Doonesbury by Garry Trudeau for June 08, 2021

A rock star among computer geeks.

Two like minds meet – how fortuitous for them all!

“Contact?”

“Roger!”

“Tah-Daahhhh!!”

The hook is set, now reel her in.

This episode originally appeared in 1996.

I thought she was a coder – now she’s a QA? I agree that QAs are brutally cool though.

And suddenly it’s “Mom who?”

A bug checker eh? So now we know she doesn’t work for Microsoft, they don’t employ any it seems.

Kim scores

Cool moms are the best!

“Learn to code” suddenly has a cool new meaning.

Bug-checking is brutally boring as are most video games. Bring back Tetris!

I want to be as happy as Alex is today.

Also known as an alpha tester. Too often, the buying public becomes the beta testers. (And alpha/beta has nothing to do with superiority, just chronological order.)

Cool! A word of praise that seems has persisted ever since the early 50’s; possibly before that. I think it started with jazz musicians, then taken up by the Beatniks and on and up until the present day.

two chicks bonding over a shared hobby

Many years ago I had a patient whose mum was a bug checker. Basically playing the game with your elbows and a notebook.

I recently retired after 25 years of software testing. At the beginning it was tough to convince the big bosses that testing was necessary but they soon realized that having users find errors did not create goodwill. I loved my job.

Yep, Alex and Kim will get along great

I had two jobs as a Computer Programmer, and I loved debugging. Finding and fixing a problem was like solving a big, complex logic puzzle (yeah, I’m weird)… ッ

I’d love to have someone fix my bugs for me.

All these years later, a lot of kids still dream about becoming video game designers…

Software testing for over two decades. Still brutally cool. ;-)

Kim is doing alpha testing, which is performed by the company’s own testers. Next step in the process is to fix whatever the alpha testers find and send out those updated copies to trusted power users to do the beta testing. Anything THEY found was fixed and incorporated into the public release, presumably in fully functional form. However, with the speedup of the development cycle and implementation of “continuous upgrades” (or whatever the the cutesy buzzword is), all of us who used to be known as “customers” or “end users” have now earned the righteous title of gamma testers.

Bug checking is tedious. Essentially you make a list of every function and feature of the software and then try them all out, singly and then in combinations. It can only be done by brute force.

Don’t think of Kim as a stepmom, think of her as a big sister. The age difference is less. XD

She forgot to mention that she Wrote most of it, too.

No, I can say from experience that bug-checking is just brutal. Agonizingly boring. But it beats testing-in-production, which I seen done too often.