in reply to OT: Testing, operations and support resources

This strikes me as unusual, usually the support and testing guys want to get into development not the other way around.

In fact support and test roles are good ways to get a handle on certain aspects of development. However I do see the appeal of the problem solving and more use for soft skills. Maybe a client facing development role would give you the same experiance.

From a Perl point of view I think there is of course Test::Simple for unit testing and LWP/HTTP::Recorder etc for automated web app testing.

A big part of testing is release management so also make sure you are up to speed of version control software. Also download and evaluate some commercial test suites such as Rational
  • Comment on Re: OT: Testing, operations and support resources

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re^2: OT: Testing, operations and support resources
by talexb (Chancellor) on Dec 05, 2005 at 18:41 UTC
      This strikes me as unusual, usually the support and testing guys want to get into development not the other way around.

    Quite. I'm thinking my path would be more in terms of operations (speccing new equipment reqirements, network design, bandwidth needed, monitoring, maintenance) and in terms of QA and release control (automated testing, random testing, continuity, focus groups).

    For example, when Scott Cook of Intuit was building Quicken, he (or one of his guys) would plonk themselves down beside amateur testers and watch how they used the software. Every time the tester ran into a problem, the programmers would be told where the problem was, and to simplify or clarify the interface.

    I guess I'm getting to the point where I can say, "Development? Yeah, done that.", and be able to move on to the next thing. The most obvious step to me right now is Operations and Support.

    Alex / talexb / Toronto

    "Groklaw is the open-source mentality applied to legal research" ~ Linus Torvalds

[reply]

In Section Meditations