I have an RSS feed for the diary now. It is available at http://www.1337hax0r.com/index.xml . Feel free to use to use it to follow my updates.

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While I’m at it, here’s my CodeCon 2004 presentation on gracefultavi.

http://www.1337hax0r.com/CodeCon/gracefultavi.sxi

Ah yes… that is an open office presentation file. http://www.openoffice.org

That’s what I use for my presentations, because it’s actually really quite good, free and not Microsoft.

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Here’s the location of the presentations I gave at SASMS Winter 2004.

Introduction to Game Theory: http://www.1337hax0r.com/SASMS/GameTheory.sxi

Game Theory and Political Science: http://www.1337hax0r.com/SASMS/polisci.sxi

The main reference books were

"Game Theory for Economists," by Jurgen Eichberger

"Game Theory and Canadian Politics," by Thomas Flanagan.

Have fun reviewing them.

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Before I start… what does everyone thing of this new political party. I am pretty sure I’ll be the first member at this rate.

Newaiz, I was contemplating what it means to be a high quality QA employee. I feel that currently the field of QA is so diluted with people determined to use it as a stepping stone to other careers (like programming.) that it needs to be reevaluated what it is to be a good QA employee. Now, I am not saying all quality assurance personnel are bad. I am a QA person myself, and I know many other high quality QA people. (/me thinks about the Alexi at Maplesoft.) It’s funny though, ’cause as much as QA seems to be useless at first for small companies. In a company with an established product, it becomes almost as important as marketing or a public relations dept. But I digress… Returning to the questions at hand: What type of people would make good QA personnel? What type of people should be hired to be long term QA personnel?

First. Hackers (as defined by both the public media and by the proper ‘hacker’ crowd) would be excellent QA employees and would likely love their job. If applied properly, they would probably be some of the most valuable employees of a server/OS company, since they would be allowed to ‘hack’ the software and find security holes before they have the chance to be released. Unfortunately though, it would be a waste to apply this type of person on matters like customer relations (ie. GUI design), automating testing, bug finding, or developing new test cases.

Now, let us put aside customer relations for a bit and deal with automating testing. Now, naturally this is an incredibly boring job. Especially if the framework for testing has already been developed and maintenance is all that is needed. The question now comes to my mind, which type of employee/person would be most optimally fitted for doing this type of work longterm. Now, there is the obvious choice of people to use this type of work as a stepping stone to development, thus providing a job track, but right now I am looking for optimal worker for this job… We’ll define QA job tracks later. ^_^ Optimally, I think this job would be best for either Tech Institute Grads or Rabid Programmers. The TIGs are obvious why. They are trained to use APIs and program, not develop a framework or create specs. (This of course is a sweeping generalization, and should be taken with a grain of salt. ^_^ ) Now, what is a Rabid Programmer? Well, I’m defining a Rabid Programmer as someone who hates to develop specs but loves the little tricks of coding and programming. There unfortunately aren’t too many of these out there, and the few that are are usually really useful for development departments too. So basically you’d have to make sure if you had one of these in QA that you really kept them busy. But really, this position of automated testing programming is definitely the hardest to fill properly in a QA department.

Now part of bug finding was already covered by the hacker group. More specifically security bugs. Now, a more generic group of people who would be excellent at finding bugs would be a group I would define as paranoid hedonists. Essentially people who want only the best, but expect the worst. These are the people who can find every little nagging bug in a piece of software and will absolutely guarantee it will be logged and taken care of. ^_^ Paranoid hedonists are also pretty good at specs and design, as well as customer relations. For example, paranoid hedonists should also have a good sense of reality and know what would make customers happy with a product. Commonly PHs become customers or sales people themselves, which is double-plus.

Now, the next area is developing new test cases. This is where you want a computer programmer who knows how a computer works with enough experience to instinctively know the black box test cases that will likely have gotten past the unit testing and will break the system. Thus, this category is great for CS Grads or math but not CS grads. Basically people who know code well enough to know when it will fail before they even touch it or code it (based entirely on specs).

Now finally is the category of customer relations. Now this isn’t just sales, or Tech Support, while those two are important as well in a large company. Customer relations in QA is commonly the manager of the dept and has to deal with managers, cutomers and the R&D department. This is optimally filled with Social Engineers and Paranoid Hedonists. Social Engineers is very obvious because they have to handle so many different groups of people and keep them all happy. Paranoid Hedonists is not as obvious. In general, paranoid hedonists will know what the customers want, and what everyone else wants, and will work their hardest to make sure that testing and work is done in the direction that will make everyone happy, incl. themselves. Being paranoid can imply social paranoia as well. *laugh*

Now, understand this is a very nontechnical discussion of QA, and not how QA really works, but I was just debating if I were turn a QA dept into a department who’s goal it was to make sure that customers love the product the most and make the product as bugless as possible. The above seems important. If you think of any other areas that would be useful to have QA personal, leave a msg for me. Currently, an interesting job description of QA is at http://open.nit.ca/wiki/?page=EvilDeathRayJob .

Everyone’s favourite Paranoid Hedonist. ^_^

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Man… I just read an anti-gay marriage letter in Imprint and I cannot hold back. Normally I’m a pretty politically correct guy in my diary, but this just pisses me off to no end.

First thing, if you are going to use the bible to prove you overtly racist and prejudice ways, first actually get legitimate quotes… After looking up the first two quotes at this site. http://www.mechon-mamre.org/p/pt/pt0.htm I discovered how completely wrong he was. Personally I was just going to read the original hebrew and see if anywhere the word "marriage" was used. But then I just discovered that this person thought it was a clever logic debate tactic to just refer to various marriages in the bible. Either way though, it’s silly to use the english translation of the bible to prove that gay people cannot use the word marriage, because "it’s our word." It’s just so silly.

Personally, let gay people get married. It’s not going to hurt you, it’s not going to be a slippery slope (or at least any worse one than the divorce problem,) and it’s going to make people happy. How can you refuse someone something that doesn’t hurt anyone and yet still makes a person happy.

newaiz…. I won’t go on too long of a rant. All I wanted to say is, if you want to tell someone that their happiness is wrong. Come up with a better argument than a book that was written 2000 years ago, and translated to your language.

*sigh*

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