Newsletter 4

Phew! What a busy fortnight it has been. There has been so much going on, it’s hard to keep track of it all. Our search continues for staff and a permanent office in Melbourne and Mark Bishop has been oing a great job with this.
Joanne Phan has been working on the implementation of our new job costing and web-based timesheet system. A few people have been trialling the new timesheet system and from all reports it seems to be a success. You will hear more from Jo about this in the coming week as we would like everyone to start using the system as soon as possible. We have multiple projects starting in the next week with Optus, MLC, University of NSW, DET NSW and the University of Sydney – all requiring the recruitment of people. We think that we have found everyone required for these projects, but we will have more work starting up in the next couple of weeks. So if anyone knows of experienced testing staff looking for work please get them to send their CV’s to me – jodir@testingcentre.com.
In the past couple of weeks we have also been working intensively on our NATA Accreditation rocess. Mark Bishop has been working on this along with Liz Mataja who is a Melbourne consultant ngaged specifically to assist with the mountains of documentation and processes required to achieve the SO 17025 accreditation.
Thanks to all of you who have contributed to this Newsletter. In this issue, Roland Perpic brings s a report from the sales desk, which we hope will become a regular feature. Chao Luan has submitted an nteresting contribution on technology, Peter Wright is becoming our resident "Greeny" with this weeks nvironment report and Mark Bishop gives us an update on what’s going on down in Melbourne. More contributions are required people. Tell us about the job you are working on, the holiday ou have just been on or any other exciting developments you would like to share with your co-workers.

Staff News
Today we farewell Tessa Cotterrell. Since joining Access in 2001 Tessa has become on of the most wellknown (and loved) members of the testing team. She has worked in many roles, including managing the est
lab in the Crows Nest office, onsite at Sydney Uni, CCH and the RTA among others. In each of her roles Tessa has been dedicated, reliable and an absolute pleasure to work with. Our clients love her as uch as we do, nearly everywhere she has worked we have had to struggle with the client to get them to elease her.
We don't think this is the last we see of Tessa and hope that after she is though experimenting ith new roles and technologies she will come back to work with us again. On behalf of the Access management team I would like to thank Tessa for her ever-present positive attitude and all of her efforts over the ast 3 years.
We will be having a farewell lunch for Tessa in the second week of August and I will send out ore details, as the time gets closer. Please join me in wishing Tessa the very best of luck (not that she will eed it) in her new role.

Welcome back to Amanda Ambrose. Amanda has just come back to her post at CCH after about a month off, visiting the relo’s overseas
In the last fortnight we have a couple of new people to add to the Access team. I would like to welcome Simon Ng and John Tan to the lab team. Tuan Pham has joined David May and Richard Martin down at Optus, North Sydney. At Optus, Chatswood we welcome Ian Graham who will be working with Janet Small there for the next few weeks at least.
We also welcome both Yasmeen Barodawla and Susan Cearns to our Melbourne team. Susan starts with us on Monday and Yasmeen on 16 August. Yasmeen and Susan will be working out of The earning Federation offices until our office is fully operational in early September.
Larry and I have been conducting interviews for the past 2 weeks and this should result in another 3-4 people starting with us next week in various roles. The RTA’s correspondence Workflow project winds up today. From what I hear Tessa Cotterrell, Lizzie Beaton and Chao Luan have all done a great job on this project. Lizzie will be heading out to take up her place at Sydney University again for a while. In between she will be having a well earned rest for about a week starting next Thursday. Chao will start working with Eran Segev on a load testing project for Resimac who is a new client.

