a self made astronaut…

As I touched on in an earlier post we are moving close to live day on one of our major projects. This week we got to see the fruits of the development work that’s been ongoing for the last month or so. We put a lot of effort into gathering requirements and designing systems and it’s always a gratifying moment when we get to see the finished article. Which is not to say there’s not a lot of work left to do; there’s an extensive testing programme now underway to check that what’s been specified is what’s been developed, and indeed whether what’s been specified does actually meets the user requirements – which is of course the ultimate acid test.

This testing process is actually more demanding on time and resources than it might initially appear. There was a nice line in an article in the latest edition of Fortune magazine on teamwork where it was noted that ‘Neil Armstrong didn’t get to the moon through rugged individualism; there is no such thing as a self-made astronaut’. The testing process is certainly no solo endeavour, and the project team are having to pull together well to get through it. It doesn’t matter how well written the specification or the code, issues will inevitably crop up. Identifying them, logging them, communicating them back to the vendor, retesting the fixes, ensuring the fixes haven’t broken something else, is time consuming, and it’s easy for the project to drift off schedule if you haven’t made sufficient allowance for just how long it can take. That said it’s not an area to cut corners. Users have a fragile faith in technology, and if they are greeted by a host of bugs the first time they use the system, it may also prove to be the last.

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