#hence buggy centric

[sw4nfire]

so I made the mistake of listening to the character songs sung by the voice actors and it sparked a buggy centric mad max style musician/music au and I cant get it out of my head here is a google doc with all the details and my reasonings

I tried not to change much about one piece's wacky world since I love it so much

[terryblount]

Tom Clancy’s The Division 2 Review

It seems like an eternity since I was last called to service as a Division Agent. It was set shortly after Black Friday, 2015, a date that can’t be erased from my memory. This was the first time I was called to save people and even humanity from a mortally dangerous virus unleashed in the heart of New York on that busy Black Friday.

In the original game there was much exploration through city streets and scavenging of abandoned vehicles. I united with my fellow Division Agents, and after many missions the operation was a success. We did it, together. Now, three years later, I’m yet again called to service as a Division Agent in a new decimated city with whole new threats to humanity. It’s time to once again change our lives, forever.

This is where you’ll start. A pleasant setting leading to greater conflicts.

As a personal note, I’ve been really hoping for a sequel to 2016’s The Division. However, I was a bit worried that a sequel might be like the first at release: great but unfinished and buggy. Plus the original’s end-game was an endless “Dark Zone” grind, which was sort of like a warm but tasteless soup.

Hence, I didn’t want to yet again have to wait for months of patches and DLC to finally experience a complete and engaging experience. Thankfully, The Division 2 avoids these problems, as we’ll soon discuss.

There’s many urban centers like the first game, but the mood is brighter and more vibrant.

The Division 2 starts exactly 7 months (in-game time) after the first game and throws you into the action without much of a concern about all the things you missed if you didn’t play the first game.

From the beginning the game feels like a tighter and more focused product than the original, but the wonderfully apocalyptic and American-centric blockbuster atmosphere it is still present. And what city could fit better as the setting for American Armageddon than the capital city itself: Washington D.C.!

The main menu is nice looking and easy to use.

As for the backstory, the epidemic that began in New York was unable to be contained and it spread to other major cities. Even Washington D.C. has fallen under plague and madness, reaching the President’s very own White House.

Given the bleak setting, sadness and sorrow are ever-present among the survivors, and nature itself is now able to do what it does best: invade and grow. It’s not unusual to find animals running around looking for food or to find plants and grass growing on buildings, roads, and cars.

The White House! The Division 2 wonderfully recreates iconic locations like this.

The original game from 2016 looked great with it’s semi-sparse New York city streets. There was a great Christmas/nighttime atmosphere throughout the game, but for this second installment the developers have made things even greater.

In The Division 2 you’ll find more guns and loot, more missions (main and secondary), and more liveliness overall, be it people, animals, plants, or living centers. Bases are now more populated by survivors, and you can find children playing, singers, and musicians.

Just a typical walk around in the neighborhood. It’s a bit gloomy today.

Every time you complete a mission you can use various materials or your experience to make life better in the living centers, creating new areas, new playgrounds, and new rooms for example. Everything is more alive than ever, even if the plague’s still there.

I might summarize the first game with the term “explore.” This second game also has exploration, but it is more about how you engage with the world. Hence, this second game is more linked with the word “interact.”

Look at the pretty graphics and reflections on the water!

You interact with your gear and progression. You interact with your companions, helping them to survive and build their bases. You study your enemies and environments to find clues to help you more wisely interact with your world.

For these reasons, I found myself enthralled with the beauty and fantastic level of detail of my surroundings. There’s just so much to find and do as you go from mission to mission.

This was a car. Now it’s a barrier. That’s how life goes sometimes.

A large part of the fun in the game is the badass enemies set on killing you and your friends. They feature a more modern artificial intelligence and are much more aggressive in their clever use of the environment. Hordes of these enemies really make your survival harder than ever.

While The Division 2 gives you bigger and better environments, the gameplay controls are virtually the same as the original. This is a fine thing since new players will easily learn the solid controls, which are customizable to suite everyone’s tastes. Veterans will find the same layouts and fall right back in to the enjoyable gameplay loop of the first game.

This is me trying to survive hordes of enemy. Duck and cover.

The game also features great support for either mouse and keyboard or gamepads. This is very welcome for those of us like me who prefer to play with keyboard and mouse at the office and a controller on the couch. (At home I play on my laptop, laying on the couch, while using an Xbox 360 controller, and I have no regrets about this.)

