Chapter 1 - The Tester Who Tested

I’m working in a Wart hog’s company of offshoring and consulting.

In the first month of my software training, a dangerous Dark Bug, in an attempt to obliterate my yet-to-start-career, killed off my motherboard and a stack of pop music cd’s. I don’t remember much about the incident, but it seems the motherboard laid down her life protecting my career. In this most selfless act of love towards the user, the motherboard managed to reduce the dark bug to almost nothingness. The death of the motherboard and the following explosion of the pc left a deep lightning shaped mark on my ID card.

I was soon sent to an onsite location by a very old project manager. I was to learn the magic behind locating bugs and defects in costly software programs. For this I needed a few books, a mouse, a keyboard and an excel sheet. I named the mouse Handglouse. At the onsite location I learned a lot about the ways of software testing and soon could perform my own charms, jinxes and counter curses to locate bugs and report them in the bug tracking tool. Once the bugs were logged in the bug logging tool, the Department Of Magical Bug Fixers would perform some coding spells to destroy the bug.

During my first year at the onsite location, I made friends with a red-haired software tester of about the same experience as mine, and a girl who always behaved as an obnoxious know-it-all. And she knew it all too. She could even write complex test plans and test cases for functional, regression and system testing even during her first few months in Wart Hog’s. I was having a good time.

At the same time, rumors were going round that the Dark Bug was returning to power. Here and there I could hear stories of how the dark bug destroyed a lot of testers’ and developers’ careers. Towards the end of my first year at onsite, I successfully located and logged a very dangerous “squirrel” bug, which had turned itself to a software feature to avoid detection, using the inherent code of the Bug-Which-Must-Not-Be-Named in order to wreak havoc in the network servers. Even though my job was only to locate the bugs, I actually managed to destroy the squirrel bug, but somehow You-Know-What made itself disappear among the countless lines of garbled code.

You-Know-What made another appearance at another onsite location I was working during my second year at Wart hog’s. This time the bug possessed one of the modules being developed by my best friend’s sister (who was also working at Wart hog’s) making the GUI of the module to act rather funny– text boxes gulped down whatever was typed on them, buttons refused to be clicked and menus displayed non-vegetarian food items. Such was the power of the Dark Bug. The presence of a boisterous and idiotic (as most of them are) project manager did not help much in narrowing down the steps to locate the bug. But finally after much deliberation and slogging (I even had to disguise myself as a network engineer together with a couple of co-testers, to gather information about the bug) I did find the bug and a few developers from the Department Of Curing Funny Acting Modules were able to throw out the Dark Bug from the original code.

The third year went by without much intervention from the dark bug. I had by this time won countless games organized during project parties and had made a name for myself. The mark on my ID card always invited unwanted attention though.