The Tribe That Worshipped 3

Reading some of the recent blog posts about sociology and anthropology being useful to a tester got me thinking about what would happen in an anthropologist did study testers..

They might come across the Testing Tribe where the number 3 seems to have great significance.

First sign of this is that the company they work for has 3 letters in its name.
The last letter also happens to be C -notice that 'C' rhymes with 'three' - coincidence ?

The people in the Testing Tribe of 3 seem to have arranged themselves in a hierarchy of 3 - Test Manager, Test Lead and Testers. The anthropologist was unsure of what value the Manager and Leads brought apart from writing reports to each other and everyone involved in the project but that's for another study.

The Test Phases also used The Power of 3 - there was always a System Test Phase, an Integration Phase and a UAT phase. These phases had to be kept totally distinct and separate.

Within each phase, the magical properties of 3 were used - the tests were always run in cycles of 3 no matter what the results of a particular cycle were.

The Test Managers used their hierarchical position to make sure each day respected The Power of 3 by making sure there were 3 conference calls each day - morning, noon and evening. Some non-believers wanted to know what the point of a morning call was as it gave the same information as the evening call but they were sent into exile ( aka turning manual test scripts into QTP scripts )

The end of each test phase was marked by observance of the Rule of Three. The Exit Criteria demanded there should be only 3 Severity 3 bugs outstanding. There had been some early controversy where some people had said that the rule was actually "no more than 3" but they too had been sent into exile ( aka transcribing the conference calls into Powerpoint )

This meant that the final hours of a testing phase were when The Ceremony of Fudging Numbers was performed and testers were put under excrutiating pressure ( I will spare the readers from the gory details but hint that it involved renumbering test steps in QC)  to make the numbers match.

Maybe I should stay off the Founders Beer when writing blog posts, but it would be interesting to see what an anthropologist would make if they studied testers at work....