By: TomLiotta

TomLiotta — Wed, 05 Sep 2012 02:42:18 +0000

…that was a bit harsh. This might have been better…

Yes, it was. Yet I believe it.

Up until a couple years ago, we had a creative tester. Although our software products were specifically designed for, and ran on, AS/400s and later in that family, he was a Linux person. He was experienced in testing methodologies, though, and he could indeed do valid testing.

He began by learning how to connect from Linux to all of our in-house systems, while reviewing our product configurations and purposes. As he learned, he wrote numerous scripts to do remote tests. He continually upgraded his suite of scripts to build new features as customers reported issues. After a couple years, we had full coverage including stress tests, performance metrics, regression tests and a number of add-ons.

Further, by the time his first year had gone by, he was taking over system administration of the five systems we had in our fairly small office. (Generally around fifteen people total at the time.) That kept him in touch with IBM, and he cultivated relationships with the regional office. He also chatted with sys admins and operations staff of some nearby large customers.

A big result of that was that he worked out some deals to pick up and take care of various bits of older equipment that would otherwise be tossed out or sold as scrap. Within another year, he had three more systems brought in-house for no cost. One of them was named SPAREPTS because he literallt built it out of spare parts. (We couldn’t get a license for the OS, but we had plenty of test uses to put it to.)

He picked up numerous old disk drives as they collected at IBM or were discarded by those customers after upgrades. He used those to build system images for some of the systems. When we needed a specific OS version, there were a number of times when he could simply power a system down, pull out one set of drives and plug in another. For practically zero cost, we had the ability to ask for a custom environment one day, and it would be available the next day.

I might have been harsh, but I was also serious. Creativity in testing is not something to be dismissed. It should be put to use.

Tom

By: Gabe9527

Gabe9527 — Tue, 04 Sep 2012 15:06:35 +0000

Tom – that was a bit harsh. This might have been better If you are creative you could reask the question in the medium of dance.

By: TomLiotta

TomLiotta — Fri, 31 Aug 2012 10:39:35 +0000

If you are “creative”, then you should be able to “create” testing procedures and functions that satisfy both your needs and the needs of your job. — Tom

Comments on: I am SAP functional test engineer. I dont like testing , what are the other interesting SAP careers.

By: TomLiotta

By: Gabe9527

By: TomLiotta