Jim in case you are not yet on the company's email list here is the newest monitor.
Fabro expects to hear in a few days from the independent testing team that their work is officially done.
Hey, how's that for an impact date...LOL Just kidding.
later,
Meteor Monitor - Thursday, July 20, 2000
Meteor Monitor: (Article) How ThoughtShare tests its software
===========================================================================
Since its successful demo at our shareholder's meeting last month, lots of
people have been asking us how ThoughtShare Communications, our major
investment, tests its software programs before releasing them +into the
wild,+ as programmers call the computerized world beyond their test
benches.
Fred Fabro, President and CEO of ThoughtShare and Meteor Technologies, says
it starts, not by running the program and seeing if it works, but by the
main teams: Quality Assurance and Verification (QA&V), and Development
first developing a testing plan.
+As we began work on the coding, we also worked out a plan for how it would
be tested. The plan provides detailed, written guidelines for testing and
debugging, and it provides various scenarios for the kinds of tests the
software has to pass, and the benchmarks it has to achieve. Parts of the
plan are useful for any software program, and parts of it take into account
the goals of a particular program and what we want to achieve with it. And
parts of the plan have to do with who will be testing it, when, and under
what conditions. There's quite a bit to it all.+
For instance, right now ThoughtShare's first major product is undergoing
rigorous checking by a independent test team. It's going a bit slower than
hoped, but not by much. +We intended to be going to beta test in July, and
we still expect to do that, but it's going to be later in the month, rather
than earlier. That bit of slippage is OK -- it's only a week or two -- and
it has to do with upgrading the user interface. Beta testers will be
getting it next, and they have expectations that the program will work the
way we say it will.+
Independent testers? Absolutely. The program's developers and our in-house
experts are too close to the program, too intimately involved with it, to
give it an objective, frank and unbiased evaluation. ThoughtShare has
complemented its QA&V with software engineers and users to run the program
through its paces. Their mission (and they readily accepted it) is to go
through the testing plan and check off every major and minor goal, and
feature, the program contains.
+The program is designed to run with Netscape and Internet Explorer running
on Windows,+ says Fabro, +But, of course, not everybody has the latest
versions of those programs or that operating system. In fact, quite a lot
of people don't. So they're testing it as it runs on various combinations
of web browser versions, and with the Windows operating system. They're
also testing it with various types of hardware - different computers,
different processors, different equipment attached to those computers. Our
program is quite graphical: what happens to it with various monitor types,
and various monitor resolutions? They're testing it under various types of
operating environments where there are other software programs running at
the same time. Our program has to be able to deal with all of that
rough-and-tumble, and it can't be doing things that interfere with whatever
else is going on inside the computer. Whatever the testers do, they know
+the wild+ is just as rough.+ Through it all, ThoughtShare's programmers
are working with the team to optimize their code.
When they get through with doing that part, the independent testers do
their best to make the program break, a process much like torture. +The
program gathers information about a web surfing session and stores it. The
testers are going to ask themselves, 'Well, what if we try getting it to
store hundreds or thousands of website addresses and links. What if we try
to sort all that data, or save it, or edit it, or re-organize it, or delete
big chunks of it, or write long essays about each link? Or cut and paste
articles about a link. What happen if we paste graphics into it and the
program is expecting text? What about this torture? What about that one?+
Fabro smiles, +Personally, I think this is the part they really enjoy the
most.+
Fabro expects to hear in a few days from the independent testing team that
their work is officially done.
Beta testing - think of it as a temporary holding pen of potential
ThoughtShare customers gathered in from +the wild+ - is the next step.
--
Meteor Technologies Inc. has a 50.3% interest in ThoughtShare
Communications. ThoughtShare is an Internet software company that is
developing a wide range of commercial products founded on an underlying
ability to help people capture web-based information -- whether it's on the
Internet or on corporate intranets -- easily, intuitively and effectively.
The products, based on years of scientific research into the way people
think and use data, will enable us to quickly organize, personalize and
save the information, turning it into knowledge. Just as importantly, the
software will also let us share the knowledge with others privately,
publicly or commercially.
---
Peter Morgan, Managing Editor, Meteor Monitor |
