HW13: Chapter 8

8.7 – Write a scenario to help test weather station wilderness system.

Bob is a weather station engineer and is being called out to the weather station because the past week it’s been overcast and the batteries are running very low since they haven’t been solar charged.  There’s been an error when the station tried to send over some reading in the overcast weather and the data was received in a corrupted state.
Bob gets during midday as the station is in a remote location and takes a reading of the batteries which are still at 15%.  He’s got some brand new ones ready to swap in but first wants to run some diagnostics on the satellite up-link to ensure it’s functioning properly.  He also looks around at the various instruments to see if there’s any signs of physical damage to them that could possibly be the origin of corrupt data as sometimes when a sensor become damaged it’ll take readings that can overflow the data structure.  But there is no sign of damage and he decides he will have to run a deep diagnostic back at the office when he can link up with the maintenance station.
He powers down the station and makes the Lithium-Ion battery swap.  He’s also able to take a backup of all the instrument readings with him for a manual transmission in case the station keeps having issues.
When Bob gets back to his office he checks the maintenance station for an update on today’s transmission and also to see how the system is keeping up with the new batteries.  He commences a full system diagnostic when today’s transmission shows up in the same errored state as yesterday.

8.10  Explain the ethics of using all the testing budget on system testing until it runs out

If I understand this correctly we mean to say we’ve allocated X amount of dollars to Development testing and when those run out we are finished so all we are really looking for are system bugs and defects.  We go ahead and skip release testing where a separate team or a team of stakeholders gets a chance to do their own testing let along a user acceptance testing stage where the one who will be using the system is allowed to test and provide any feedback for changes because of mistakes… it sounds pretty unethical doesn’t it?  However, I know that oftentimes what matters is what is written on the contract and type of service level agreement for when the system is implemented at the user’s place of business or whatever the system may be there’s a guaranteed resolution time-frame or feedback.  If this is an off the shelf product with minimum additional requirements this might be an okay approach but if this is a custom system for a specific customer and especially the first go-around deploying the system than that would be pretty outrageous and they probably wouldn’t be in business very long with those shady practices.