For those who really love the PvP “Dark Zone” location of the first The Division, you’ll love the new take on the “Dark Zones.” This second game gives you three zones placed around the city, so you’ll be able to play in PvP mode with more variety and easy access than ever before.

This is me, still trying not to die. There’s a lot of taking cover in the game, FYI.

When finishing the main story in the original The Division, players had the chance to replay missions over and over or compete in the PvP area. This binary option was a bit boring and made the game feel incomplete and unsatisfying to many of us.

In this sequel, the endgame continuously gives you new challenges through encounters with new and stronger enemies (the Black Tusks) and new materials and loot, always better than the previous items.

Even at launch, The Division 2 feels like a complete game, and update after update will continue to add more challenges for those who are strong and brave. If you commit to the game, there’s a potential for seemingly limitless character evolution.

There’s so much loot and equipment to find and equip.

It should be noted that this is an online-only game; being online is mandatory at all times. This game also is much easier when playing in a group. You can try to complete each mission alone, but it’s not ideal. Thanks to a built-in matchmaking system, you can easily join with friends or strangers at every part of the game. Sometimes you’ll also respond to (or send) S.O.S. calls from other players.

There’s matchmaking to facilitate partying up!

On the technical side, the Snowdrop engine’s excellent power is on showcase in this sequel. Graphically, things are great. There’s some texture pop-up, which is sometimes distracting, but this is a minor issue. Overall, the game crafts a credible and vivid Washington D.C. location that’s just as impressive as the original game’s New York.

While there’s very little to complain about regarding the engine or performance, sometimes the game can crash on certain computer setups when using the DX12 renderer, which requires manually editing the config files to restart using the DX11 renderer.

Did I mention there’s a White House in this game? Yep, it’s the White House.

Apart from the crashing issue, using max settings on my 1050 Ti-equipped laptop gave me an average of 30 frames per second without any worries. Reaching areas with many enemies dropped the FPS a little bit, but reducing shadows quality fixed this. The game should run very well on more powerful systems.

I died. It happens. Thankfully death isn’t too extreme in this game.

I admit I’m not the best shooter player, and after 7 hours I was still at level 6. I’ve died many times on missions, even with the help of other players. But it doesn’t matter how many times I die, lose, and retry. I always feel that I’m evolving, and I think each play session is rewarding for players. This means even newbies will not have to worry about the sense of failure that comes with less forgiving games.

I love shopping! So many pretty outfits to try on! Must gear up!

In conclusion, the first game started something interesting but this second one delivers on the promise. What began as a more bare-bones franchise has developed into a robust looter-shooter that makes everything bigger, better, and more interesting.

Since booting it up, it feels like a complete game that will continue to get even better down the road. I feel this is the perfect mix between strong story missions (even if filled some clich?s), an interesting PvE open world, and competitive PvP modes.

This is me running away from my inevitable death. Even if I die, I’ll enjoy the experience.

I have never been to Washington D.C., but after playing The Division 2 I’m sure I’ll feel some d?j? vu if I ever do visit. I feel like I’ve lived in the city and experienced so much, eliminating the bad guys and saving countless lives. The Division 2, with its Washington D.C. setting, is a truly unforgettable and unmissable experience.

Plenty of content

Great voice acting

Graphically impressive

Matchmaking is easy

A complete experience

Repetitive at times

Playing solo can be tough

DX12 renderer issues

Always online

  Playtime: 20 hours total (and counting). Mathieu has not completed the game, but he’s still playing it!

Computer Specs: Windows 10 64-bit laptop computer, with 16GB of Ram, Nvidia 1050Ti.

Also read the The Division 2 PC Performance Analysis.

Tom Clancy’s The Division 2 Review published first on https://touchgen.tumblr.com/

[baburaja97-blog]

New Post has been published on Vin Zite

New Post has been published on https://vinzite.com/crowd-sourcing-in-software-testing/

Crowd Sourcing in Software Testing

Many hands make software work

The stakes for Microsoft, which was outlining its Office 2010 product strategy, were extremely high. According to Microsoft’s earnings statements, Microsoft Office productivity suite generates more revenue than any other business division, says Gregg Keizer, who covers Microsoft and general technology news for Computerworld.

