marco baylon

okay, so it has been a while.

i have no excuse…

…except the usual ” been busy with work ” excuse.

“yeah? what kind of work do you actually do there?”

well i am part of this BIG project that started almost 3 years ago. It’s basically an online banking system, where you use the internet to check your account balance, transaction details, transfer money, convert currency, pay bills, etc. kinda like the citibank online banking system that we have back home (back there). you can access the online banking system using the PC or using a cellphone. Our role, which may be small but still important, is to do System Test for the.. er.. system. It was kinda slow and boring at first (well to some of the team members it might still be slow and boring) but its getting better now. see, our first task was called ‘Screen Test’. to do screen testing, you just use the system – in this case: go to the banking website – and just do regular transactions. Example of a regular transaction: checking your transaction history or checking your account balance. Example of an irregular transaction? clicking random buttons or inputing letters on a numbers-only textbox. just being a stupid user and trying to destroy the system with random clicks, that kind of stuff. but for the first part, just regular transactions, and then when you get the result, what you do is to compare what you see on the browser/cellphone screen with what we call a “Demo Screen”. if it looks the same, it’s good. if it looks different, we raise a bug. it’s a simple concept really. this kind of testing is just like playing Photo Hunt, which is actually, nicole’s and mine/my favorite.. mine and nicole’s… favorite game siya namin ni nicole, yung meron sa powerstation (di na ako marunong mag-ingles). so yeah, you can think of it that way, the first part of our testing is really just something like this – playing photo hunt the whole day. it gets tiring i tell you. see its not so much that its hard work? but really just tedious and we have to finish so many screens in one day, and it’s all in japanese so we have to study the words (and the unique to japan banking processes) to be able to navigate through the system. the first part was really boring, tiring, but it was good since it allowed us to get familar with the terms, the processes, the system as a whole. it prepared us for what was in store afterwards.

just a few weeks ago, we started another kind of system test called ‘Function Test’. where we.. wait, do you really wanna read this? ive been told that i talk to much, and nicole knows that i tend to ‘lecture’ or ‘make sermon’ all the time. i will spare you.

but basically, work is getting better (=more challenging), we’re not ‘just playing photohunt’ anymore. but getting into the more serious stuff of the system. its a banking system, a *japanese* banking system at that. so it has to, at least, be bug-free. it has to be perfect. well, right now, it’s not. at all. that’s why we’re here to make sure that people won’t start using the system in its current buggy state. after testing the functions, we’ll go into ‘monkey testing‘ (see my explanation of irregular transactions? it’s something like that, you test as is you are a monkey using the system.. im not kidding! scratching your butt from time to time is optional) we’ll also do security test, where we try to look for security holes/vulnerabilities, try to hack into the banking system.. like for example try to get some money, transfer it to another account… let’s say.. to an account in the philippines maybe? now that is fun testing. (i repeat, challenging = fun, apparently, i have a strange definition of fun)

so there, work is doing good, getting better, in this sense.

the work environment is a different thing.. way different.