@nixCraft

Yeah, is over there in the big blue room.

@nixCraft

Where I find myself now. Rather have a lab system to test, to help keep the customer and our execs off my back when things go sideways.

@nixCraft At a previous job, I was brought on to handle a large macOS environment. It was a mess of different OS versions, no standardized way to deploy packages, no base profiles, etc and a lengthy queue of trouble tickets for poorly deployed software. I grabbed three Mac Minis, put the three majority deployed OS versions on them and just stacked them on my desk and started running profiles, install packages on them, etc to make sure nothing would break before going out. Had some of the other IT people stick their head in the door and go “hey you want some more computers? HAHA. What are you doing anyway?” After telling them I was testing things before deployment every one said something along the lines of “Huh…never thought about that…I should do something similar.”

That should have been a giant red flag, but I was just happy to have a new job at the time and moved past it.

@nixCraft I’m retired but when I worked as a developer mgmt’s cavalier attitude toward test never ceased to amaze me.

- Lack of physical test environment for things that required it. For instance telecom where telephone switches were the source of data.
- Having testers reporting bugs against unversioned environment . For instance “last Tuesday I saw the software on server XXX doing such and such”. Well, it’s now Monday and if I can’t reproduce your bug how am I supposed to fix it?

@nixCraft I was asked once what our test network looks like.

“A lot like our production network.”