Welcome to the Black Box

When I started on my career path, I conducted black box testing. This is a test strategy where the person testing knows nothing about the internal workings, logic or code structure of the application. A tester who knows nothing can be extremely useful in many ways. They can help perfect your test scripts and they give honest feedback about their experiences to name a few pluses. Since then much has changed, both my own knowledge and the industry itself. I now know a bit more about the software applications I test and the processes that get us to the "lab" which no longer exists. I am on the white side now. This blog is a capture of some of those learning's because although things have changed, a whole lot has remained the same.

I started testing back in 1997 in a professional sense. Not too long ago really; but the dark ages to some. At the time I was working at a major retailer in their corporate offices and had the luxury of a lab. You know a room where the actual systems "lived" and we would visit them. Poor computers were in cages stacked three high and dust was a major issue. We would often have to find working keyboards or other peripherals in order to get started for the day. I knew nothing about software development at the time and would have to write down the DOS commands so I'd remember how to boot up or back up. The backup was on floppies and that was a luxury compared to tapes. Some of the old-timers there remembered punch cards. When the monitors lit up they were black and the letters in green! Today there is no lab and even mouse clicking is old school.

The kind of testing I did at that time was on registers and back office systems. I worked with a lot of hardware. From stacks of Cisco switches to scanners. During end-user acceptance testing we would bring in cashiers or sales associates from the local stores. One project we brought in distribution associates from the warehouse and had them test. We had large binders with the test scripts in them. Some of the steps in the scripts required pictures. During one holiday break, I took pictures of the back of the computer to show the end-users how to properly plug in the parallel ports. Really, I was one of them; nothing more than a glorified cashier getting paid good money to ring up sales 9-5 in the corporate office. But I embraced that and really enjoyed making our lab time very productive and organized. By the time I left there post Y2K, that store systems lab was a well oiled machine and our scripts were well on their was to automation.