random quotes

I had been playing around FB until I stumbled upon some love quotes from a friend's wall... I thought I'd post some here:

"Love is... giving someone the power to break your heart, but trusting her/him not to."

They asked, "how does it feel to love someone who loves someone else?" After a deep breath, I answered, "It's like hugging a cactus, the tighter you embrace, the more it hurts..."

"When you've found a reason to walk away, never look back... Just keep walking. It's better to get lost moving on than to get stuck and stranded broken."

I really like the third one :)

NextBase

I was in the mall yesterday, wondering what I could buy... I spent half an hour at Watson's roaming around the store, looking for a toothbrush and apricot scrub. I couldn't think of anything else to buy until I ended up breaking one of those lotion bottles... I just told the sales lady that I will pay for it at the counter. Then when I was at the counter I found out that I only have 400 in my wallet. Geez, my mom or my sister must have taken some money again from the wallet. I thought I have 4000...

But its okay, I just ended up withdrawing money from my account again. Then I walked endlessly and aimlessly in the mall, thinking fervently of something to buy... Until I came across the appliance center. Haha! So to cut the long story short, I ended up buying a new DVD player.. NextBase,, which can play AVIs from flash drive and with built-in karaoke function too...

I am so happy with my new acquisition hehehe... Because, I am not really fond of watching my movies from a computer. I want it in a larger screen hehehe... Now, I can watch those movies in AVI format in the television...

All I need now is to get some Karaoke disks and an additional microphone... Ha! Enough to occupy my bored mind in a short while :)

UAT at ADB

I am getting a little time from my weekend to write this entry coz I don't want to forget one extraordinary experience. Hmmm, maybe this will take ten minutes before I shut down my laptop and enjoy the rest of my weekend.

Our project is now undergoing User Acceptance Testing even if functional testing is not yet done.

I say that I had never been in a more chaotic UAT ever wherein there is no definite plan and "anything goes" is the name of the game. So what can you expect??? A UAT with no plan + QAs without team spirit = A TOTAL UAT FIASCO (I must say)...

Hahaha! I got so frustrated for the past week... I mean, I had always been a team player myself and seeing my fellow QAs who just want to stand on their own even if they are working on the same project, really frustrates me to the point of demotivation.

But then, I am also a self-starter and proactive. I try to help organize things. I experienced being a "referee" between two fellow QAs last week because they are having a "professional" cat fight via Lotus Notes "over" a simple subject of "Test Script Template", which I devised originally.

Hayss... And to think that these QAs are much experienced in terms of number of years in QA and much older than me... Anyway, at least someone in the team knows how to draw the line.

Then, during the actual UAT, since there are so many setbacks (being unplanned) and for the first time in my QA life, I heard users telling me that "we" are wasting "their" valuable time. It is a good thing that I know how to handle these situations and stay cool, calm and collected.

One good outcome is that our tech leader learned a lesson. So she called for a meeting after the UAT. Wow! Another fiasco! We discussed the template, the process or lack thereof, etc... People in the team don't know how to handle meetings...

Another thing that shocked me to a point of total disbelief is hearing from 2 of my fellow QAs that "EXPECTED RESULTS" is not needed in the testscript/test case. Three of us disagreed. I even told them that expected results are the basis of pass and fail. The tech leader just won't listen to the likes of us who just joined the team. The 2 QAs who joined the team a year or two ahead of us won. So, whether we like it or not, Expected Results was removed. I cannot accept it until now. I cannot believe hearing those things from fellow QAs who keep on insisting that they are experienced enough in our field. One of them even came from Accenture and she keeps pointing out that she came from a process-driven environment. Yeah right? Expected Results off a test script/test case? WOW!!! I am surrounded by incompetent people who just happen to have the biggest superiority complex ever. But I don't care. I know how to do things right. My friend (fellow QA) is so annoyed that she keeps having curt discussion with these QAs. I, however, choose to stay quiet. I am not stooping down to their level anyway and I won't waste my energy convincing people who don't want to be convinced. As long as I know my own skills and the things that I can do, I don't care what they do with theirs.

I won't comment from now on. I will just do what I think is right. Even if they removed the expected results from the template, who cares? I will still add it somewhere...

But one of the nice outcomes of the UAT is that I also met some nice people (users) like Miss Malou and the head of a department that I didn't get the chance to know his name. I get respect from some developers because I am catching bugs that other QAs can't find. Some developers also come to me for help. I feel happy somehow.

