companies don’t do testing. Medium ones do. In between there are people like me who spend years trying to persuade directors that yes, actually, knowing what the product is supposed to do does require that someone actually write something down that is not either a sales brochure or a million lines of C++.

Test Cases? These are written down after you do the testing, so you can do it again next time.
Test Plans? This is what you write to demonstrate to a customer that the faults they find could not be reasonably expected to be found under a normal test cycle.

I have been made redundant because my QA procedures were too far in advance of the company that took us over (and which later was broken up by the serious fraud office).

I have been sacked because I committed the company to a level of QA that pleased the commissioning customer, but made too many changes to the (non-existent) QA system they had before. (at the start of a project that is now about 5 years overdue because it has too many bugs and the users refuse to use it)

I have spent years being turned down for bog-standard testing jobs because I was over-qualified.

What I’ve found is that what a software tester does, mostly, is struggle to justify the pittance he’s paid to people for whom the concept of ’spend to save’ is completely unintelligable.

That said, I recognise all of what you’ve described above, and it is, painfully, funny.

I found your entry interesting do I’ve added a Trackback to it on my weblog …

I’m an Exchange and Messaging systems admin. I wish I had the power to get rid of our present email wreaking solution but I don’t. All the decisions for our UK office solutions come from the US and our America-centric decision makers are unwilling to consider local solutions no matter how good they are.

It is good to know that when I am in a position to contribute to or lead these decisions, there are systems out there that are viable alternatives to the sorry excuse for archiving we use right now.

We’re heavily focused on the admin side as well. The underlying ContextStore platform is available in a number of forms – notably a turnkey solution (on top of Linux or Windows), a virtual appliance, a hosted private cloud offering and a hosted public cloud offering. We’ve spent a lot of time getting the installation to be as simple as possible but also the administration to be straight forward, no nonsense and reliable.

The whole platform is configured and controlled through a single central UI called the ContextStore Manager (CSM for short) which is actually a Rich Internet Application implemented in Silverlight. It’s very intuitive (I can send you a video if you’re interested) and provides a single point of access for Administrators to do everything they need to do.

We offer a number of really cool advanced features such as ILM (with the unique ability to be based on business policies) and HSM (with out of the box integration to common file storage over DAS, SAN, iSCSI etc… but also to proprietary CAS devices such as Centerra and Atmos).

Another neat thing is that the ContextStore platform is entirely accessible and configurable through a single set of RESTful web services APIs. This means that you can build your own apps which expose ContextStore content (we build ALL our Apps against the same API layer) and you can integrate very easily with 3rd party systems.

Given that all interaction with the platform is done over HTTP(S) we’re very geared up to cloud or hosted deployments but also for integrating to hosted or cloud based MS exchange environments. This is why we’re very easily able to provide compatibility with services such as MS BPOS.

Other key features from an Admin perspective is full integration with Active Directory for very simple straightforward user provisioning and authentication.

Do you work on the administration side of things?

Cheers

James