Months before Microsoft released Office 2010 productivity suite, 9 million people downloaded the beta version to test the software and to provide feedback. Through this program, Microsoft collected 2 million valuable comments and insights from those testers.

Denise Carlevato, a Microsoft usability engineer for 10 years, and her colleagues from Microsoft’s Virtual Research Lab observed how people used new features. Their objective was to make Microsoft Office fit the way millions of people used their product and to help them work better. It was a massive, controlled crowdsourcing project.

  The scenario

Developing a new software product is always exciting, especially to watch ideas take form and truly become a reality. Sometimes a fresh perspective or an innovative use case is all it takes to turn a product from good to great. However, when it comes to testing, we often find ourselves in unchartered waters wondering if the product will actually work in the diverse customer landscapes. It is virtually impossible to test the vast number of devices and configurations of software that web-based software can run on today. Truly robust testing is time-consuming and ensuring that every possible permutation and the combination of features, localizations, and platforms works, as intended is nearly impossible.

Often times, comprehensive testing is a challenge and buggy code is delivered to the customer. For example, if a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) application does not render in a particular browser or a critical software tool fails to deliver its intended functionality, a bug fix or a patch is promised and the vicious cycle starts all over again. Either way, the customer withstands the worst of inadequate testing, especially when faced with the escalating costs of software maintenance, performance, etc. For the software development company, ramifications include distress around brand image, perceived quality, relationship and potential future projects, trust, etc.

Welcome to the new world of crowd-sourced testing, an emerging trend in software engineering that exploits the benefits, effectiveness, and efficiency of crowdsourcing and the cloud platform towards software quality assurance and control. With this new form of software testing, the product is put to test under diverse platforms, which makes it more representative, reliable, cost-effective, fast, and above all, bug-free.

Crowdsourced testing, conceived around a Testing-as-a-Service (TaaS) framework, helps companies reach out to a community to solve problems and remain innovative. When it comes to testing software applications, crowdsourcing helps companies reduce expenses, reduce time to market and increase resources for testing, manage a wide range of testing projects, test competence needs, exigency to resolve higher defects rates and use 3rd party’s test environment to subside the project requirements.

It differs from traditional testing methods in that the testing is carried out by a number of different testers from across the globe, and not by locally hired consultants and professionals. In other words, crowdsourced testing is a form of outsourced software testing, a time-consuming activity, to testers around the world, thus enabling small startups to use ad-hoc quality-assurance teams, even though they themselves could not afford traditional quality assurance testing teams.

Why Does Crowd Sourced Testing Work?

To understand why crowdsourced testing works, it is important to understand the set of biases that infect most testers and test managers around the world. This phenomenon is called, “The Curse of Knowledge,” a phrase used in a 1989 paper in The Journal of Political Economy. It means that for a particular subject expert, it is nearly impossible to imagine and look beyond the knowledge the tester has acquired i.e. the set of concepts, beliefs, and scenarios that the tester knows or predicts. As a result, it is particularly challenging to think outside the box and conceive the various ways a typical end user would use particular software.

This phenomenon has been empirically proven through an infamous experiment conducted by a Stanford University graduate student of psychology, Elizabeth Newton. She illustrated the phenomenon through a simple game, people were assigned to one of two roles, namely tappers and listeners. Each tapper was to select a well-known song, such as “Happy Birthday,” and tap the rhythm on a table. The listeners were to guess the song from the taps. However, before the listeners guessed the song, tappers were asked to predict the probability that listeners would guess correctly. They predicted 50%. Over the course of the experiment, 120 songs were tapped out, but listeners guessed only three of the songs correctly – a success rate of merely 2.5%

The explanation is as follows: when tappers tap, it is impossible for them to avoid hearing the tune playing along to their taps. Meanwhile, all the listeners could hear is a kind of bizarre Morse code. The problem is that once we know something, we find it impossible to imagine the other party not knowing it.

Extrapolating this experiment to software testing, most testers conduct a battery of tests that they feel is representative and that captures the set of end-user scenarios for how the software would be used. The reality is far from this. Any expert tester would assert that it is impossible to capture the complete set of scenarios that an end user may throw at a software system. As a result, critical path(s) of the code under certain scenarios go untested, which leads to software malfunctioning, production system crashes, customer escalations, long hours of meetings, debugging, etc.

