Realistic website testing

To make our QA process more realistic and accurate, we decided to give the QA department a set of computers -appart of those they already have. The new set is mostly composed by Intel Centrino with Windows XP, and not less than 5 o 6 different types of spyware installed.

The idea is to reproduce the average visitor experience, which is very far away from the experience they have using their last generation computers.

Sounds stupid, but I think it was a very clever move.

Windows' cmd is disgusting

After many years working under Linux, and less than a month having a Mac as personal computer I've found myself in a Symfony2 training, using the Windows' cmd program. During the final part of the training we were learning MongoDB, a non-relational database. To follow the examples we needed to make many copy/paste operations, specially with the documents' IDs which in MongoDB are 48-bits keys, shown in 24 hexa characters.

Working with the cmd tool is technically impossible. Copy-paste operations are so hard to do that I decided to simply not follow the examples. I'm sincerely disgusted.

But I'm still happy, I know that once I'm out of this great training I'll be back with my little black-on-white console, either at home or at the office.

BTW, thanks a lot to ManWin who paid the training about Symfony2, and to Hugo Hamon who made a great job during the training. We, programmers, tend to be very prouds and to refuse other people ideas, so training developers is not a simple task, and he made an excellent job with us.