Hiccupps

I'm been working on an application that will orchestrate data from multiple services. As the developers add clients for those services, they have been writing integration tests and, naturally, many of them use mocked data. Mostly the data consists of non-trivial JSON response bodies full of domain-specific terminology captured during interactions with the other services. Consequently, many of our tests reflect this complexity and domain-specificity by asserting on its data structures and particular terms. This is functionally fine, but problematic for readability because test intent can be hidden in a mass of incomprehensible word salad. Again, this is usually fine for the author when writing the test because the intent is front of mind but it's problematic for other readers, including the author later. I have been vocal about this drawback and today one of my colleagues asked me to summarise my prescription for it. Without thinking I said this, and I ...

I've spoken to a couple of friends recently about testers they know who continually express a desire to "learn automation" and continually fail to begin learning anything at all.  A common behaviour is to find something that blocks the goal. For one friend, the testers wanted a course on automation and ring-fenced time each week to work on it. Without those, they said, it was obvious that no learning could happen. For the other friend, an interesting natural experiment had taken place. There had been a couple of weeks at his place where the wiki, task management system, and source control service had been unavailable. Staff who usually complained about not having time to study anything because they were too busy moving an endless stream of tickets across boards were told to spend that time on self-learning.  Do you think they mostly did? No need to answer. I can empathise. From a standing start a distant goal can look very intimidating. Of course putting off starting does...

We are generally not the target users of the software products we work on.  That's not to say we never use our applications or that we have no interest in those who do, but mostly we rely on feedback from elsewhere to tell us whether needs are being met.  Sure, as testers we'll interact with the software and maybe even consider ourselves to be a proxy for users. Yes, we'll probably have people in product and business roles translating, or inventing, customer requirements for us. And, yes, perhaps we'll even dogfood the stuff we build sometimes, to some extent. I've lost count of the number of times I've asked developers whether they ran the software after their changes and been told that the tests pass. I've lost count of the number of colleagues I've had who work on a service and have little or no idea what clients it has and what kinds of tasks their users are trying to complete or why. I've lost count of the number of times I've been in argume...

  My friend Mirek wrote an interesting post recently: Where Rust fits for me . In it, he made a hierarchy of the programming languages he reaches for on a regular basis and why he picks a particular one for any specific task. I'd summarise it crudely like this: Shell: only for very basic setup. Anything with non-trivial logic belongs somewhere else. Python: his go-to but with caveats about the expected lifetime of the code: if it needs to persist without regular attention then Python won't do. Rust: Whatever doesn't fit in the other two categories.  I enjoy seeing people be thoughtful about their tools and reflect on the way that they work. Understanding what you do and why is a helpful first step on improving what you do and why, should you want to. And I always want to. So I thought I'd attempt the same kind of analysis and started listing languages that I use regularly: Groovy : I use Groovy exclusively in Jenkins pipelines. It's useful to have a little familiar...

The map is not the territory. You've heard this before and I've quoted it before . The longer quote (due to Alfred Korzybski) from which the snappy soundbite originated adds some valuable context: A map is not the territory it represents, but, if correct, it has a similar structure to the territory, which accounts for its usefulness. I was thinking about that this week as I came to a product new to me but quite mature with a very rich set of configuration options. When I say rich , I mean — without casting any shade, because I have been there and understand — it is set in multiple locations, has extensive potential effects, and is often difficult to understand.  For my current project I consider it crucial to get a non-shallow view of how this works and so I began to explore. While there is some limited documentation it is, as so often, not up to date so mostly I worked in the codebases. Yes, plural, because this product spans multiple r...

In simpler times you had to go out of your way to find useless motivational banalities. There'd be an aisle in the shops that you could easily avoid or a spot on the office kitchen wall next to the milk rota that you could stare straight past while the kettle boiled and you fantasised about another job.  These days, unless you've vacated social media, it's much harder to avoid having decontextualised generalities with a side of misleading infographics thrust in your face. I scroll hard past that crap but I was reminded of one that comes around frequently the other day. It goes something like these ( 1 , 2 , 3 ): "Ready to unlock your 38X potential in just one year?" "Imagine being offered a 365% return on any investment!" "Every day: 1% stack or 1% slide. You choose." Naturally, "better" and "return" and "stack" are pretty vague and the directions for achieving these easy wins are even more so...

If you've met me anywhere outside of a wedding or funeral, a snowy day, or a muddy field in the last 20 years you'll have seen me in Adidas Superstar trainers. But why? This post is for April Cools' Club .  --00-- I'm the butt of many jokes in our house, but not having a good memory features prominently amongst them. See also being bald ("do you need a hat, Dad?"), wearing jeans that have elastane in them (they're very comfy but "oh look, he's got the jeggings on again!"), and finding joy in contorted puns ("no-one's laughing except you, you know that, right?") Which is why it's interesting that I have a very strong, if admittedly not complete, memory of the first time I heard Run DMC. Raising Hell , their third album, was released in the UK in May 1986 and I bought it pretty much immediately after hearing it on the evening show on Radio 1, probably presented by Janice Long, ...

  I told you how much I love Kill it with Fire by Marianne Bellotti in This is Fire and you can see it in my copy above too. It's a book about dealing with legacy systems but in the first couple of chapters grounds its thesis in the marketplace, thinking about how products, the constraints on them, and the context in which they sit change in controllable and (more often) uncontrollable ways. This might not seem very "tech" but in fact is fundamental to understanding how we seem to bounce back and forth between the same kinds of solutions, why some of them become legacy, and why we should think carefully about radically changing a working system. To be clear, this information is not necessary to get the core benefits of the book but I found it fascinating and wanted to try to triangluate concepts such as Alignable and non-alignable differences Service-dominant Logic Hype Cycle Unique Selling Proposition Cro...