Sunday February 15^th 2009. Launch -60 days.

This has been another quiet day, something attributable mainly to the fact that the system is now working quite smoothly. People are cautiously optimistic that we really have made a major step to domesticate our system. It shows the value of the extended tests that we have been doing. Up to now, the longest continuous period that the system has been in use in formal testing has been six days; this campaign though has now been running for 13 days and people have been using the system heavily seven days a week during that time. This has put everything – people, machines and software – under a lot of stress and allowed problems to be detected. The engineers then solve the problems as they appear. It may be a case of “famous last words”, but there is a growing feeling that we have now found and either corrected or are well on the way to correcting all the major vices in the system. What is left, hopefully, are going to be annoying problems rather than serious ones.

All in all, we feel much happier about life and much more satisfied with progress than we did a week ago.

Today I have dedicated most of the day to preparing the release of a second, advanced draft of the test report for the major test campaign before Christmas. A lot of the work is just formatting and trying to make things coherent but a substantial part is also in recognising and filling-in the gaps. As my familiarity with the system gets greater, it is easier to do this. However, it did not stop the draft from going out at 01:30am on a Sunday night. However, at least it will be in the inboxes of the people who should see it when they arrive in the morning, so that they can act on it (or not) as they so wish.

Izzy wizzy, let’s get busy:

The colleague who uttered those words has finally put me out of my misery and reminded me what TV personality used them regularly. When I saw the photo below I realised why I could not remember… I’m barely old enough to remember him! However, for those of a curious bent, here is… Sooty (complete with magic wand for solving our database issues)!!!!