Tuesday March 10^th 2009. Launch -37 days.

The smile on out long-suffering Development Manager’s face in the cafeteria this morning said it all. Yesterday’s Wacky Race-type start was all down to some weird network problems and, since the problem fixed itself, the system has behaved impeccably. I asked our system engineer this morning if he saw himself in the Dick Dastardly role and he just sniggered like Muttley, so all seems well there. We are happy. Hopefully the 11am briefing will confirm the good news. It is already noticeable that there is not the frenetic air that the pre-Christmas tests had where everyone seemed on the verge of hysteria at times, nor the fatalist “here we go again” of the last test. Right now I am much less busy than I have been in any previous test and that is always a good sign. My time though is coming: suddenly I am going to ramp up from “calm” to “frantically busy” as the breaking wave of activity reaches my office. In a previous test the order was “keep it boring”… that requested was made just before a catastrophe happened, so let’s not count our chickens but, normally, if there has been no disaster by the end of the third day of a test you can usually be confident that things are going well.

Yesterday I gave the Boss my list of success criteria: four conditions that, if met, I feel would permit us to declare the test a success. He changed one word, slightly tightening a criterion (i.e. making it tougher). This is our last big exercise and it is important to have some criteria to be able to declare it a success or a failure. A week ago the Boss was still nervous now, I think that he is cautiously confident. However, it is evident that he feels very stressed, The relentless ticking down on the countdown clock reminds us all how little time is left.

Persistence is hammering the remaining bugs and problems in the system flat. Yesterday we had some teething troubles with the new configuration, but nothing serious and, glory be! a triumphant message from our computer manager suggests that our new computer hardware has arrived in the nick of time.

In the end it was a successful day today, albeit a long one. I left work at ten to eight, having arrived at nine-fifteen in the morning and did another couple of hours at home until tiredness decided me to stop and go to bed to read a little. I had arranged to go shopping with my neighbour at the shopping centre, but fortunately he couldn’t make it because I got home about 20 minutes after the time when we had agreed to meet: he was worried that I was waiting and vice versa.