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April Fools Aftermath

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Every year, I am surprised that, despite the buildup to “April Fools Day”, someone gets duped on just about every prank.

The school where my kids go has a parking and drop off issue that’s on the mind of everyone. So much so, that when the weekly newsletter was delivered (“accidentally” a day later than normal yesterday) an article about undercover policeman and parking tickets caused at least one parent to start an email flame-rant and call the police department. Luckily, someone clued them in before they went too far.

I also had my part in the April Fools tradition. Yesterday, I was on twitter first thing in the morning with the following announcement:

The rumors are true - I've just accepted a job as Vice-President of Testing at a "very public software company". Time to write a new book!

Only Matt Heusser pointed out that the announcement was occurring on April 1st, but I think everyone else knew something was up. Although it would be fun to start writing “How We Test Software at ACME”, my string of offers to become a VP has slowed down dramatically with the current economic situation.

I also posted the following article in an internal newsletter I just happen to send out on the first day of every month:

A New Way to Test?
The Microsoft Robotics Studio, in conjunction with several pilot test teams at Microsoft have been successful in creating a robot that can simulate almost any manual testing activity, including exploratory testing. The robot can push buttons, resize windows, and even read email in 9 different languages. Additionally, it can “explore” the application by taking high resolution photos at predefined intervals. This allows testers to simply review screenshots each morning, rather than go through all of the pain and hassle associated with manual testing.

The brains of the system are built around a Fully Automated Knowledge Engine (or FAKE). FAKE can easily simulate any manual testing activity with as little as 80-100 man hours of programming per task. “Finally” quips one tester we talked to, “with FAKE, I can free up my time by reviewing hundreds of screen shots rather than actually testing the application in person”. For more information, or to investigate FAKE for your test team, visit the team web site.

In this case, I tried my best to make it fun, but completely unbelievable. Unfortunately, I had a few people bite and ask me for more information. I replied and referred them to the site linked in the article. So far, that has cleared up the confusion.

Comments

  • Anonymous
    April 02, 2009
    PingBack from http://www.anith.com/?p=25821
  • Anonymous
    April 05, 2009
    Isnt it great fun to not know that the people who congratulated you, also knew, it was an April Fool's day prank. And they did not want to show you that till you write this post. :-)Matt spilled the beans early, huh.