A couple of weeks ago I was wondering what testing patina might look like . What do I mean by patina in this context? I think I'm looking for artefacts and side-effects of work, visible on tools and places of work, that demonstrate something about the length of time, depth, and breadth of work, and ways of working. I'm seeking things that other practitioners could recognise and appreciate as evidence of that work. But, and this is important, the patina is not the work itself. So here's the list of things I've come up with so far: Patina might be visible in an IDE I've been using for a long time through a litter of plug-ins, some for defunct tooling, or obsolete languages, with multiple plug-ins for the same file format, and so on. Patina might be visible at work from my Confluence home page where I collect links to the internal talks and demos I've done. (Top-right in the image at the top, and deliberately obfuscated I'm afraid.) Patina might be visible in
I paired with my friend Vernon last week. He mentioned it in a blog post afterwards: Watching my colleagues Lisi and James work is like watching wizards cast spells. He's very kind, and I do like a pointy hat, but there was no sorcery involved, simply intentful exploratory testing. What do I mean by that? In this case, I mean that we started with a question and looked for ways that we could find information to help us to answer it. This particular question was very open because we didn't have a very specific oracle: can we find examples where the output of the system under test might be problematic? What did we do? CODS : Control, Observe, Decompose, Simplify. We could use the debugger to trace execution to a few pivotal functions and see what the application was doing (control, observe) but that was tiresome after a while. So we hacked the source code a little (conceptually simplify) so that variables were available to be d