In the next lecture, our guest speaker, Prey Noah from the distant arm of Perseus Beta, will introduce us to a new innovative type of consulting in our test environments, namely “Testing and Verification of Tourism Products and Services”.
Lyrical diversion for accidental attendees
Even if you happen to be someone who accidentally wandered into our tester social gathering, don’t rush to sneak out unnoticed, because you’ll learn about a lot of different types of recreational activities to engage in during your short holiday (*unless you live on Proxima Gamma A, where the hard-left government has introduced universal permanent leave for the entire workforce to raise productivity in all sectors of the economy. The bad thing about this scenario is that, according to recent news reports, the planet now has inflation of 1 billion percent due to the GDP “increase” resulting from this policy. Thus, if you’re a Proximian, you’re unlikely to have enough money to travel anywhere. But let’s not worry about the Proximians too much – they’ll be fine since they live on radiation and cork, and there’s plenty of both resources there. **Proxima Gamma A is the main sorted waste processor in our galaxy, and their main industry is cork bottle top recycling. Since they have had such a great surplus for so long and use a radiation-based method to process cork waste, the government has imposed a second policy of dealing with “productivity gains and GDP growth” by secretly modifying the genome of all residents, so they can eat those two waste materials right at the workplace). But we’ll look more closely at those strange cases in the next lecture title “How to test and simulate whether our policies are working or we are just dreaming”.
After this brief lyrical diversion of useful information, let’s make a start on our topic of tourism and more.
Testing wine tours and souvenir shops
You’re probably wondering what exactly it means to consult and even test in tourism. You’ll best understand with a few examples. We all go on holidays at hotels and drink wine in their restaurants (in some form – muddy, icy, iced, virtual, irrational; for more types, read the book “1005 Modern Forms of Grapevines and Marc Distillates by Pental Prip, 5th Updated Edition”).
Right now, it’s very popular to test so-called “wine tours” for different types of tourists. We’ll now get a little more technical, so listen carefully. To identify the most common types of tourists, we use turnstile analytics API data at the location of various turnstiles (i.e. where you insert your ticket and go through a tight spot with metal bars. When the bars move, we detect and read your genetic chip, which tells us all about you – from what you’ve eaten, through who your grandmother is up to three generations, to what toys you bought from the sex shop four blocks away on your home planet, so that your neighbour Genka doesn’t see you and give you a reproachful “you dirty degenerate” look. Because of GDPR, we aren’t allowed to read data concerning the colour of the knickers that turn you on, otherwise we’d probably use that to optimise your “shopping experience” in the world of market capitalism. **Still, we should note that we value your personal information and appreciate your right to privacy). So, to test a wine tour, we measure the optimal amount of wine drunk (this is always the optimal ratio between amount + price / market cap), so that you generate a good wine turnover, but you’re still capable of finding your way to one of the many shops for “nice” and “cheap” souvenirs. But, of course, it’s even more important to test the shops’ “usability” – if you’re drunk, how easy is it to find them and go in without falling over three times, because doing so would put somewhat of a damper on your “shopping experience”.
There’s a separate science of testing the shops themselves, in particular the layout of aisles and shelves. It’s very important for the real shop to test the cashier’s up-selling skills and how effective they are when she’s offering you a chocolate bar. We can advise you whether artificial intelligence should be implemented to whisper in her ear that if you are into sports it’d be better to sell you quinoa at a discount instead of a chocolate bar.
The next part, after you’re optimally tipsy, is to find the way back to your hotel. Another service we offer is to measure the performance of your hotel and its other important parameters. Like where the cooling or heating system is located. Since a room very often has to be generated from a container specifically for the guest, all possible permutations must be checked or automated tests will have to be written to check the frequently generated ones. A new branch in this area is to automatically generate the automated verification tests. But then the question is who ensures the test is testing the right thing or is testing anything at all?! Still, it’s important to make sure that if you shower with mud, this is actually the case, or if you eat radiation, that there is no iodine in your fridge instead, especially if you were expecting a small zombie cow.
