BCFH

by apr on certifications

A recent post in the users' mailing list has triggered this post.

The post goes something like this: "The problem was they where modifing this server (it's a test server) and that's why I didn't get anything." Sounds familiar?

This happened to me dozens of times.

These people think they are smarter than us developers, so they use our time to test their systems, and they hide behind their big names. I can imagine they say something like "hey, let's test this new patch that handle our latest features with the next stupid programmer that needs to certify".

They do test driven development, but the problem is YOU (developer) are the tester, and by the way, you don't know that.

They hide behind their big brand names and you get to listen things like "Your system has to be failing, our's process a massive amount of transactions every single day, we just can't afford to go wrong".

And that's very true, their production system, installed turn-key by their solutions provider actually works (until they start messing with it), but the little crap that they have put together for your tests, running some bogotified version of the original software with some spaghetti-patch to support the latest feature recently requested by the marketing division never worked before.

It would be okay if they are honest and tell you "Listen, test with this proven certification environment, and then, if you don't mind, we would like to run a couple of tests in our new system".

That's fair, you usually need a little bit of help during certification and it's very nice to provide some useful feedback, but the problem is they usually don't get to acknowledge their system has never run before until you spend a week, testing day after day, frustrasted against a wall.

UPDATE: the previous title was rude so I changed it to BCFH (based on BOFH, C for certifier)