Sunday, 19 May 2013

The test ride.

Yesterday we went to our local Honda bike dealer. They where doing what they call 'Honda Day' and it is a opportunity for anyone to take a close look to new bikes and to do a test ride.

This year, they where so nice to let me a brand new CBR500R. I was not able to take a picture, but the bike looks something like this:
Sweet dreams are made of this.
My wife and I we went out for a ride outside the city. The bike feels great, it is very easy to drive, and the brakes and the frame are just outstanding. For more info about the bike, here is a professional review.

After the ride, we asked about price and loan conditions, and it happens that you might get a 24month loan at 0%, not bad at all.

So, we got a nice bike, some good loan conditions and... are we going to buy one?

Well, as everything in live, it depends on the context...

It happens that we already got a bike, a trustworthy Vespa PX200. We use this bike for daily commute and from time to time, when we feel like going for a ride, we rent a second unit at a local shop so we both got some throttle to twist.
So by now, the Vespa is doing quite fine and we don't really need this new bike, even if it rides quite well.

 As a tester, I would say that the new Honda is ready to go to production, I would say that it is more powerful, safer ro ride and has a better mpg ratio than my old Vespa.

But still, I don't run a business, but I do run a family, so as a stakeholder I would say that we don't want to spend the cost of this new feature.

Remember two things here.
1. Priorities of a business are part of the context too. And use to change in time. Be aware when testing whatever feature about the context the business is running in,  and if priorities ever change, remember to re-test if needed with this change in mind, because your old testing criteria might be outdated.
2. Every new feature comes with a cost. Whatever new stuff it does, is by using resources from somewhere, be it cash from the bank, or access to database or page loading speed. Before running a new feature to production, after testing it works, make sure you are aware about the cost of the feature.





Letting it go.

I dropped my Twitter account. And somehow, it did not make sense to write a tweet about it. Many years ago, when I was riding by bike as cou...