Wednesday 13th May
One of those strange rituals at pop / rock / metal / indie (delete as appropriate) gigs is that moment when some poor roadie has to come on stage and do the obligatory quick sound checks. They stand there, shout “Two... Two... One… Two” at the mic (is that because “one” and “two” represent good sounds to check or because they cannot count any further?) They non-rhythmically hit the snare and bass drums or strum three or four cords on the lead guitar. Of course the audience ignores him and if he did anything more elaborate I guess the crew would soon take the mick! Strangely though, I have found very often that the first song of the set is hampered by roadies bent double, twiddling amps and plugging in leads. I don’t know why they’re bent double - we can see them. Bending double is not a cloaking device. However, inevitably after a couple of tweaks the band performs and the equipment works and more often than not the gig is brilliant.

This preamble came to mind as I sat in a workshop that was covering all aspects of testing for the Companies Act. In my warped mind the two are very similar: I will explain why.

Firstly, this summer ICC will be testing extensively. We will test new data coming into our database and we will test data coming out. We will make sure that what the user sees on screen is correct - we will have to do all of this with dummy data that we will create and Companies House will provide as the actual data does not exist. For me this is exactly like the afternoon sound check before the show. It is all a bit unreal. The musicians have no audience and therefore it is nothing like the real gig experience. Similarly this testing will be difficult to manage at a customer level (which would be the norm) because technically none of the things like annotations, inconsistencies or the new forms exist until 1st October. However we will be working as much as we can with clients using our bulk extracts and API to do as much User Acceptance Testing (UAT) as possible.

Moreover, it will be very difficult to replicate updates to companies and people records to the degree that we get on a normal working day - the combinations are endless, and again we do not get real updates until after the event!

In addition to UAT work we will be doing system tests, unit tests, functionality and content tests and of course stress tests (apparently no test exists to see which person in ICC is the most stressed although I suspect that it would be easier to yield obvious results!) Testing therefore forms the backbone of what we are doing this summer. I was amazed at all of the types of testing you can do - and that they all had specific names. I guess the project managers and developers would have kittens if they thought I did not know all of the differences between the different types of tests!

So – there is lots of background work that in reality the audience (or end user) will not see as it is behind closed doors. Of course just before we go live I know we will re-run things and effectively do our version of the snare drum, one-two test, and then we will go live!

Will we have hiccups ‘post-live?’ Possibly. Will we run on stage and fix them straight away? Definitely. Will we have a post-show party? I hope so but I cannot be sure of that one.

What I can be sure of is that behind the scenes people are working hard to cover all eventualities but when we do go live, we will be ready to deal with the unexpected. As Dennis Norden would say, it will be alright on the night. However, I do hope I am not sweating as much come 1st October as I normally do after spending too much time in the mosh pit!

PS: Companies Act tour t-shirts are available at the back of the hall!