Newsletter 6

Spring has Sprung – Jodi Reid
Can anyone believe it will be spring next week? For those of us lucky enough to be in Sydney the weather has been sensational. I guess spring is about clearing those cobwebs away and starting afresh. It’s a time of new beginnings and unlimited potential. And that is the feeling I get about Access at the moment. There are so many opportunities to be had, it’s a very exciting time.

In this newsletter Tony Bailey will report on some of those opportunities. Janet Small will give us another update from Optus at Chatswood, Mark Bishop will provide us with all the news from Melbourne. Roland Perpic will report from the Sales Desk and we will have the usual staff updates.

Enjoy

CEO’s Report – Tony Bailey
To say its been a busy 6 weeks is the understatement of the year! I‘ve found myself in Melbourne Canberra, and the gold coast which is why I haven’t prepared a message for the past 6 weeks and why most of you have not seen a lot of me in the last while– my apologies.

That said, the good news is that our goal of capturing and professionalizing the testing industry in Australia is growing and developing at a rapid rate.

On the company front, we have found a permanent location in Melbourne and Mark and team will be busy setting this up in the coming weeks (more on this below). We will be moving half of our Sydney lab to Melbourne reflecting the fact that the majority of our lab work comes from Melbourne customers. We will still continue to provide testing services in the Sydney lab and should be able to get to the stage where we can balance work between the 2 locations. Natalie has made the brave move to Melbourne and we wish her well in her new position.

On the client front, this week we were appointed to another period panel contract with the federal government for Australian Government Information Management Office. This takes the number of period panel contracts we are on to 7 and demonstrates our credibility in the govt. sector. In additon to the one just mentioned the Contracts we have so far are:

Department of Immigration and Multicultural and Indigenous Affairs
Department of Urban Services - Canberra Connect
Australian Government Information Management Office
Australian Taxation Office - Testing Panel for usability testing services
Australian Taxation Office - Marketing Panel for market survey
TAFE Tasmania

Our work within our existing client base such as MLC, the RTA, Sydney University, Optus, The learning Federation, Hothouse, UNSW and CCH, is growing, which is a direct reflection on the quality work you are providing to our clients. In addition, in the last 3 weeks we have been approached (unsolicited) by St George, NineMSN, Telstra Bigpond, Citibank Singapore and Kaz (soon to be Telstra) to provide testing services in the coming months. This grade A client list is indicative of the position we are now claiming in the Australian marketplace and the opportunities we hope to give you all in the future – and long may it continue.

On the partnership front we have commenced our regular sales meetings with the Satyam team to exploit the 5 year testing partnership we have signed for the Asia-Pacific region. I will be in Melbourne next week to attend the launch of Satyam’s new development centre – which will be Satyam’s largest development centre outside of India. The honorable Marsha Thompson – the Victorian Minister for ICT will open the centre with Satyam’s worldwide Chairman. There are a number of other strategic initiatives underway which will further cement our position as the leader in the testing field, including testing partnerships with IBM and CSC and others I am unable to disclose at this time, but will be able to in future months. Watch this space!

For a while now we have been trying to find a way to do leading edge research and development into testing methodologies and world’s best practice. We have come up with the idea of a Centre of Excellence for Testing (which we drive for our purposes) which would have government, industry and educational involvement. I am in deep discussion with the Victorian and Federal Governments about this idea and although we are still midway through discussions the Victorian government in particular like this notion.

Needless to say you can understand why it has been busy but you can feel confident that our position in the marketplace and the opportunities we are creating are already taking us a long way towards achieving our goal. The pace will accelerate in the coming months and quarters and as always we are only as good as the quality of our people, so keep up the great work!

Newsletter Contributions – Jodi Reid
If you have anything you would like to contribute the deadline for the next newsletter will be close of business, Thursday, 9 September. We would love to hear from you people on client sites – tell us about the project you are working on – or anything interesting about the company you are working within. I had an interesting visit to MLC this week and found the project we are working on and culture of the organisation fascinating. Linda Milne has promised to write something for the next newsletter so I wont go into too much detail, but I think you would be surprised to find how interested other people would be to hear about what you are working on.

From the Sales Desk

Each day I hear a new fact or see a statistic about software quality. Some are quite memorable and some just make me laugh.

Today, I was at a client site reviewing a project. The developer proudly stated that the quality of the code he produced was “better than the average programmer”. This person had to be one of the most disorganised people I have met. With developers like that, there will be no shortage of work for test professionals.

An interesting paper was tabled the Australian Software Engineering Conference (ASWEC’04) that was jointly prepared by LaTrobe and Swinburne Universities titled “A Preliminary Survey on Software Test Practices in Australia”.

Some of the key findings reported:
* 70% or private organisations adopted a structured test methodology with government reporting a significantly lower percentage
* Black box test case derivation is widely used
* Organisations are “not allocating realistic budget to testing”
* “There was a substantial satisfaction among organisations that hired external testers…. We predict that the future hiring of testers may become even more popular”
* A major issue was stopping rules and metrics
* Deficiencies in existing published software standards


Melbourne Activities – Mark Bishop
Finally, we have a lease for our new office at 28 Drummond Street, Carlton - well, actually we have one that's ready to be signed. It just needs a review by the Texan. That'd be Tony Bailey (CEO) - anyone north of Mexico has gotta be a Texan!

