We kicked off Jambo at the STAREAST conference last night. After we introduced how it works, several people stayed to use Jambo. But one guy, Patrick L., can’t log in, so we start to troubleshoot. We uncover an error message in the log that hints about permission problems. So we go on a grand adventure, creating a different Windows account on his computer and finding that we could log in to Jambo from that account, and we do some tricks with the data to get him logged in with his main Windows account that wasn’t working before. We get our lead developer involved over an instant messenger, and my cohort, Jim, helps by checking the web logs. We take a few wrong turns because we’re so engrossed in the hunt that we neglect to properly check whether things are working on every test we try.
Then finally I look at the log again, and see another error that I had been ignoring because it appeared after the first error. The first error is almost always the one to pay attention to. But as soon as we actually read the second item in the log, we see that Jambo is trying to connect to our web server over a proxy. It just takes a quick bit of exploration to confirm that Patrick’s proxy settings only work when he’s on his office network.
Time has stood still while we had this flurry of problem solving, and we realize we’ve been at it for 90 minutes. When the dust settles, I’m very frustrated that I didn’t zero in on the problem much sooner. But overwhelming that frustration is a feeling of pure exhilaration. I sat down with a fellow tester I had never met before, with a common goal–we both wanted Jambo to work, and we wanted to know how to avoid the problem in the future. As testers, we also knew this was a showstopper issue for anyone who doesn’t have the technical skills to work around it. We never asked each other if we wanted to embark on this adventure, but the thrill of the hunt pulled us in to an impromptu session of pair testing.
The end result is a new item for our support knowledge base, plus a usability bug to report. I knew we’d have fun using Jambo at a conference for testers!
May 25th, 2005 at 12:45 am
At the moment I’m the tech support guy at the conference with about 150 ICT-field process & quality related professionals (mostly theoretical). The proxy is real nightmare (with the personal firewalls). Too many times they’ve been set by by their employers and it prevents access to the web.
Oh well… if you had problem only with one person you’ve been lucky. Some corporations doesn’t let any accesses to the web without using their proxy. One (worst) case here was that when ever any network connection to internet was up the vpn took over the connection. VPN connected to corporate network and forced to use corp. proxy for all accesses. When this conference has one internal file server the access to it wasn’t (of course) allowed because the internal server is not visible to the public internet. Luckily we can use memory sticks to communicate…
Teme =)
May 25th, 2005 at 3:12 pm
There were certainly several others at STAREAST whose IT policies prevented them from installing Jambo, and others who weren’t allowed to use the wireless network. This certainly presents some challenges for us, and we’re building a strategy to deal with this reality.
Fortunately in this case, Patrick was able to use Jambo once we resolved the problem.