Crowdsourced testing circumvents all these headaches by bringing a comprehensive set of code coverage mechanisms and end user scenarios during the design and development stages of software engineering, during which the cost of modification is meager. This results in identifying critical use cases early on and providing for those contingencies, which reduces software maintenance costs later on during and after productive deployment. Besides progressive code coverage, the quality and depth of software testing among various vital software modules is achieved, which ultimately results in a higher code quality, among other benefits.

Crowdsourced testing – the framework

At the heart of the crowd, sourced testing is the community that tests a given software product. The community encompasses people from diverse backgrounds, cultures, geographies, languages, all with a diverse approach to software usage. The community, represented by a diverse and extended user space, tests any given software by putting it to use under realistic scenarios, which a tester in the core test team may not be able to envision, given a tester’s constraints, such as limited bounds of operation, knowledge, scenarios. Thus, it is easy to observe the broad set of usage patterns that put the software under intense scrutiny. Crowdsourcing software testing draws its benefits from delegating the task of testing a web or software project, while in development, on to a number of Internet users, to ensure that the software contains no defects.

The method of crowdsourced testing is particularly useful when the software is user-centric when software’s success and adoption is determined by its user feedback. It is frequently implemented with gaming or mobile applications, when experts who may be difficult to find in one place are required for specific testing, or when the company lacks the resources or time to carry out internal testing.

The spectrum of issues that such test efforts could uncover within a short lead-time is particularly noteworthy. Such testing efforts yield productive results with reasonable costs. Often times, the product company pays only for those valid reported bugs. Hence, the Return on Investment (ROI) is high compared to the traditional means of software testing.

How does it work?

Most crowdsourced testing companies provide the platform for the testing cycles. Clients specify the type of tests that they wish to have performed and the types of devices that the software product must be tested on.

Testers complete a profile, indicating the skills they have, the devices to which they have access to, and the countries where they reside. Once a tester has completed his profile, he/she can check the project dashboard for a listing of projects and releases that are available for testing. The dashboard may also include sample test scenarios, additional tools, and scripts, instructions for testers about what is expected from them, etc. Usually, the testers are required to submit a QA plan, which outlines both high-level test cases and detailed test scenarios. The plan may also include whether or not the test can be automated and expected results.

A qualified Project Manager, who is typically a proven community leader or a person from the client/the platform company, reviews such plans and approves or amends such plans to cater to the client’s specific testing requirements.

Each project includes an explanation and access to a forum where bugs and issues are discussed and additional questions can be asked. Testers document bug reports and are rated based on the quality of their reports. The amount the testers earn increases as their rating increases.

The community combines aspects of collaboration and competition, as members work to finding solutions to the stated problem. Forums facilitate networking and discussion of bugs or relevant issues; rating systems allow for recognition of a job well done, which helps participants gain credibility and improved career.

Checks & Balances

Security is a crucial element to crowdsource testing. More often than not, confidential customer information is exposed to testers during application testing. Any breach of this data can lead to serious damage, both to the brand and the business. Test data management ensures the availability and security of test data by obfuscating sensitive information for large-scale testing engagements. Masking such information or creating ‘test-only’ data helps maintain privacy and security while using crowdsourced testing services.

In almost all cases, the testers are required to sign a Non-Disclosure Agreement (NDA) when they join the community. The NDA forbids them from talking about customers, their products or specific defects, both offline and online on Facebook, Twitter, personal blogs or anywhere outside the confines of the private testing platform. Beyond that, the customers can upload a customized NDA, which testers must sign before viewing the customer’s project. For projects that require a high level of security, a pre-screened list of white hat engineers, that have a long professional relationship with the platform company are selected.

Furthermore, standardized communication patterns help users secure their data and gain confidence in their testing vendors, which results in a seamless transition.

By combining an internal, permanent team of testers with a crowd of experienced software testers working from around the globe, superior quality in testing is delivered. By constantly filtering the network of testers to accept only experienced software testing professionals, applicants without formal training and significant professional experience are eliminated. This ensures the quality and the validity of the bugs reported. Last but not the least, tests are dispatched to individual testers based on their experience, available material, and languages mastered. The testers and test project exposure are continually monitored to ensure both quality and integrity, not only of the test results but also of the associated environment.

