EWT17 – The Rocket

Date: 8th May 2010
Time: 15:00 – 17:30 GMT

Mission:
The EWT17 testers are all working in the test group of an IT company. It’s Friday afternoon and your test manager has just sent you an email.

All,

as you know I’m playing in a band and we have a gig tonight. Unfortunately our hardware compressor broke down and we absolutely need one. Since technology has moved on a bit since I bought it it’s now possible to use a software compressor as a plugin to the music software we’re using.

I’d really like to use this plugin but need to know if it’s stable enough for me to use during our gig tonight – it would look really bad if it crashed our laptop while we’re playing. Our laptop is essential to playing live and can’t go down.

The compressor will be used on individual tracks and on the main buss – a fast attack is vital, can it do that?

I have to head off to the venue now but you can send me an SMS if you have questions or to let me know if this plugin is suitable. If it isn’t I might have another alternative but the sooner I know the better.

I attached an archive that contains all you need to test this compressor plugin. Please send me an answer within the next hour, I won’t forget that you helped me out today.

Your test manager.

Testers: Shruti Gudi, Jeroen Rosink, Tony Bruce, Zeger van Hese, Catalin Anastasoaie, Katya Kemeneva, Dominique Comte, Pradeep Soundararajan, Jaswinder Kaur Nagi, Thomas Ponnet, Anna Baik, Markus Gärtner

Thomas Ponnet facilitated the discussion afterwards.

The discussion arose on the topic whether or not a tester may point out, if a software is usable. Among the circumstances discussed were the test environment and its comparability to the production environment, the vagueness of the mission itself, and the little support from the test manager.

The whole chat transcript can be inspected here.