Bug Queen for the Tech Team
As
Project Manager for IT Quality Assurance on the
Clark for President
Technology Team,
I was responsible for the reliability of the campaign contributions page
(achieved 100% up time with the exception of one harrowing hour of downtime
caused by a vendor error!) and all other campaign web applications and forms
excluding the blog and eBlocks.
Working
literally elbow to elbow with my colleagues at campaign headquarters,
I designed and executed usability and functionality tests on the work of
programmers
each working 80+ hours per week, month after month -- just as I did.
Often
we felt as linked in our thoughts and actions as our computers were.
When
I accepted a contract with the campaign in October of 2003, I was testing
the work of three;
by January the work of seven programmers, some off-site, was coming through
my banked computers.
"Evaluate test results and recommend modifications to programs by priority"
sounds innocuous enough,
but when your job is to identify and describe in detail every error in the
work of others
and tell them to drop what they're working on to fix something else --
or telling someone that something urgently needed has too many errors to be
released yet --
humor becomes essential.
Toys like my "bug eaters" helped programmers "digest"
the software bug reports I sent them.
Add to
my Bug Queen responsibilities recruiting and communicating with
beta testers all over the country, evaluating and responding to web site
user complaints
and questions (up to 50 per day), training and supervising on-line and
on-site QA volunteer assistants, coordinating elements and timing of roll
outs for new and upgraded web applications,
conducting cross-department interviews to gather spatial information and
mapping requirements, evaluating and recommending GIS software, formatting,
preparing and sending out
the majority of text and HTML e-mail public communications,
and you can understand why I rarely knew what was happening outside the
Technology Team.
Only
when something BIG was happening did we techies tear ourselves away from our
computers and phones to find out what had the politicos glued to the
breaking news monitors.
What a
reward for our work that the Clark Technology and Online teams won
industry-wide acclaim for innovation, and the widely-read
Adaptive Path study
of all
candidates' websites
gave Clark's its highest rating.