Hiccupps

The big story in IT right now is Crowdstrike 's unfortunate update that prompted millions of Windows machines to BSOD and caused chaos in critical infrastructure around the world. Actually, that's not just big, it's BIG or B. I. G. or maybe B! I! G! and it's provoked loads of speculation about the hows and whys and what-should-haves and what-didn'ts. But even on a week without that scale of fail, even on a week where nothing untoward happened on any computer anywhere, the observation I'm sharing here probably wouldn't merit much coverage.  This is it: Do you see? Just under the orange bar, the word OLIVE. Why? Don't get me wrong, I like olives. I just don't expect to see them on the BBC Sounds player while I'm setting myself up to listen to England win the cricket at the weekend. Of course, if you look a bit closer and wait a second or two, you'll see that there's a slight vertical alignment difference between the O and LIVE and the th

Last weekend I participated in the LLandegfan Exploratory Workshop on Testing (LLEWT) 2024, a peer conference in a small parish hall on Anglesey, north Wales. The topic was communication and I shared my sketchnotes and a mind map from the day a few days ago. This post summarises my experience report.  Express, Listen, and Field Just about the most hands-on, practical, and valuable training I have ever done was on assertiveness with a local Cambridge coach, Laura Dain . In it she introduced Express, Listen, and Field (ELF), distilled from her experience across many years in the women’s movement, business, and academia.  ELF: say your key message clearly and calmly, actively listen to the response, and then focus only on what is relevant to your needs. I blogged a little about it back in 2017 and I've been using it ever since. Assertiveness In a previous role, I was the manager of a test team and organised training for the whole team

This weekend I was at LLEWT 2024, a peer conference on Anglesey , north Wales, discussing communication. Given the day jobs of the participants, it was no surprise that the experience reports and the conversations that followed them mostly focussed on software development contexts.  Notes from my presentation are in Express, Listen, and Field . I made sketchnotes (below) for each presentation and a mindmap (above) to try to summarise the whole. Without much reflection yet, I guess I would pull these common high-level threads from the day: There are multiple reasons that communication fails  ... like, duh! ... but having multiple strategies for framing a message can help ... and having multiple tactics for delivering a message can help too. Understanding what you want from an interaction is key ... so setting the context to make that more likely is wise ... which might mean meta-conversation, being transparent, or changing your approach ...

It was Father's Day recently and one of my daughters made me a card which I love for all sorts of reasons, not least because it says she sees me practising "dad philosophy": See a need, fill a need Sadly this particular gem is not mine, it belongs to Bigweld , a character in Robots . We watched that film loads when my kids were little and I quoted it to encourage them to contribute to the chores, not ignore a mess, and look for opportunities to help each other out.  So I can't claim credit but, hat tip to Bigweld, it is a mindset I use for myself at home and take with me to work. Image: Robots Wiki

For over a year the roadworks near our house have been a riot of signage, inspiring me and my daughter to make silly songs using their words for lyrics as we walked to school.  Then she got the idea that we should make a "proper" song. So I downloaded n-Track and we hacked together a techno instrumental over a few evenings. Unfortunately, recording decent quality vocals at home without much equipment is non-trvial and then real life intervened anyway so the project stopped. A few months later I came aross Suno , an AI song generator, and had a lightbulb moment. Suno exposes a prompt for musical style and a prompt for lyrics so we had it make a song, When Red Light Shows , based on the signs. I think it was my daughter that suggested we should make a video too, so we did, with a non-AI tool, CapCut . The lyrics came from signs, the music came from AI, and we made the images yet I feel that we were creative across all of those areas. Reflecting on our experience,

The Association for Software Testing is crowd-sourcing a book,  Navigating the World as a Context-Driven Tester , which aims to provide  responses to common questions and statements about testing from a  context-driven perspective . It's being edited by  Lee Hawkins  who is  posing questions on  Twitter ,   LinkedIn , Mastodon , Slack , and the AST  mailing list  and then collating the replies, focusing on practice over theory. I've decided to  contribute  by answering briefly, and without a lot of editing or crafting, by imagining that I'm speaking to someone in software development who's acting in good faith, cares about their work and mine, but doesn't have much visibility of what testing can be. Perhaps you'd like to join me?   --00-- "How can I possibly test 'all the stuff' every iteration?" Whoa! There's a lot to unpack there, so let me break it down a little: who is suggesting that "all the stuff"

I was talking with a colleague the other week and we got onto the topic of framing our work. This is one of my suggestions: I want to help whoever I'm working with build the best version of their thing, whatever 'best' means for them, given the constraints they have. That's it. Chef's kiss. I like it because it packs in, for example: exploration of ideas, software, process, business choices, and legal considerations conversations about budget, scope, resources, dreams, and priorities communicating findings, hypotheses, and suggestions helping to break down the work, organise the work, and facilitate the work making connections, pulling information from outside, and sharing information from inside It doesn't mean that I have no core expertise to bring, no scope for judgement, no agency, and no way to be creative or express myself, and it specifically does not mean that I'm going to pick up all the crap that no-one else wants to do.  Of course, I might pick up

Questions are a powerful testing tool and, like any tool, can be used in different ways in different scenarios with different motivations and different results. A significant part of my role is generating questions and I will generally have a lot of them. I will rarely ask them all, though, and I've put a lot of time and effort into learning to be comfortable with that. A couple of examples: I was in a meeting this week where the technical conversation was too deep for me to give a perspective from a position of knowledge. I could have disengaged, but I didn't. Instead, I asked occasional questions, not wanting to derail the discussion or disrupt the flow. Some were detail questions, to help grow my understanding. Some were scoping questions, to help understand motivations. The one that really landed, however, was about the focus of the meeting. Although I couldn't contribute at a low level, I understood enough to suspect that we were not discussing the key problem tha

The Association for Software Testing is crowd-sourcing a book,  Navigating the World as a Context-Driven Tester , which aims to provide  responses to common questions and statements about testing from a  context-driven perspective . It's being edited by  Lee Hawkins  who is  posing questions on  Twitter ,   LinkedIn , Mastodon , Slack , and the AST  mailing list  and then collating the replies, focusing on practice over theory. I've decided to  contribute  by answering briefly, and without a lot of editing or crafting, by imagining that I'm speaking to someone in software development who's acting in good faith, cares about their work and mine, but doesn't have much visibility of what testing can be. Perhaps you'd like to join me?   --00--  "Why don’t we replace the testers with AI?" We have a good relationship so I feel safe telling you that my instinctive reaction, as a member of the Tester's Union, is to ask why we don&