Paper short abstract:

Designers and developers in software testing are not conventional users. However, they spend many time using infrastructures, essential for their work. The paper analyzes connections between the testing of a designed application of a social network architecture, and two testing infrastructures.

Paper long abstract:

Following designers and developers in their practice means to observe a long series of activities which are focused in remote infrastructures. These infrastructures are employed to test new devices, but they are also challenged in their fonctioning, often fixed, or reloaded, and opened to developers' interventions. In this sense, designers and developers act as users. This contribution arised from a research carried out in an Italian ICT company, into a group of designers and developers. They aimed to extend an extant architecture of a social network toward a remote surveillance device, understood as a new application of the old social network. In order to test their device, technicians used to monitor the tests' evolution employing two different remote devices. The first one was used to assess the flow of data exchanged during the attempt to make a video call, while the second one gave more detailed information about the operating commands and the parts of the protocol used during the attempt to exchange a video call. Despite the conventional and taken-for-granted accounts, the two remote devices worked as infrastructures, without which all the testing activity was unthinkable. This situation challenges not only the traditional divide between designers and users, but also opens to considerations on spacial dimensions not strictly defined by a set of use, due to remote and digital characters of this kind of infrastructure. Furthermore, the "origination" of digital devices emerges as a strongly infrastructured work, where infrastructuring challenges "creation" or planned activities as the main activity.