This thing I’m currently testing… There are a dozen separate calculation formulas to look at. I then have 14 groups of said formulas with different tweaks. So – 168 calculations to check. Which sounds like a lot, but the biggest pain in the ass is getting the data setup and then building the spreadsheet to validate the calculations, but that only has to be done once – and I’ve gotten pretty good at that part over the past two and a half years. The actual test is push button, dump data into spreadsheet, make sure numbers on Tab A equal the numbers on Tab B. Conditional formatting is the best thing ever. If they equal, GREEN! If not, ORANGE! Then that gets repeated several times.

So, I’d found some issues Wednesday, those got fixed, found another yesterday – and it took me a while to figure out why it was wrong until I had a revelation of “Oh, if I set X so that all these calculations should equal zero – then I can clearly see what is/isn’t included” – and I figured out what the issue was. (Why the hell this approach didn’t occur to me from the start, I don’t know.)

It only affected 8 of the 168 calculations – 4 formulas, 2 tweaks. Send it back to dev, let the folks on the other side of the world know, said I’d pick back up on Monday (PTO today) – but also offered to pop in this morning to do a quick check, cause we’re rapidly approaching the deadline on this. Team leads response was to tell the other person testing to please check it.

Cool! I still take a look at Teams this morning to see how things turned out, and the other tester has looked at one formula. One. And says it’s OK and he’ll look at the rest on Monday.

FFS. No. You can’t just look at one. I logged on – ON MY DAY OFF – pushed the button, dumped the data, and looked at all 168. 160 that were good are still good, YAY. 6 of the 8 which were problems are now good, YAY. The one that had been declared good by the other tester – STILL IS NOT WORKING.

I understand that everyone is overworked, especially my buds on the other side of the world, because I think the team lead is pushing them to do too much and no one dares say no. I get that. Hell, it took me a couple iterations to nail down the issues I found – they were all related, but overlapping, and I didn’t initially take the best approach to see them clearly. (Shoulda done that “everything should be zero” check first – it will be part of my protocol going forward.)

However, throughout this testing, which has been going on for a week now – this person has not found a single issue and then missed a problem that was still right there, plain as day. (Also, not the first time this has happened.)

The reason we split testing is almost always for time constraints – we’re testing the same thing in two systems, and yep, faster for each of us to take a system than one of us running everything through two systems. The added benefit is that theoretically, if I miss something, the other tester will catch it and vice-versa.

But I’m really feeling like with this one tester, I don’t have a safety net and that if I miss something – they’re not going to find it. I don’t know if they’re just missing things or waiting for me to find things first, but add to it the general weird attitude when I tell the team I’ve found an issue…

I realize that the attitude part is likely just the fact that trying to communicate via Teams is complete crap, and what I’m catching as “Ugh, why didn’t you find this sooner and why do you think anyone would actually be using this calculation/tweak variation?” is probably more just “Shit, why is this still fucked” – but I am still feeling a bit shit on sometimes for doing my job.

At least the other day, one of my coworkers did say “keep being curious!” which I did appreciate, even if I don’t think of my job as to be curious so much as “try to be 3 steps ahead of the clients” – which I suppose does mean being curious.

Threw my other tester under the bus a bit, cause I did have to say, “checked it, still broken” – but that had to be said, cause they need to know it’s going back to dev. Maybe someone will ask him what he looked at to determine it was OK and they’ll figure out that they didn’t pay attention to what I’d said.

Maybe nothing will be said or followed up on and I’ll only have myself to count on when I do split testing, just like when I do solo testing. And that’s fine if that’s how it’s gonna be.

I’m not gonna quit my job or anything like that – I’m not even mad, I’m just annoyed today. It only took an hour and a half out of my day, and I didn’t have any special plans for my day off. It’s just not being able to count on folks that is really bothering me.

I’ll be fine tomorrow. Just had to get it out of my system. You have a good Friday!