RoboCrush.com

With every new beginning there is change. Whether major or minor change will always have it’s issuess…as a part of life and as a part of America - and as a part of Robocrush.

We’ve been out of site, but not out of mind. We’ve had our nose to the grindstone and our feet to the pavement. Yes, we’ve partly been scrambling, but we’ve mostly been thinking and planning - thinktanking as it were about the future direction of our beta testing phases.

The ultimate direction of Robocrush has not changed, but sometimes the path to a final destination must take into account the unpredictable changes to the landscape required to get there. Anyone who’s ever downloaded driving directions from an online mapping service only to be faced with unanticipated constructions knows exactly what I mean.

We will reach our destination. And we will travel whatever new path we must in order to get there.

Tad

Some of the beta testers have been confused about why we are redoing some of the initial testing so I thought I’d take some time to explain.

The RC Factor - which I know it seems we are so “hush hush” about is still evolving as are many other areas of our business and modeling systems. I’ve been accused of being needlessly technical I’m not going to go into predictor variables and other elements that you don’t really need to know about.

Really, the main takeaway here is we are constantly improving the processes and modeling and sometimes that means we need to retest the same test case scenarios.

Tad

We’re pleased to announce that within the next week or so RobCrush will start publishing limited releases of production data subsets. These are production data sets that have been verified as having gone through the following:

• Initial test plan walkthrough.
• Test data review.
• Proper test enivronment to product migration path.

By the way, we’ve heard a lot of complaints about the complexity and number of migration paths to choose from based on which piece of the RoboCrush system you’re working on. We understand this and once again we will be automating much of this into a pretty-much fail-safe system (never say never, eh?).

We’ll also be formally opening up the blog to a moderated feedback status and see how that goes.

Sorry for the scrambling-fast post here.  But as most of you know things have really gotten crazy here - and that’s crazy in a good way. Our project seems to be getting a lot of attention despite our attempt to keep it somewhat underground - obviously not TOO underground as we’ve put up this site and shortly will start publishing some of our production data.

Mainly we just want to make sure you all know that we feel like we’re really settingly into a groove and have  noticed some of you feeling that way as well. It’s been nice to see how some of the test teams are shaping up, too. It was a somewhat unexpected surprise that there would be so much synergy not only within the teams but even between the teams that have been working together on testing.

We apologize for the recent Beta lockdown and hiatus on the blog but we truly believe in the mantra “better safe than sorry”. I’m sure most of you got that from the testing training you’ve gone through.

Probably to many of you we seemed a bit paranoid and it may have even seemed like we were on a witch-hunt. Rest assured that wasn’t the case at all. Sometimes we got a bit careless with the language in the memos we sent out which gave the impression that we were being accusatory.

The truth is the whole problem started with what we thought was a potential vulnerability in our repository of test data. Even though the data itself is essentially useless without the system interface, there was a remote potential of partial reverse-engineering if certain potential exploits we thought we identified were actually present.

As it turns out, they weren’t so now we are ready to return to business as usual.

In the spirit of RoboCrush we will be sending out feedback forms to get your suggestions on how we might have handled this situation better.

Once again let us thank you all for hanging in there during these exciting times at RoboCrush.

Tad & P.J.