Berry picking

After a few years really, we went to the woods to pick blueberries. If you find a good place, it's almost fun for a while. Until my back starts to hurt, that is. And until the mosquitos find us. We found a decent enough place to do some old-fashioned berry picking. We are not using machinery mainly because we are old school. It took less than two hours to gather more than 5 litres of blueberries. Not bad. The weather was great, like it has been for some time now.

Let's move on to the Smek twist in the story. When we got home, it was my job to clean our berries and remove any dirt discovered among them. That's a boring and troublesome job; the Swedes would say 'jobbigt'. Anyway, it has to be done. Like with fishes and mushrooms, it's by far the most annoying task of the process.

When my wife made blueberry pie, it was served to our invited guests. My wife was telling how she had done it etc. but there was no mention about who had cleaned them. I thought to myself that my job is invisible as long as everything is okay. Suddenly she found a piece of plastic in the pie. And it only took a second for her to announce who had done the cleaning of the berries! I couldn't be silent but stated that the cleaner is never mentioned unless someone finds something that doesn't belong there. That's gratitude.

I began to compare berry picking to SW development. Developers do the picking, it may be of good quality, or bad. If they use machines to pick berries, it's like they'd use some scripts or other tools in sofware creation. Tools may create errors on regular basis - in berry picking tools gather dirt, leaves and green blueberries.

Then a SW tester comes and tries to sort it out. Find the shit and remove it. In SW world they'd just ask someone to fix it. Because the cleaning up requires human eye and touch, it can't be automated. The more lines of code, or litres of berries, the slower it gets. No show stoppers, i.e. spiders and worms are allowed to pass the test.

The application is released. The pie lies on the table. It's time to use it. The developer gets praises how delicious the pie is. At least courtesy praises. If nothing wrong is detected, the application/pie has passed the end-user test. But, if something weird is found inside it, the focus moves instantly from a developer to a tester. The poor cleaner. "The tester should have found it!" is echoing in my ears while I'm feeling an undesirable deja vu all over again. Tester's job isn't appreciative, but nonetheless critical. I have yet to meet another profession which is more important and yet as dissed broadly.