Anyway, while that formality is taken care of we've started organising the infrastructure. Tomorrow I'm supervising Telstra while they connect our ISDN services. Meanwhile we're trying to beat them into shape so they'll connect our data service sooner than 9 September. Interestingly we get what they call BDSL, a connection straight to the Telstra backbone (no, they're not entirely spineless). In contrast, ADSL goes to Bigpond which then goes to the backbone. So, our service will cut out a layer of communication and infrastructure. That means we get faster, more reliable service with better guarantee of availability. For example, on ADSL Telstra would have a service level of 24 hour response to an outage whereas (I think) BDSL guarantees 12 hours, or something like that.

Our new phone number range will be 9669 1700 - 1799 when we get up and running.

The schedule was to have all infrastructure in place by 30 August and be operational by start of business, 5 September. But, some unavoidable delays have put that at risk. Nevertheless, we're working hard to meet the schedule as far as possible. Thanks go to Rhys McKendrick in particular who has a lot to do, organising supply and installation of hardware lie a new server and PC's plus relocation of existing test platforms from the Sydney lab. All that while maintaining IT services for Sydney, not helped by the server outage this week.

Over the last couple of weeks I've also been trying to hire a permanent staff member to take up the role of Editorial Reviewer for our TLF work. That's proving to be very difficult - I had more than 70 applicants but only 2 proved to be worth an interview by the client. Unfortunately, neither passed the test. Both candidates were required to edit a small piece of text to discover all of the grammar, spelling, context and consistency errors. They each found most of the problems (about 80% I'd say) but not all of them, and they needed to find all if they are to be regarded as true editors. This is a standard that is very important to the client. It didn't help that one of the applicants had typo's in their resume. We see that all too often in the recruitment process - people who apply for testing roles but can't deliver a sound document are likely to be short listed out of the game pretty quickly in this industry. So, the search goes on.

If you know a person with 2-3 years print editing experience and sound knowledge of multimedia technology, preferably for online learning products please let me know.

Next week, aside from the ongoing saga of getting the new office going, I'm looking forward to a big function with Satyam at the Park Hyatt - whoo hoo! It's their grand opening for 30,000 m2 of office space here in Melbourne to cater for 300 staff, establishing the largest Satyam development centre outside of India. Considering they have around 16,000 employees worldwide that says something about their role and commitment in Australia and the potential for our testing partner relationship. The Chairman of Satyam and the VIC Minister for Information and Communication Technology will join me for cocktails.

Yasmeen Barodawala says “Hello”
(Yasmeen joined Access Testing Centre as a permanent employee last week):
"My last job?: I was a Test Analyst at Atex Media Command (AMC). I used to do all types of manual and automated testing for this Development house which created software for the publishing industry. I have been doing basic sanity testing, regression, production, workflow and performance test on the manual side of testing. In the automated world I have written test scripts as well as scheduled running of the scripts regularly using a Test tool called Test Complete.

Now?: I'm at The Le@rning Federation (TLF) and am basically doing conformance testing. Working with Learning Objects can be fun. It is very graphical.

My challenges?: It's a very fun as well as challenging role since I have to test Learning Objects that can have issues which are not only to be reported but a potential solution needs to be provided. This is extremely different to the client-server environment I used to work in my previous role."

Greetings from Optus Chatswood – Janet Small
(Janet and Ian Graham have been working at Optus for the past month)
Things have been getting tense at Optus as the deadlines for our AFS (Allocated Functional Specifications) fall due.

It's a problem being so busy working when the Chatswood Shopping Mecca is a few blocks away and there is no time for shopping!

Ian and I had a walkthrough of our documents on Monday with the Project Manager, Information Architect and Senior Technical Writer. The feedback on our work was excellent and very encouraging. We are now tidying up for the "walkthrough" with the "business people" who do not seem very clear about what they want. Oh well.

We are still coping with one toilet pass and no printer connection. We are also coping with incompatible versions of Word. I emailed my AFS to the project manager who has Word 97. She opened my document and concluded that an insane person had drawn the diagrams.

Staff News
Since the last newsletter we have had Chris Geagea, Jo-Ming Ong and John Nguyen all start as part of our lab testing team.

Leeanne Pellow started with us last week. Fingers crossed Leeanne will be working within Hothouse, conducting testing there 2-3 days per week.

A big welcome to all those fresh faces and we sincerely hope you enjoy working with Access.

Last Friday the Sydney office said farewell to Natalie Kerschner. Nat has taken the huge step of moving to Melbourne to assist Mark Bishop in getting that up and running. We wish her the best of luck in this position.

Welcome back to Lizzie Beaton. Lizzie took a couple of days off, but is now back working at Sydney University.

Alison Ang is now working down with our team of people at Optus North Sydney and from all reports making a great impression with the client.

Happy Birthday to Alex Arvelo for 7 September.

Position Vacant
Background: In the Crows Nest office we have a kitchen roster. Groups of people are rostered on weekly to ensure that the kitchen is kept clean the dishwasher is put on at night. Natalie moving to Melbourne has created a problem for Group 2 who is sorely missing her this week. Following is their solution.

Position Vacant

A vacancy exists for a cleaner to become part of our great team. The areas that this position covers are the staff kitchen and testing lab. The hours per week will vary, as this is a casual position.

Knowledge of current Dishwasher Stacking Practices Essential

Desirable Skills Include:

Team Player
Good Knowledge of Standard ISO 0294675000 –
Kitchen Hygiene Practices
Ant eradication qualifications and supporting evidence

Formal applications, including three available referees who may be contacted for the above position, should be forwarded by Friday, 3 September to:

John Eklund - johne@testingcentre.com
Lisa Herrod - lisal@testingcentre.com