Coping with the tourist influx
A little background first. Because of the large influx of tourists to certain destinations, it was initially decided to introduce a coupon or lottery system to pick who could go there. They then started to filter prospects based on whether their personal identification number is odd or even. This turned out to be a little impractical, since many alien nations had dispensed with ID numbers altogether, if they had any at all in the first place, so this policy “slightly” killed tourism for several tebis.
So, the latest fashion in tourism branches out in two directions. One is to use different timelines. Since you can’t fit all tourists in the same place in yours, you take them back 2-3 tebis and put them in a mega-container automatically generated at the place, separating them according to race/gender/affiliation/belief/god/deities/sect/cult/wife/mistress/football club. Based on all those criteria and many more, the system will decide whether mud or radiation will flow from the fountains, which are the right colours to generate and whether the sink taps will be different. (*Beings on the planets in the Kra Kra System are accustomed to having taps, while in the Beta C system they prefer sinks with voice commands, such as “Ouch!”, “Stay”, “Zzzz” and “Aaah, eh, you”. You’ll be amazed at how irritated some species can become if the mud is not heated to the right temperature. And let’s not even get into radiation!
It’s very important to test your restaurant as well. You should keep in mind that using different timelines means you have to hire employees for each one. Also, rents for land, establishments, air/sea/cosmic/virtual/irrational spaces can vary considerably, which can make it difficult to calculate the final price for the customer. A 100 tebis ago, the amounts were much larger. An inflation index based on the absence of Hop-Trop frogs might completely bankrupt your current restaurant branch.
Another complication that will have to be absorbed by some branches of the tourist attraction is that your customers must not realise they’re in another timeline! But that means acquiring sophisticated mobile phone roaming and satellite TV technology! After all, if there’s a Champions League match on, we want to watch it! Here’re some sample test scenarios:
Test scenario 1 – Do we have a phone connection?
We call mum to see who picks up – mum from this timeline or her version from ours. The problem with this test is that if your mother from this timeline answers and realises you’re from another time, just try and tell her it’s only business in order to avoid creating a time paradox. God forbid your grandfather picks up. Then you absolutely have to call the APTDF (Agency for Prevention of Temporal Disturbances and Faxes) (*at your own expense, of course) (**you need to make sure you choose the right code for your timeline because it can get complicated to the second degree, causing double temporal disturbances).
Test scenario 2 – Are the right TV channels being broadcast?
You need to find out what the upcoming Champions League matches are before teleporting to the relevant timeline. But that’s not enough! Because God forbid that the same combination of teams, but with other players, might have occurred in this timeline as well. Therefore, it’s a good idea to learn how many yellow and red cards everyone has and who the key players and coaches are. That’s the only way to make sure you’re watching the right channel! The same goes for news channels! We’ve encountered bugs where everything is fine with the sports channel, but the news network reports that your world is being destroyed by mega-nuclear, hydrogen, magnetic giga-weapons due to an economic and trade feud that hasn’t happened in your timeline. Not for anything else, but it can get pretty difficult afterwards due to the numerous insurance and compensation claims for heart and hip attacks. Other commonly used channels are adult channels. As they generate most of the profit for your hotel, it must be verified that they broadcast shows featuring the right species, i.e. compatible with the species of your guests. Otherwise they wouldn’t pay you, would they? For verification purposes, buy the special volume of Anatomy of Intergalactic Kama Sutra, which contains all compatible types of combinations and highly original kinky poses for every taste and limb. Even if you don’t have time for this test case, your general knowledge and blue film trivia will surely… hmm… expand! Only now with 5% off from this promo link. Accordingly, those channels or folk music networks very often feature small-print dating ads. “Young Beta girl from the moon of Honolulu seeks a young well-groomed Leventh man for an extramarital affair on tonnes of amphetamines under our blue star. Send IGSM (Intergalactic Short Message)” at *7658 for only $ 2K. Again, you need to check whether the messaging software can filter by compatible life forms. You need to make sure that the correct code is displayed on the screen and that the contact phone number is genuine, otherwise you won’t be able to empty the young Leventh’s telephone and bank accounts.
