It isn't 666, oh no, its 5015.2. That's the US Department of Defense standard for Electronic Records Management software certification. The company I work for has just finished the grueling 2 week certification process and, fortunately, passed. For a large number of US and foreign governments, you must have 5015.2 certification in order to sell your records management software to them.
This is the third time we've certified since I have been with the company. The first time was hectic, but it was with the previous revision of the standard and not too stringent. The second time was against the new standard and was a nightmare. As has become the standard mode of operation, the management of the company didn't have us working on updating the software to conform to the standard until about 6 months before we were scheduled to be tested. Nevermind that they had had the newer, more stringent stanard in their hands for nearly two years.
The dev and QA teams were worked to the bone to pass that one, with lots of people pulling 36 hour shifts. We lost quite a few good people after that because of the company's treatment of the employees and the fact that for all of that effort, the company barely managed a pat on the back for those involved. Nevermind that the company would have been effectively barred from making millions of dollars worth of revenue from all of the US and foreign governments that require software to have 5015.2 certification before they will buy it.
So, this time was supposed to be a walk in the park. The software was supposed to be roughly the same as we certified with the second time, and the standard hadn't been revised (you have to renew cert every two years and/or every time you go up a major version number in your software). I was assigned to work on this back in December as pretty much the only developer on the project. We had only one QA person as well for the most part. That was a serious management mistake.
The QA guy is responsible for writing up the testing script, which is what we provide to the JITC testers as a road map of sorts so they can go through the standard as it is covered by our software. The test script has screenshots and whatnot showing how our software does various tasks. Well, in writing this document, the QA engineer didn't really have time to actually, you know, test the software in any meaningful way. So of course, as we get to the week before the certification is to start, they add a few people to the QA group and lo and behold, they start finding issues. Serious issues. Serious issues that should have been found months prior so they could have beenfixed before testing started, not during.
Well, after entirely too many nights of driving sleepily home at 2am the last two weeks...and missing a LOT of FSU baseball games (that I already paid for...which probably pisses me off more than anything) we pulled it out of our asses again.
I have the next week off and I will be using it constructively to find another job with hopefully better management. Or at least management that is proactive rather than reactive. I have a phone interview with one company Monday and leads for two other companies. I doubt they'll wow me with money offers, but honestly, I don't need to be wowed with money.
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