Caveat emptor?

Crowdsourced testing is best when the product under development is consumer-centric rather than enterprise-centric, such as gaming or web is drove consumer applications. A global user base to test the product should exist and the product should be relevant to the community at large. This is also a test for the application’s potential success in the marketplace.

  There should also be an earnest interest from the community to proffer critical feedback for the product under consideration such as a monetary reward. This also brings forth another interesting challenge. The product company is not obliged to follow through on community’s recommendations and may dispense with the feedback for various internal reasons. In this case, the community may feel unheard and this mandates a fine balancing act of the entire ecosystem.

The product company should be committed to working with a large group of people and understand that it involves some degree of overhead in such a decentralized test effort. It also requires certain subject matter experts to mentor and monitors various testing efforts as well as offer support and relevant guidance to the testing teams. If the product team does not have the resources to take on full-fledged testing in-house but has a good understanding of the testing requirements, it can realize its overall strategy from a globally sourced team.

With normal employment contracts, employees receive a salary for their contribution and the firm owns any intellectual property developed by the employee during their tenure with the organization. In a crowd-sourcing constellation, people are participating voluntarily. Unless the position on Intellectual Property (IP) is clear and explicitly stated, i.e. a condition of the right to participate is the acceptance of Intellectual Property transfers to the client, potential for IP infringement by the contributor exists.

A crowdsourced project requires skills and mastery in designing the compensation structure, both in monetary and non-monetary terms. The testers are usually paid a certain amount of money in the case of a successful bug/issue discovery. In some cases, the testers would prefer non-monetary aspects like recognition and personal satisfaction rather than monetary compensation. Thus, it is vital to understand the motivators prior to mission critical deployments.

In cases where participants are compensated on a per task basis, an incentive for participants to choose speed over accuracy exists. This is especially the case with especially micro tasks, which are susceptible to mistakes and could result in erroneous overall outcomes. Therefore, robust governance mechanisms need to be installed, continually monitored and policies regularly updated to reflect the changing trends.

Advantages of crowdsourced testing:

Representative scenarios from the real user base, not hypothetical test cases

Tight feedback loop with rapid feedback processing and agility

Comprehensiveness in use cases, platforms, tools, browsers, testers, etc. that is typically impossible to replicate by any single product company

Cost efficiency, as the product company pays only for the valid bugs reported

Diversity among the pool of testers leads to comprehensive testing, especially with regard to applications, which are localization based

Reduced time to test, time to market and total cost of ownership as critical paths of a software module are tested during design time, which leads to a reduced maintenance cost

Better productivity and improved product development focus

Disadvantages of crowdsourced testing:

Governance issues around security, exposure, and confidentiality when offering a community project to wide user base for testing

Quality and workload challenges that arise from the unpredictable nature of customer demands

Project management challenges that stem from the users’ diverse backgrounds, languages and experience levels

Documentation issues, such as poor quality of bug reports, bug duplicates, and false alarms

Equity and equality constraints in the reward mechanism with remuneration as a function of the quality of contributions that meets a prescribed minimum standard

Management overhead associated with managing an active and growing community

What does the future hold?

Crowdsourced testing, clearly, has its advantages and limitations. It cannot be considered as a panacea for all testing requirements and the power of the crowd should be diligently employed. The key to avoiding failure in crowdsourcing would be to use it prudently depending on the tactical and strategic needs of the organization that seeks crowdsourced testing services. It is important for the organization to embrace the correct model, identify the target audience, offer the right incentives and have a suitable workforce to manage the task results.

Crowdsourcing testing is a relatively new application in Software Engineering and as we continue to experiment and learn about crowdsourcing, we will gain experience and maturity that will help to identify best practices and to harvest the entire value it offers. With this learning, we will become better equipped at mitigating any associated risks and at learning how to better deal with the operational issues around the applicability of crowdsourcing to new sets of activities.

Considering the above points in mind and taking cues from individual scenarios will help determine whether crowdsourced testing really makes sense and if so, what to, when and how to leverage the crowdsourced community.