Feedback please....(on current TELCO test job scenario)

[Darren_Test]

Thanks...Looks like I have to make another CV..ie UAT CV now...

[Darren_Test]

thanks

[Dow Jones]

Glad to be of help

You seem to know your stuff (unlike lots of others here), so best of luck. Do mention the 'uat' bit more often. Also, if you want to place yourself in the middle, just put 'Test Team Lead' or 'Test Co-ordinator' and it shows leadership skills as well. It's just a matter of when, not if, AFAYC. Best of luck, again.

[Darren_Test]

Honestly I should thank this group for most of my adventures around CV...When ever I get stuck with some thing this BB was extreamly helpful...Like last time I got PRINCE2 pass with a night's prep (along with tips from this BB ). Barring few funny replies, help from this group is great....
Thanks to guys like you, DowJones..Hopefully this time too I could pull some thing soon...

[tim123]

What has happened is that the project and hence test lifecycles have shortened dramatically. Whereas before you had to go through unit, system, regression, e2e, etc before uat, now PMs are under pressure to deliver in the shortest possible time and with a tight budget. You can spend months testing something and surely it would be free from bugs, however by the time the users get it it might be out of date or out of scope, so they want to get their hands on it asap to give feedback.

I don't believe that this discription fits the Telco model at all. The roll-out across the network would make the process very long, even if you shorten the rest. There is no way that the Vodas of this world are going to take the risk of all their exchanges being updated at the same time, nor would they even start the process without at least several months trial running at a reference site.

So yes, you do have to wait a long time for a new feature to arrive, but that's how it works. Saving a few months system test time doesn't change that.

tim

[Dow Jones]

Telcos

I can only speak for development/testing of financial apps eg front/middle/back-ends and trading systems etc. Longer test lifecycles maybe the case in telco projects, so more time and budget for testing equals more contracts. However, I am told that most providers are still reeling from the £ 25bn that Flash Gordon took from them 10 years ago to grant them the 3G licences. Amazing piece of state theft that was.

[XperTest]

I can only speak for development/testing of financial apps eg front/middle/back-ends and trading systems etc. Longer test lifecycles maybe the case in telco projects, so more time and budget for testing equals more contracts. However, I am told that most providers are still reeling from the £ 25bn that Flash Gordon took from them 10 years ago to grant them the 3G licences. Amazing piece of state theft that was.

I am an experienced test contractor (7,5 years) who has mainly worked in financial services (over 5 years) and I don't recognise your description of shortening test lifecycles at all. I am currently the test manager on two projects that both have big bang type releases after 1,5 years system design, development and test. I have worked very iteratively on one project before, but this was with HMRCm, so not in financial services. In my experience testing has become ever more important in system development, and accordingly the number of testers has increased. Currently, the big companies are testing the water with test outsourcing, and this may have lead to a slight downturn in the market (although I don't personally know of anybody who is having a hard time finding work). In my experience however, the scope for test outsourcing is limited, due to the required proximity to the business and design teams. Also, the trend for test outsourcing may decrease the demand for test analysts, but it will increase the demand for good test coordinators and managers with good soft and organisational skills.

Darren, I don't mean to be rude or condescending, but if your email or phone communication and your CV is anything like your spelling and grammar on this forum, that may contribute to your difficulty in finding your next contract.

[Dow Jones]

Agree to disagree

Big-bang releases were in the days of Y2K and dot.com. As a PM, I don't like big releases, as they hold up development (and testing) until everything is OK'd. I prefer smaller/point releases so there is no down-time and also prefer to 'educate' developers in the 'art of testing'. ** See RAD/XP/Agile/Scrum/etc **I appreciate you seeing things from the 'perfectionist' point of view (as a tester), but in real-life I'd rather have timely delivery with a no of (non-critical) errors, rather than a perfect product, months late and outdated. For those that lead sheltered job-lives where costs are not important, fine.

[XperTest]

Big-bang releases were in the days of Y2K and dot.com. As a PM, I don't like big releases, as they hold up development (and testing) until everything is OK'd. I prefer smaller/point releases so there is no down-time and also prefer to 'educate' developers in the 'art of testing'. ** See RAD/XP/Agile/Scrum/etc **I appreciate you seeing things from the 'perfectionist' point of view (as a tester), but in real-life I'd rather have timely delivery with a no of (non-critical) errors, rather than a perfect product, months late and outdated. For those that lead sheltered job-lives where costs are not important, fine.

I agree completely that the big bang approach yields inferior results to RUP-like iterative development. In our projects we have introduced iterative working by breaking down the scope of the projects in subprojects and system and user acceptance testing one system part after another before a big integration and regression testing effort. I was just commenting that in my experience this is the way my customers prefer to work, i.e. implement everything at once. I imagine this may be dependent on the customer and even be project specific, but the projects I have most recently been involved with within the financial services sector have been titanic-like in their implementation approach. Here's hoping my current two projects stay afloat..

[tim123]

Big-bang releases were in the days of Y2K and dot.com. As a PM, I don't like big releases, as they hold up development (and testing) until everything is OK'd. I prefer smaller/point releases so there is no down-time and also prefer to 'educate' developers in the 'art of testing'. **

But as I tried to point out earlier, in a Telco environment you don't have any choice.

A telco will have several thousand exchanges, all geographically separate from each other, that need to be updated with a new release before they can 'sell' the new features that it introduces to paying customers.

Even if they could get the staff to do the task across these geographically spread locations all at the same time, they don't want to take the risk of a problem bringing down more than a couple of exchanges so they update a few at a time over a period of months. Working like this also costs big bucks.

Unsurprisingly, they don't want to do this roll out more frequently that once every 12-18 months and as it costs a lot of money each release has to have a substantial number of new features or they won't bother at all. So, as a manufacturer of telco equipment you have no choice but to provide software updates at this frequency, containing significant improvements in a big bang. Trickling out minor updates at weekly intervals, just doesn't work.

tim