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 Cycles waiting for action outside our offices I’ve watched them dig the holes and wondered why. I’ve watched them fill them in again leaving funny plates behind. I’ve watched them install the bike stands and understood. I’ve registered and watched the bikes arrive in obsessive excitement and today I took one of the bikes for a test ride. But how well tested is this system which, I’ve been told, we’ve imported from Canada? I’ve never eagerly anticipated the launch of something quite so much in all my life. As soon as I could I registered for my key and watched in amusement as it arrived two days later in a handwritten envelope. “That won’t scale” I thought to myself. Reminder emails badgered me to activate my new key, I guess some kind of security thing to make sure the credit cardholder had the key. Failure #1: Why then does my online account actually display the key number anyway, even though I haven’t yet completed the activation process? This failure enabled me to activate the key whilst at the office, without having the key in my possession. Today marks the first day of the Barclays Cycle Hire scheme in London. I am a keen cyclist, and arrived later than usual into my normal station and made for the nearest bike stand. From afar it looked like a lot of bikes had already gone, and worried about a cluster of people around the stands, I broke into a run. As the distance between me and my new mode of transport shortened, allowing my myopic vision to discern events correctly, I realised the cluster of people were in fact journalists. I approached a stand with a bike and began the process of removing one. “Do you mind if I ask you a few questions” someone from the Guardian asked me. “Not at all” I replied, as I continued the process of obtaining a bike. A few questions later, I had managed to insert and withdraw the key, but was struggling to remove the bike. This is much harder when someone is waving a boom microphone in your face. Then disaster struck, the stand locked itself up again and then reinsertion of the key into that stand or any other (all accompanied by the microphone, possibly to detect explitives) failed to elicit the warm and friendly glow of a green LED. Instead I got a red LED. At that point, I’m not sure if it was me, but I swear the journalist smiled smugly when she said that this had happened to a few people and maybe the people round the corner could help at the official press opening. I didn’t clarify if all the people having problems also had microphones in their faces but did take the advice. I got the feeling there were lots of people hoping for this to go wrong. Round the corner there were more bikes, but none of these could be unlocked. “Not until 09:30″ an official said. Another helpful pair gave me a phone number, which I called. “Due to high call volume …” said the recorded message. I persevered, determined not to be put off. Michael soon answered the phone and after a few putting on holds said I just needed to wait five minutes before trying again. Failure #2: I agree red LEDs are cheap, but hardly an effective way of communicating any kind of complex message as to WHY I was being denied a bike and the fact that if I waited five minutes I would get one. If every one of these events generates a phone call to the call centre for each user the first time they try and get a bike, that’s gonna be expensive. Failure #3: What is the point of having bike stations manned during this initial adoption period if all they do is tell you to call the call centre? Training would have been nice. I returned to my original bike stand to find more journalists and TV people who now wanted to film me getting a bike out. This time it happened so quick they missed it so I had to repeat it a few times, and then again for a different crew. By now I’m late for the office but enjoying my five minutes of celebrity, and conscious this may be it for me, milk it for all its worth. The bike are too heavy for me to do a wheely or any other stunts for that matter and I have to satisfy myself with my new skill of docking and undocking without getting locked out by the computer! Finally the journalists tire of this and I get to cycle towards the office. Apparently I’m not the only one who has managed to get a bike, and there is a quiet smug feeling of riding a bike that belongs to someone else, even if you do get overtaken by proper cyclists on meaner machines, the smugness remains of having paid 12p today for this remarkable privilege. I’m surprised by the presence of gears and they seem fine for the purpose of keeping up with traffic, although I wouldn’t like to tackle Ditchling Beacon with them! The bike stand at the office (pictured) is almost too full for me to park, although I do get a spot agreeably close to my final destination, dock the bike and grin. Despite the initial hiccups, most likely caused by user training anyway, it looks like being a success and I cannot wait until I get to cycle back to the station again tonight. Some lessons then for all of us building systems:
I’m a big fan of this scheme and look forward to seeing it blossom.
So now, Java programmers and testers of Winchester, Southampton, Portsmouth, Basingstoke and beyond, if you’re fed up with the commute to London, want a fresh challenge, want to make a difference to a company big enough to be safe but small enough to be free of bureaucracy, where the code you develop will end up very rapidly on the desks of people in banks, electronics companies, telecommunications companies, hospitals and so on all over the world, this is the place to be. Drop us a line through our recruitment pages and come and join the fun, we’ve got jobs waiting for you! To steal a phase from CrimeWatch: we’re waiting for your call. Some of you may be wondering why Green Hat has decided to add GUI testing into our GH Tester suite of tools for testing SOA and integrated systems. There are several answers to this. Firstly, when I was out and about meeting customers, I found increasing numbers of them had been using GH Tester with their existing GUI automation products. Why were they doing this? Surely there are not many humans in an SOA world? The answer lies in the fact that much of the ROI from an SOA is currently coming from Business Process Management (BPM). BPM models the existing human processes, but as the project evolves, the BPM processes are used to extract information out of key systems, nowadays using an SOA (see figure 1).  Figure 1 So why is testing different and difficult in this world? Simply because to test the BPM process, all the underlying interfaces and static data needs to be set up. Not only that, but if a rich GUI has been developed over the top of the BPM platform, or you are using one of the AJAX toolkits offered by people like TIBCO and Software AG, you need to test that GUI. Unit testing is difficult without the systems that the BPM process will call. Enter GH Tester with its new GUI testing capability. GH Tester can not only automate the GUI based system but can simulate the underlying dependencies, allowing different paths of the GUI to be tested without needing to hard code this into the application under test (figure 2).  Figure 2 So why is this an improvement on the way our customers are doing it today? Firstly, although existing customers are using combinations of HP QTP with GH Tester, it is time-consuming to set up from the existing GUI automation application and the results we are able to pass back are limited by the vendors of these applications. This means there are multiple places you must look to understand what went wrong and where: not good. Secondly, data driving these tests in and out of the GUI and back and forth from GH Tester was made impossible by the extension points offered by these vendors. This meant that the tests did not scale well when customers wanted to try many different scenarios driven by Excel or a database or other data source. Thirdly, some green field sites that are not doing GUI testing but are interested in the intuitive, codeless approach that Green Hat took and wanted to know if we offered GUI testing, so now we do! We hope you find the new GUI testing capabilities useful, we’ll be posting a video of the functionality in action shortly, watch this space, and if you’d like a demo before that, please get in touch. |
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After months of preparation, the Winchester office opened this week in the heart of Hampshire and in the old capital of the Kingdom of England. It’s been really busy getting everything sorted. The furniture movers did an excellent job, and I was glad they turned up as apparently other people in the building were worried about the strange man sitting on the floor with a laptop on his lap talking into his iPhone. Hopefully they are now reassured that yes, we can afford chairs and desks too! A big thanks to Rebecca and Nadia who have made this process one of the smoothest new office openings I have ever been involved with - we couldn’t have done it without you.