Well either you've a severely lacking imagination or have had a really comfortable life. I hope for the latter :)
Kidding though, yeah printers are frustrating and cobbling together a printer-fax-copier-scanner into one device is even more terrible. HP was really serious about process though! The test group was literally bigger (more people) than the dev team.. by probably a factor of almost 2.
HP was really big on Model Based Testing [1] and we read books and maybe even had a class on it when joining. The QA team was all in all pretty high functioning, if memory serves.. but the products would still get shipped with four figures of open bug reports (I am not kidding or exaggerating).
The sort of bugs at the start of the cycle were downright terrifying, too. If your printer has never caught fire, or vomited all of it's ink on your desk in the middle of the night... thank your friendly HP QA employee!
Mostly in my era the problems with the products were that they were done on a pretty tight schedule (6-12 months) for what tended to amount to more complex/new hardware than folks would initially expect. The testing cycle also started pretty late because the initial "get it barely working" cycle ate up a couple-few months, and the non-firmware software (drivers and crapware utilities) got very little attention by the a-players on the team.
Well either you've a severely lacking imagination or have had a really comfortable life. I hope for the latter :)
Kidding though, yeah printers are frustrating and cobbling together a printer-fax-copier-scanner into one device is even more terrible. HP was really serious about process though! The test group was literally bigger (more people) than the dev team.. by probably a factor of almost 2.
HP was really big on Model Based Testing [1] and we read books and maybe even had a class on it when joining. The QA team was all in all pretty high functioning, if memory serves.. but the products would still get shipped with four figures of open bug reports (I am not kidding or exaggerating).
The sort of bugs at the start of the cycle were downright terrifying, too. If your printer has never caught fire, or vomited all of it's ink on your desk in the middle of the night... thank your friendly HP QA employee!
Mostly in my era the problems with the products were that they were done on a pretty tight schedule (6-12 months) for what tended to amount to more complex/new hardware than folks would initially expect. The testing cycle also started pretty late because the initial "get it barely working" cycle ate up a couple-few months, and the non-firmware software (drivers and crapware utilities) got very little attention by the a-players on the team.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model-based_testing