Measuring and testing chaos and anarchy levels
Hijoe Junkfoodish Island is an interesting place. You go there to wallow in squalor and anarchy. It’s so relaxing after the tidy cities of the future, with their driverless cars, planes, carts and donkeys. Everything is vintage there. People drive cars without a licence and there’re no road crossing rules or even old-style traffic lights. Generally, you go to this place for the anarchy. However, the idea is for the anarchy to be simulated, which makes it quite complicated to manage. It’s like planned chaos – a bit of an oxymoron. And how do you measure chaos? It’s usually tested by means of a heuristic checklist, i.e. we have a baseline for what constitutes order. We use our discretion to give a rating of 1 to 10 for each of these indicators. If it’s the opposite of order, then we have chaos! Look, it’s much harder for you to judge whether it’s really simulated and not real. On this planet, everyone lives in the subterranean parts of the city, where there is a giant dome with everything in perfect order. After seeing the locals live there like that, you’ll understand that, to them, going to the surface to create chaos is really just a movie, a big conspiracy. But maybe they actually like it a little too.
Quick chaos and anarchy checklist
1. Do the people speak your language?
2. Can you tell who wants to eat you, hurt you or give you a rose?
3. Can you distinguish vehicles from normal inhabitants of the planet?
4. Do you understand how to get from point A to point B? (“What points, where am I?!”)
5. Are the beings able, and do they want, to communicate with you in any way? (*hand waving, drawing, gestures and exchanges of toccatas/kicks/other limbs and obscene gestures all count as communication)
6. Can you tell what the road crossing and traffic rules are?
7. Do you understand how to get food or refreshments?
8. Are there official sales rules? (*i.e. or does everyone “pick”/borrow whatever they like)
9. Are there rules for who can do the dirty with whom? (*we don’t discriminate between animals, corpses, pine trees and drill bits)
10. Is there an official religion/cult/dictatorship/belief/sect in your immediate area? (*burning goats and chickens, drawing satanic pentagrams, eating raw kidneys/other offal, etc. also count + they are more of a positive indicator of order)
** I guess the lack of any living thing counts as the opposite of chaos (i.e. detecting if there’s anything alive on this empty planet/moon/asteroid/bakery is a prerequisite to proceeding to your measurements)
Cultural shock and hygiene testing
Eating at a caravan festival, or any festival with very loud but mediocre music for that matter, is very popular with a certain group of tourists. Why do people love places like this? They see it as a kind of exotic tourism where they can experience what poor hygiene means and what disturbances and new sensations it can cause. For this to happen, the food must, of course, be below a certain standard. I guess you already know where I’m going with this? Yes, this is the first thing we need to measure. But, as with any test, a single number will tell us nothing – we have to compare it to something chosen as our benchmark. No need to invent the wheel or whatever shape you prefer – you can just open the Almanac of Poor Hygiene Standards and Harmful Agents. Inside, you’ll find the hygiene tolerance limits of every living civilised organism we know of (the values in the book may be slightly different from the latest ones since they were measured on real individuals prior to the adoption of GDPR, GPRG, GGPR and all similar privacy protection laws). Since such laws don’t apply and/or don’t exist in the Kra Kra System, you can hire a few djondjonbolcheta who’ll test them on themselves. After measuring how different harmful and dirty foods affect them, we can use complex transformation matrices from Higher Mathematics 4 to recalculate the coefficients for other races. Of course, you can also use exploratory/experienced testing. Here are some sample test scenarios: we ensure the cooks have no running water to wash the dishes, don’t use gloves or other antibacterial protection, and are required to handle the means of payment with the limb they use for cooking, wipe their forehead with the limb they use to knead the dough, always use the cheapest dubious products they can find and, if something needs to be refrigerated, leave it out in 40-degree heat. An important part of unhygienic tourism is to measure the amount of cultural shock absorbed by tourists. The most basic measurement is the number of times in a microtebi the tourist will express indignation or swear in their native dialect. Again, these numbers are comparable to those in the almanac, which turns out to be a pretty useful tool in the limbs of any QA (quality assurer). If you don’t have a copy of the almanac, you can always base your calculations on the FICCI (index of female indignation and cultural shock upon entering a man’s disgusting bathroom not cleaned since the lodgings were rented/generated/dug/built/programmed).
