Well, I’m back from the first ISEB course (of three that I’ll give this month). It was, frankly, somewhat of a disappointment except for the money.
I went to a town in Wiltshire (think Salisbury, Stonehenge, and stuff like that there). It’s dead, really. Nothing to do. And this company that I trained at, which shall remain anonymous, has dragged about 20 or 30 twenty-somethings there to do software testing. I had 13 of them in the class, all except three being those twenty-something guys. Some cute ones, too. But, they were bored out of their skulls, nothing to do in the evenings, working in a sweatshop, for low wages, at something that can be simple rote work. No wonder they paid little attention.
Problem 1: In a classroom meant for 8-9 people at best, we had 13 people and one trainer (me). It was cramped, and went from boiling hot to ice cold all day.
Problem 2: In a sweatshop, there is no leeway. After the course, the delegates all had to return to their desks until 5:30, which is quitting time. I am presuming that the same thing happened when they finished the exam on the third day. Very much a downer.
Problem 3: Being young, disaffected, and bored, they had the attention span of gnats and the short-term memory of flies. So many of them took in little or nothing of what I taught. Neither did they react when something I taught went counter to the practices that were current at their company.
This meant that they all got one question wrong on the exam because their term for what most software companies call “test scripts” or “test cases” is “test plan”. I don’t know what they call their test plans. However, I had emphasized this point in my lecture and no one bothered to tell me that their company did it differently. Oy veh!
I believe that maybe 8 or 9 out of the 13 will pass. This will drop my lifetime pass rate for ISEB course delegates from 91% to 85.7%. Still pretty good, but I’m not sure.
Amusingly, I discovered during the day that their company had a policy on retesting. If you took the ISEB exam and failed, the company will pay for one re-sit of the test. However, if you fail it twice you need to pay for the second re-sit yourself. Now, I’m certain that the reason they have this policy is that some people there have, indeed, had to re-sit the exam twice. It’s only 25 right out of 40 questions! Perhaps the company trawls the parks and picks cans of Strongbow Cider out of the hands of vagrants. Then they ask the new “recruits” whether they want to be software testers. If they say “Yeah, sure mate!” they lend them the money for a suit and they start work.
Oh, it was also an all-white group. I find this oddly disconcerting as I’m more comfortable in mixed situations.
Next week, here at my former company. The week after, in Wales. All I need now is to get paid for August, September, this week, next week, the week after, and October’s ISO9001 work. It would be nice if large companies would pay their bills on time.
Mmmm… Strongbow Cider… 😉
I recall taking classes in Windows NT administration and being told that the Microsoft materials used to prepare for the MCSE were quite simply wrong but you had to answer the pertinent question “wrong” in order for it to score as correct on the exam.