Melbourne Update by Mark Bishop
The Melbourne office will soon be moving from the luxury of Level 50, 101 Collins Street to slightly less salubrious digs. This is largely a response to increased volume of work from the Le@rning Federation (TLF), a long term client for ATC. It's also to meet our commitment to them that testing can and will be done better if co-located with the client. What does that mean? Well, we're very close to leasing space for a new test laboratory not far away from TLF's office in Melbourne CBD. Also, we're hiring local staff to take up testing and editorial review roles.
Yasmeen Barodawala will start with ATC on 16 August, taking up a permanent position. Also, subject to some final paper work, Susan Cearns will take up another permanent role starting this Monday, 2 August.
Both people will initially work on site at TLF to be trained by the client about their testing and reporting requirements. This week an advertisement will be placed on SEEK and MyCareer for apermanent Editorial Reviewer to join the team. And, Natalie Kerschner is succumbing to the temptation of Melbourne's shopping, restaurant and quality coffee (mostly the shopping though) to move down permanently and take up the test leadership responsibilities for a team that will be dedicated to TLF's testing requirements. Natalie's coming down next week to sort out some personal accommodation, have a look at the (potential) new office and meet the new starters.
The plan is to have the new lab up and running before 4 September. That's because we have a significant volume of work starting then for e-Works, formerly DET Victoria, and their Toolbox Series 7. Similar to TLF, we have committed to transfer all testing to Melbourne. It will provide better, more responsive service and eliminate some of the communication issues that often occur when organisations are geographically challenged. We'll soon be recruiting locally for those roles too. The prospects are that by mid September we should have 6-8 testers plus myself in the new lab. By the end of this calendar year I wouldn't be surprised to see us at 8-10 just for those two clients. Logistically, this is all a bit of a nightmare, trying to find a suitable property, get the infrastructure laid on and organise staffing. Something else that's making life interesting here is our application to National Association of Testing
Authorities (NATA) for accreditation against ISO 17025. We have hired an experienced project manager to work with me and prepare a Quality Management System for ATC. The purpose and objectivesof the Quality Management System and the ensuing Operations Manual is to:
Centralize and consolidate the Organization’s Quality Management System Policy and procedures
Provide a mechanism for communications and transparency across the organisation to promote and ensure the quality management system is accessible and understood by all personnel Establish a foundation level for NATA accreditation and future quality process improvements Provide a mechanism that ensures a quality system for the scope of activities
Provision of a quality system that generates technically valid results Guidance and assurance of the quality of the organization activities and test deliverables
This is an important goal for ATC, something we must do to assure quality of our work and also to remain competitive in the market place. The industry is showing signs that clients are more inclined now than ever before to choose their service providers based on demonstrated competency. Our involvement with NATA and also the Certified Software Testing Professionals (CSTP) training programme for permanent staff, delivered by Software Engineering Australia (SEA), is a means to that end. In September NATA will review our system and how we conduct quality management. We'll then have the opportunity to closeany gaps with the aim to achieve accreditation before the end of this year.

From the Sales Desk, by Roland Perpic
The quote of the week came from a banking executive (I won't name the bank).

The statement form the banking executive struck me. With Microsoft Windows 2000 the ratio of developers to tester analysts was 2:1 with Microsoft XP the ratio was 1:1. This was the first project that I am aware that testing exceeded development. A number of well delivered projects over the last couple of weeks, bouquets from our international
colleagues:
"I'd like to extend my thanks to you and Access Testing for the usability testing of the RAP project scenarios. The testing performed last week was thorough and professional ...." Air New Zealand
And . . .
"After "decrypting" access' log files I was able to locate the problematic requests in several of the sigmalink log files. They all showed the same error. At this point I actually have to congratulate access for the accurate appraisal of the issue." "This helped a lot!" Empolis (Germany)
Keep up the great work.

Yet More Environmental Gossip!! By Peter Wright
"National Tree Planting Day 25/7/04 Feedback"
From what I have heard from the Planet Ark Group, there was approximately "1 million trees" planted across Australia. This is really a step in the right direction. I attended one of the sites for my local council and I must say it was a bit disappointing. The tree planting activities were planned to only last 2 hours, there was only about 10 people present, the average age of attendees was 40+ (where were the "Teenagers")and there were NO TREES TO PLANT? (All we could plant were shrubs and grasses). Taking all this in to account it was still good to be able to do something for our environment. I just hope that next year, "National Tree Planting Day" in our local area takes on a new image.

