We have been testing a new system out the past few weeks at work. It has been a real learning experience. There have been more than a couple 12+ hour days, early mornings and late evenings.
The testing was simple. Operate the system at various levels and make sure it works as intended. Nothing complicated. However, when you are testing something that touches fifty other somethings it doesn't take much for things to break. Murphy just loves complicated interconnected systems. To give you an idea of the scale of the challenges we've had the testing could have taken us about four days if nothing had gone wrong. Not long days either. Just normal work days. It has taken us three weeks.
We have had days where nothing got done because Murphy was poking EVERYTHING. There were a few points where we might have been able to shortcut issues or avoid them, but I only see those now in retrospect. Others just came out of the blue.
We overcame them one at a time and have trudged through it all to success. It has been a battle like no other challenge I have had in my engineering career. Through it though I have learned a lot about teamwork, troubleshooting, perseverance, and the nuances of complex systems.
It is one of the most satisfying points of my career to date.
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