Fortunately, the food is good during UAT. So, that is one thing I am happy about too...

Small World

I am so amazed with my recent discoveries and I thought IT is such a small world indeed... hehehe

Yesterday, I found out that Mylene Ofalsa (ex-VC DBA) is a friend of one of my fellow QAs here. They attended the same highschool.

Then, another one, Michael Candelaria (ex-DbSoft) is also a friend of one of the developers here.

Then, today, I found out that Don Robert Mejia is also a friend of Geraldine (one of my friends from Antico/Verifone).

Not to mention all the other common friends I have from different organizations. LOL!

I don't know if IT is such a small world or it is only I who made it smaller for myself since I had been with different organizations already...

Hmmmm.. quite a thought :)

You have to PRETEND

We had our formal project presentation/kickoff to the external users yesterday. It was a first time experience for me as a QA. I had always been an internal user, doing only SAT (system acceptance testing) and with no formal interaction with users during UAT (user acceptance testing).

My work as a tester here is quite boring actually but I must say that the experience is worthwhile. Yesterday's experience is one of them I could say. The mini theater is awesome. My fellow QAs and I were wondering if its okay to watch a movie there (lol!) The mini theater (though, much simpler) is like one of those you see in a movie or in a prestigious school like Harvard. I think its really cool... Too bad, we were not able to get some free coffee hahaha!

The module assigned to me is the frontliner of the entire project. It is Dashboard. Hays, so basically I have to understand the entire process of the system end to end... So, I also have to understand the principles behind the other modules assigned to other testers. I was teased last Sunday by one of the developers that I am the QA of QAs... Weeehhh... Poor me :(

During the presentation, I feel like I am about to faint everytime dashboard is being accessed. I was so afraid that it might fail coz the test environment we are using is intermittent and there are so many changes in the code that are not yet tested...

Thankfully, no errors were encountered during the presentation. It is really quite an experience for QAs. Will make any QA sweat during a presentation coz when the module assigned to you failed, it will be quite embarrassing :(

Then during the wrap-up, the BA presiding the presentation made some comments about how the external users need to take External UAT seriously because they will be the one to support other users.

And one of his comments made us really laugh... He says that COSO users need to pretend to be admin, need to pretend to be an approver, etc... Then, when he seems to have lost for words already, he just said "Well, you have to pretend,"

Hahaha! He just mentioned one of the main qualities of a good QA!

QAs/testers really need to pretend to be someone else.

• Well, if you are testing an Accounting System, you need to be an accountant, that should be your POV.

• If you are testing a performance monitoring system, you need to be a network engineer.

• If you are testing a POS system, you need to be someone in sales.

• and the list goes on...

It was a nice presentation even if it means more work for us after :)

Ketsana and Parma: Lessons in Life

Philippines just experienced one of the most devastating flood in so many years. I cannot say that it is one of the worst since I only exist on the face of earth for 29 years...

These two storms/typhoons that just entered Philippine Area of Responsibility somehow taught us some important things in life...

Ketsana (locally known as Ondoy) is just categorized as a mere TROPICAL STORM, not to be feared (I, myself is guilty of this... I underestimated this storm. I even went to October Fest last September 25). A storm is weaker than a cyclone or a typhoon when categorized based on wind speed and gustiness.

But look what happened last weekend (September 26 in particular). It practically washed away Manila and nearby provinces with its nonstop raining. Nobody is prepared for that since it is, as I said earlier, just a "Tropical Storm"... So may people lost their properties, so many lives had been lost...

Then there is Parma (known as Pepeng), which was categorized as a SUPER TYPHOON... Everybody panicked and almost everyone prepared for its wrath this week. But thank God, it changed its course Saturday (Oct. 3) morning...

What are the lessons behind this? I can think of some and here they are:

• We can never be too prepared for anything that might happen...
• We should throw our garbage at the right places
• Nobody can really predict Nature...
• It is good to be prepared but it is always FAITH that will save us...
• The underestimated always ends up being the one that hit the most...
• Nature doesn't choose based on status, wealth, popularity, etc... It would hit and will hit hard in due time...
• Yes, industrialization cannot be stopped in parallel with Nature's destruction; but when its payback time, its payback time.
  

I am so thankful for today... I had been praying for this... Philippines has not yet recovered from Ondoy's wrath and it is very lucky indeed that Pepeng changed its course. I hope that the good weather continues :)