Coping for the Long Term

I think I might have mentioned that I'm one of the long term unemployed? At least once or twice anyway. Back in January 2009, I wrote a diary at The Seminal titled I Am Unemployed but Not a Statistic. I wrote it in one of my bouts of frustration, the day one of the many news reports came out on the "Unemployment Rate" as reported by Reuters (link in the linked diary), back when the official rate was 7.2%. Now the most recent report I can find quickly online says it is 9.7% for March 2010.

Much as I may sometimes want to, it is impossible to live my life in full-on outrage mode, railing at the Gods/Fates/Furies all the time, everyday. It does absolutely nothing for me except raise the blood pressure unnecessarily. So I find ways to cope. As we all do.

One of my coping mechanisms is surfing the web, staying up on news from a variety of sources. Or laughing at the latest ramblings from some member of the beltway punditocracy. Laughter at absurdities is actually quite cathartic sometimes.

I Do Love Software Quality Assurance

I've always felt like I got lucky when I fell into the Software Quality Assurance career field. As I've written previously, I completed a Computer Science degree while in the USAF but realized quickly that I did not have the patience to be a programmer. I can read code and follow the logic used and have done so on projects using a variety of programming languages; I just find it difficult to build programs myself. I don't know if it's a deficiency in me or I just never had an instructor present things in a way that made the light go on for me. My best bet is to take a block of code (such as HTML), play with it, see what the results are, tweak some things then look again. It's not efficient but it allows me to do some things and learn as I go.

I started in Quality Assurance through a nationwide Defense Logistics Agency training program. The DoD was in the forefront of implementing Software Quality Assurance programs and I liked the idea of being a pioneer. The DoD programs concentrated on controlling the process in order to control the product. For most QA "commodities" (textiles or hardware development for example), during the Engineering development phase of a project, QA is pretty hand off since there are always modifications to processes up until production. For Software though, if you wait for the production phase, all the software has been developed already so there's nothing to monitor for the most part. Software is nebulous, ephemeral even, as you can't pick up the bits and bytes that go into a program while it is being developed. So you use the things like Requirements reviews, Design reviews, Code inspections, and so on during the code development to monitor the quality of the product.

I was placed at a Defense Contracts Administration Service, Plant Representation Office (DCASPRO) at a GTE facility. I had occasional battles with the various GTE folks on most every program they had but knew always, that the processes and procedures they used worked. They had empirical evidence. I was told a few years later when the idea of the Capability Maturity Model was hitting the literature that this particular facility was one of the handful of organizations worldwide deemed to be operating at a CMM Level 3. Probably my biggest surprise after I left DLA was just how many firms continued to fight the idea of robust SQA programs and processes. Which goes back to the lack of respect often accorded to Quality Assurance within a lot of organizations.