Well, actually, the Design Team disguised as the QA Team.

The little frustrations, system and function failures result in a lot of dog-kicking, huge antacid and alcohol intake and a lot of whining. I begin to understand how little-person tossing may have started down under a few years ago. Obviously QA Teams at the pub got this trend started.

The academics have broken testing up into five or six TLAs (Three Letter Abbreviations designed by Consultants so they can charge more and use more buzzwords than normal people). You got your UAT (User Acceptance Test), your Unit Test, your Sanity Check, your boundary test, your Automated Regressive and Non-automated Regressive series (this means high school kids who click and chew gum while re-Ghosting machines) and on and on.

These labels are obviously created by people who don't do testing.

Us testers use language you shouldn't put on a blog.

This blog started because I had to do a complicated test three times today before I got the dang thing right.

I wrote the test script, had to change it four times because it wasn't really testing what I wanted it to test when I was writing it yesterday. Funny thing. I had the developer who created the function look it over for me. He said it was fine.

But each of those rewrites was one to three new database entries.

When I had it right and came to the end of the second phase of the three part test... the application didn't do what I wanted it to do. Totally unrelated to the test. ARGH!

I know.

You've been there, done that and have the tee-shirt.

Come to think about it, Our PM owes me a tee-shirt. 3XL, Ron, I've lost 45 pounds since 4/4.

Before I threw my laptop at the wall, I calmed myself by repeating the Tester's Mantra: If I didn't find it, the Client would.

The thing is, I don't mind writing Test Cases or even test scripts. I find writing them an interesting challenge. I also find doing them drudgery, akin to the constitutional prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment.

I wish I could get into the spirit of a real QA guy who thinks about these tests creatively and with wild abandon. You know, the fellow or gal who can think like a crazed end user ready to pounce on my poor application with abandon and relish.

Such folks are a treasure.

But with a small team, the lack budget for QA resources and the need to test major functionalities of a complex application, we Business Analysts, Information Architects, Project Managers and Receptionists will continue to click, type, spell check and screen capture.

And moan, groan and whine.

But it's gotta get done.

Oh, for the days when the BA and QA Lead managed the process and others did the work...