Extreme sports testing
For adrenaline junkies, there are similar offers. In previous lectures, we talked about touring black holes on a bus and enjoying the gourmet restaurants there. The problem with this type of tourism and its testing is that you can’t always come back. The gravity is bit strong and time and space merge into one. So how do we know there’re restaurants and tourism inside? Elementary. We base our prospectus on the travelogues of the famous traveller Shmirk Bell, who is said to have travelled around a dozen or so places in the centre of the galaxy. He says that, inside the largest black hole, there actually exists a very advanced civilization whose king would send agents across the galaxy to test various gourmet restaurants. They then disappeared surprisingly and mysteriously. Coincidence? I don’t think so! So, especially for this kind of exotic tourism, the IATRSP (Intergalactic Association for Tourism, Rose and Snowdrop Picking) offers a prize for creating a test plan, including for the happy return of tourists + testers from those exotic places. If you can come up with such a plan and provide proof, you’ll get a premium membership card, 3 kg of snowdrops, a photo of you shaking hands with the association chair and 3 gourmet dinners worth up to $20.
Another type of extreme sports in tourism is jet skiing through a wormhole. This is quite an expensive and rare sport. Again, we only base our claims on theoretical papers and rumours that such experiments have taken place. There are at least two credible theories for creating such tunnels.
1. You need a black and white hole to merge. The second type is yet to be seen by anyone living. Maybe because they turn to ash after seeing it. NOBODY KNOWS FOR SURE!
2. The other, cheaper option is to find a piece of galactic space and place two oppositely charged black holes there. You’ll also need two space strings, one of which must circle its own orbit. You must not touch them because they’ll slice right through you like a red-hot knife in a peasant ritual. This begs the question of how exactly you “place” those strings between your holes. (*you can use the services of this lecture’s official sponsor with a 50% discount: If It’s Heavy We’ll Carry it – Movers 2.0). You can imagine that creating a PROD environment is quite expensive. Accordingly, the admins really don’t want to allocate you a budget for the creation of a TEST environment. This means you should test in PROD. Very often, after updating the software that monitors tunnel and hole stability, as well as something else, slight regression problems occur. But what’s the big deal about losing 2-3-4-5 … 102 tourists? The important thing is to test whether anybody will find out and whether you’ll make enough money to pay your lawyers. (*another 20% discount from the silver sponsor of our lecture – Shishman Shishman Shishman Shishman – The Shishman Brothers Law Firm). In fact, instead of testing whether everything really works, there’s a much easier option. While your customer places an order, a checkbox appears at the bottom of the screen. By ticking it, your customers accepts that you’re in no way responsible for any permanent or perpetual damage you might inflict on them (*standard obituary form). This should be your most important test to ensure that your product can’t be purchased without a signature on this “standard” virtual consent form. Leave everything else to the marketing and film crew that makes the trailers and demos.
Recap before “The End”
In my opinion, after this information-packed lecture on tourism, you’ll already be holidaying in a much more aware and tester-like way. We hope you don’t mind the bugs. Have a nice holiday! We’ll take care of you, your shadow, your security and your money (through a pleasant “shopping experience”).
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