Today’s comic is primarily based around the fun revelation that HP obviously has all of it’s software testing for it’s face tracking webcam software done by whities. A Youtube video surfaced that showed that black faces appear to be completely unrecognized. When you develop software QA personnel (Quality Assurance testers) are a vital part of making sure that your final product works the way it should. When you make poor decisions on the testers and the Use Cases (scenarios that the final product should succeed in passing when finished) you can end up with inadvertent situations like this one. It’s not limited to software–Thalidomide is a drug that caused huge cases of malformed children after pregnant women used it–but it was only tested with men before being released to consumers. In my experience QA is one of the areas least funded in an organization–foolishly companies think that they can cut back on this part of development and get away with it. Well, guess what, you can’t. You’ll always end up paying for it with your reputation or serious cash if people die or get hurt. But then again, the executive who gets a huge bonus for cutting costs doesn’t have to pay….so who actually loses?

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This entry was posted on Saturday, January 2nd, 2010 at 5:41 pm and is filed under My Annoying Life Comic. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.