I have, for a long time, suggested that Testers are the Time Lords of IT. Stay with it, just for a minute please, no I don’t have a Tardis, a robotic dog or a sonic screwdriver, but I am often asked to travel in time as part of my testing.
I know, you are thinking that I have finally lost my grip on reality and sanity, but I promise you that Testers are Time Lords and here is the evidence:
- We have to test things like “14 day cooling off periods”
- We have to test month end, quarter end, year-end reports
- We have to reset data to an earlier state in order to retest “fixed bugs” with the same data
So, that’s 2 examples of travelling into the Future and one of travelling back in time. Jules Verne, Douglas Adams, Dr Who (my wife prefers the David Tenant version, but I am a Jon Pertwee and Tom Baker man myself!), the boys from Star Trek and the wonderful Sam Beckett from Quantum Leap would be proud of us testers.
So, are we Testers really Time Lords? Sadly not, I haven’t yet invented a machine which allows me to travel forwards and backwards in the space time continuum, but I do have to design and execute tests which achieve this goal.
If you need help with real-time testing, testing systems with future states (e.g. 14 day cooling off periods) or you want someone to wind the clock back to a previous data state so you can retest something, please contact the experts at Buitech by getting in touch with us via www.buitech.co.uk, emailing info@buitech.co.uk or by calling us on 0330 223 3036.