Chao's Sites of Interest.
Environmental Matters
To continue on with Peter Wright's green theme from the last newsletter, I'd like to introduce an organisation called Greenfleet (www.greenfleet.com.au), what it attempts to do is offset your carbon dioxide and other green house effects caused by cars, households and air travel, by planting trees. There's a nifty little "Tree Totaller" that calculates your annual greenhouse emissions and equates that to the amount of trees required to offset these emissions. You can then elect to donate money to plant the trees. As a rough estimate of the costs, I generate 12.91 _tonnes_ of green house emissions a year (49 trees), based on having 1 car and having a household of 4. This equates to a reasonable amount of $115.29 for the year. This is quite a small amount of money to spend actually, and it'll go a long way to protecting our environment. I for one will be contributing to this worthy cause.

FireFox.
As you know, Microsoft's Internet Explorer is very insecure and there are a lot of exploits that use the security holes within IE to compromise your computer. Even if you are patched up to the lastest IE version, you can still be annoyed by browser hijacking and popup ads. It has come to the point that even CERT (Computer Emergency Readiness Team) advises users not to use Internet Explorer. Even Slate, a part of the MSN Network (owned by Microsoft) advises users not to use IE. (http://slate.msn.com/id/2103152/#ContinueArticle)
There is an alternate browser out there called the Mozilla, the newer Netscape browsers use the code from the open source group in their browser. However, previously you had to install the whole Mozilla suite, which included the browser itself, as well as the email and news client. This is where FireFox (http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/) comes in. Firefox is just the browser component of Mozilla.

Listed below are the additional features Firefox over Internet Explorer.

* Slim, unbloated application
Firefox is designed to be slim and unbloated, any feature you want can be added on top of the browser via Extensions (see below). In terms of speed, Firefox takes about as much time to load as IE does. (This is even with part of IE already being loaded already in Windows!)

* In Built Pop-up blocking
Don't be bothered by pop-up ads no more. Legitimate pop-up windows can be configured to pop-up automatically, or you can allow pop-ups on a per-popup basis.

* Tabbed Browsing.
Instead of opening multiple Internet Explorer windows and having it clutter up your task bar. Firefox allows users to have multiple websites open, within the same Firefox window, by adding tabs. Simply middle click (or Ctrl+Click) a link and it opens the page up in a new tab, within the same browser window.

* Extensions + Themes
Extensions as the name implies, extend the browser's capabilities allowing users to configure the browser to suit their needs. Themes can change the look and feel of the browser, allowing it to reflect the user's own personal tastes. These have to be downloaded and installed, but are small.

* Quick Search + Dictionary. just type 'google' and then your search term into the Address bar and it'll perform a google search type 'dict' and then the word you want to look up, will look up the word and it's meaning from www.dictionary.com
A nice list of extensions can be found here: http://extensionroom.mozdev.org/

Extensions can be useful for Access:

* TabBrowser Extensions (http://extensionroom.mozdev.org/more-info/tbe) This allows more control over the tab, and you can specify what links you want to appear as a tab and what links you want opened in a new window.

* Web Developer Toolbar.
This is quite well suited to the Web developer (as the name implies) as well as our own Usuability and Accessability experts. It allows you to disable images, replace them with the alt tabs, outline HTML elements, validate the page for HTML conformance via the W3C validator and even allows you to resize the browser window to specific resolutions (800x600,1024x768,custom resolution etc).

* Live HTTP Headers
This is quite well suited to load testing (OpenSTA). You can view, on-the-fly, the headers generated by the browser and the response from the server. There are many more extensions available, just have a browse through the extensions available and choose the ones that suit your needs. *Phew* that was a long, section. Time to relax!

Time Wasters
If you’re still with me until now, I commend you. :)
At the end of a long hard working day/week, unwind and relax by "testing" the following time wasters.
1. Tontie - http://www.kiteretsu.jp/on/tontie/
Try and hit as many weird monsters as you can before the time runs out,or you run out of health. The complexity increases each level.

2. Lemmings - http://193.151.73.87/games/lemmings/index.html
We all remember the game lemmings? This is an online version :) What I find great about this is, it doesn't use any flash at all... it's all in DHTML. Very ingenious. I have some more, but I think I'll save them until next time as I think I've bored you enough.
Happy Surfing 8) Chao.

More Contributions
If you have anything to contribute to the next newsletter please e-mail me on
jodir@testingcentre.com

Have a nice weekend everyone.