I found myself watching an episode of Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares USA the other night. As expected, it was not going very well and Gordon seemed to be getting more and more frustrated with one of the Chefs. Something had to give, but my heart sank when Gordon held up an apple and asked the question ‘What is this?’ Now I have come to respect Gordon’s approach to project recovery; he’s straight talking and gets results. Eventually the answer came, ‘it’s an apple Gordon’. Oh dear, maybe he’s just been working too hard.

Clearly the wrong answer! Gordon seemed to get quite upset. Apparently it’s not just an apple, it’s a bundle of flavour and inspiration for several dishes. This got me thinking, as testers do we just see test cases, or do we see crit-sits and outages prevented. If it really is just test case xyz, how can we get anyone interested in it?

I seem to have amassed quite a lot of personal data; digital photographs, music, manuals and course-work all adds up to a few GB. Obviously, being fond of computing, I have implemented some mind bogglingly complex – albeit sporadic – backup strategies that I don’t really understand anymore. If a key piece of hardware were to fail I’d loose it all. As good an excuse as any then for a gadget impulse buy: a Network Attached Storage (NAS) device would save the day, so I bought one last weekend.

The problems started shortly after I switched it on.  I planned to use the device for backup purposes and to support sharing of data between systems, but I had not really thought this through. The device has a single ‘large’ disk, so no complex redundancy or performance configurations to worry about, how hard can it be?

My first plan was simple – mount the drive and start copying data. The drawbacks emerged pretty quickly;  many of the data structures are ‘live’ and subject to change.  Relying on manual inspection to identify updates is not really going to scale. Thankfully, the device manufacturer was one step ahead and had kindly bundled some software. Sadly, my PC, the software and I could not get along, the PC eventually got so upset that I sent it to the naughty step to reflect on its behaviour. OK, I need way of pairing file structures and establishing a relation so that changes would be synchronized from the live ‘master’ to backup ’slave’ structures. At this point I remembered Jon mentioning SyncToy, which seems to address my needs. Any other tools or strategies worth reviewing?

Test bucket x, the Regression Test bucket – sound familiar?

Seriously, I’ve always wondered where the term comes from. Is it just a collective noun for tests, or was there really a time when the software industry quantified tests by the bucket-load?

In true Balderdash & Piffle style: Does anyone have a reference for its first usage?

It is widely recognised that testing software can be an enormously challenging task, but why is this? The answer to this question is not straight forward; software is complex, code paths are long and the numbers are not on the tester’s side…

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