Hitting Earth

 Readers of my cartoons often ask me about the root incident behind these sketches. Many of the ideas develop over years. I keep making notes on things that happen to me (or to others) especially when I think, it could make a great story or lessons learnt later on. Sometimes, no direct background story exists on a cartoon; like this one. The original inspiration was born due to an article about a comet coming closer to Earth. There were speculations whether it is really just a comet or maybe something else. Even though the root idea had nothing to do with software development or -testing, you can still draw your own  relation to interesting software related stories. I mean, how often have you experienced a situation where you warned about a possibly wrong decision made by either your boss, a manager, a customer or whoever, only for you to later get a confirmation in the form of "Told ya!". 

Software made on Earth

This is a remake of my original cartoon which was published at SDTimes, N.Y. in their newsletter as of April 1, 2008

BETA Test at Green Galactica

One day the PL asked me to provide a checklist with the most important acceptance criteria and which served as checkpoints to enter the next phase of the project. The list was later extended with a few more items by the PL and PO. When the date came closer, someone worked on the list and changed most of the quality attributes from MUST to NICE-TO-HAVE without upfront warning. Obviously, someone realized one is not going to meet all the goals and changed the attributes beforehand. As a quality manager, I was concerned that tasks labelled NICE-TO-HAVE are never picked up, therefore I protested heavily.

 We then agreed to keep the list with its original priority, and, on D-DAY we would go through the list again and then decide for each unfinished task how bad it really is and what are the risks related if we are not completing the task.

 But, the cartoon fits even better to several similar situations where the testers warned management long in advance about the immaturity of the system. When deadlines were close, the pattern was often the same: concerns were overruled, management had “higher” goals and caused a mess with the decision to rollout the software despite the obvious consequences.

Patched UFOs

When developers state, they didn't change anything but one line of code, they actually believe that themselves. It's just that they have a bias towards forgetting all the work they've done (plus their colleagues') before their last coffee break.