so this is all mostly theory, which is the entire problem

In honor of only two days of work this week as Holiday!Monday and Escapade Starts Thursday, I've been contemplating the more esoteric parts of my career, or more specifically, my least favorite part.

For those who don't know, I'm a Quality Control/Quality Analyst; my formal title is System Analyst IV, my job description is program testing, primarily, UAT, aka 'User Acceptance Testing' but have done and will do everything from unit testing to testing live in production literally during and after deployment. UAT is the last line of defense before a program is released in production, and our job is to break it with only the tools and general knowledge available to the average user of this program aka Everyman.

And when I say 'the program', that refers not just to 'one single program' but 'an entire program ecosystem that all work together to do shit'. We call the latter Integration Testing, which combines 'so breathtakingly boring even death avoids you when you have to do it' with 'astronomically high stakes'. For System Integration is literally repeating all your tests on those same damn programs (sometimes you're on your fifth repetition and resent key parts of the alphabet) but now while all programs are connected to each other.

In general, if there are problems, they're tiny; earlier testing of the individual parts of a program and then the program itself should have and generally does catch everything with a realistic chance of happening, quite a bit that realistically won't but possibly could, and some that is technically impossible but when you were on repetition three of the same set of ten to twenty goddamn tests, dev was naturally the target best suited to share your suffering. At that point, they were so goddamn tired of seeing your name on defects they didn't care if it was possible this situation would ever occur, they'd code as if it would happen every day just to avoid how rejection at end of business day inevitably meant that the first thing they'd see in their inbox the next morning would be a gratingly cheerful email that included an essay (and references) on why the defect was not only very possible but could cause the apocalypse if not fixed like right now please, sometimes with malice aforethought in thirteen point Comic Sans.

But I digress.

( stress is both a constant and a variable )

...yes, I am doing integration testing this week. How'd you guess?