I Work With a Pedant

[Gittins Gal]

Ph.D from Cambridge, very academic and all that but really the last person you want alongside you in the trenches when client co has a legal requirement to go live on 1 March.

He's another contractor but , gawd, he keeps coming up with the most infinitesimally marginal of borderline scenarios to provoke a debate about the whys and wherefores of how and why we're doing such and such a thing.

Then we waste half an hour persuading him to shut up.

Seriously, if I were responsible for hiring people, CVs containing the word Ph.D might just go in the bin.

Am I being harsh?

[Mich the Tester]

How do you know the chance of those 'borderline scenarios' is so small?

Every day, things happen that have never happened before.

[DirtyDog]

So you'd prefer it if someone stayed quiet, watched it all fall apart and then said "yes, I thought that would probably happen" when it goes wrong.

Because those kind of people are great to have around you

The role of Cassandra on a project isn't much fun, I can tell you.

[Gittins Gal]

How do you know the chance of those 'borderline scenarios' is so small?

Every day, things happen that have never happened before.

Don't you frkkin' well start! Lol

[d000hg]

keeps coming up with ... scenarios to provoke a debate about the whys and wherefores of how and why we're doing such and such a thing.

Did one of GG's co-workers hijack her CUK login?

[Gittins Gal]

So you'd prefer it if someone stayed quiet, watched it all fall apart and then said "yes, I thought that would probably happen" when it goes wrong.

Because those kind of people are great to have around you

The role of Cassandra on a project isn't much fun, I can tell you.

These are not issues that are going to make anything fall apart. Mostly look and feel related stuff.

The last thing we need is someone nitpicking when we've got a tight deadline - one that is legally binding!

[Mich the Tester]

Don't you frkkin' well start! Lol

Too late. The role of 'edge cases' and 'borderline scenarios' is often misunderstood; it's not about what happens when some incredibly improbable set of imagined circumstances come together, but about exploring the possibilities. An edge case can expose a weakness that might actually occur in more probable circumstances. But then, if you've read about exploratory testing and systems thinking, instead of ISTQB and ISO9000 unthinking, you will know that.

It's a bit like the doctor hitting you under your knee with a rubber hammer and watching what happens. People don't hit you under the knee every day with a rubber hammer, so the test isn't to find out what happens when somebody spontaneously takes a rubber hammer and hits you, but it can give an indication that something is worth more investigation.

My advice as to how to make use of your pedant is to listen carefully to his reasoning and ask him to demonstrate on a real system how something can go wrong.

[Mich the Tester]

These are not issues that are going to make anything fall apart. Mostly look and feel related stuff.

The last thing we need is someone nitpicking when we've got a tight deadline - one that is legally binding!

'Look and feel related stuff' forced a Japanese bank to get a bail out in the days before state bail-outs were fashionable; someone got the price and the quantity mixed up in a futures transaction where the two fields were difficult to distinguish.

[MicrosoftBob]

How do you know the chance of those 'borderline scenarios' is so small?

Every day, things happen that have never happened before.

This might help your argument

[suityou01]

GG just wants to hit a deadline and put a pin in the quality. I know of plenty of contractors like that. The 80/20 brigade.

I suppose in this case, each edge case would have to be risk assessed to see if it would make the project miss the deadline, which in this case sounds like it carries some significant penalty.

I wonder how the execs would feel if the deadline was missed because of an edge case that in reality meant bugger all?

Need a process in place to triage these edge cases. Then you are diligent and efficient, and have MTT off your case