I was thinking maybe that a lot of “usual” interviews, evaluations, views on testing  etc do not touch the sensitive points a tester and maybe certain types of missions are needed.

Here are some I have in mind:

1) This was one I had in mind after a twitter chat with @shrinik:

Lets say Skype(doesn’t matter what provider ) added a new type of video chat that suppose to be much better regarding video and audio transmission. And they made an estimate and measurement and  assume some numbers of servers for the peer-to-peer (better peer-server-peer) connections. Each of these servers have to put up with 10000 videochat conferences of some defined conditions (video stream = X data /second, audi stream =Y data /second -doesn’t matter).

The problem here is how do you test this properly, having in mind that Skype wants to know that their initial estimate, before the actual investment in hardware (budget is also limited and very important) , is accurate and reliable?

2) How would you test gmail servers from Google for 200 million users for spam filtering, so that each email sent is received in maximum 2 sec within network?

3) Start with an empty website, or an empty window application, or something that is very close to “nothing”.

And from that start giving info about the product. For example “there is nothing about this blank page, at least a help section will be need”

You can do it as an exercise, and others can play stakeholder role etc

4)Let’s say within a SMS service provider,  each SMS has to be filter out by some text, and if its not filtered out the SMS is not received by the user.

And let’s assume a requirement that said in case of failover of the filtering server, a queue of up to 10 billion SMS messages have to be kept  till server is back. After that number is reached,  send the SMS without the filter on a FIFO (first in first out) base.  The idea here is to try to save the SMS as long as possible to be filtered, but if the filter is not up, send it as it could be important for the user.

Also after the filter serve is up, the queue should be consumed within an hour and arrive to a “usual” size.

So that is what I kind of have in mind as alternative testing missions. Large scale applications are one good example. Hope others with give similar examples.

These days it seems to be a little of an issue the dispute between Google and Microsoft. It started  with “Google: Bing is Cheating, Copying Our Search Results”,  in which there were accusations that Bing is using the Google engine for its own results. Then it was this post, as a response “We do not copy Google’s results”, in which Microsoft tried to deny stuff. Then again “Microsoft’s Bing is using Google search results”.

Well, I guess it raises interest, but I also think not too many care that much about. People use Google because is simpler and it is useful and they got used to it. Its is a philosophical/legal/many-other-perspectives issue between the two corporations, but as long its a good search engine there, its all fine.

However, no engine is really perfect. As an example I have this:

Try to Google search for images, with the default filter (“Moderate”), by entering this as query:

http://ramnicuvalcea.olx.ro/doresc-sa-cunosc-prietene-prieteni-iid-98527442

I don’t think though the results are very “moderate”, at least at the time of writing this post.
(used my experience from a while ago as Internet Assessor at Lionbridge, where I  had to rate the search results based on a query, for the main engines )

Every engine could do better and for that competition is a necessity.

This gave me ideas to play with some queries related to my website and my usual ID “testalways”.

1) Google curiously does not return my website after querying “test always”. And a while ago it did show it like 5th or 6th.

2) Yahoo tops my website first for the same query.

3) Bing also tops my website first

4) Ask.com doesn’t top my website first, but within top 10. It looks btw like Google results a while ago

5) AOL search doesn’t show anything within first results related to my website.

Well that is strange that Google doesn’t show it. Maybe because I tweet it 

Now about what is the best result for “test always”, I think I have to agree a little bit with Google’s. I actually used very rarely “test always”, and only when I say that I don’t test always, but most of the time

So “testalways” is an ID, not necessarily  referring to “test always”. Indeed it suggests that, but its still an ID primary.

I kinda like it, whether its not correct, to have it as first result.

Edit: after I wrote this post I am able to see my website within top 10  results in Google search…