Wrong is not not Right

I saw a blue being from another dimension clawing its way through the ceiling the other day.

If only.

The building I work in is being redecorated and on the way to the canteen I noticed that the painters had covered a smoke detector with a rubber glove. You don't need to be a health and safety officer to realise that this is not standard policy and potentially risky.

But, paint fumes can set off smoke detectors and there were plenty of people around and there are many other smoke detectors in the building and the lack of other detectors covered with gloves suggested that decorators would be likely to remove it when they'd moved further down the building so I decided to do nothing about it. A clear spec violation, but mitigated by other factors. A reasonable short-term solution to an acute issue, but on the way home I still walked that way and checked that it had gone.

You'll sometimes hear testers described as pedantic and it's true that the detail and process-orientated aspects of our work are apt to be misinterpreted as (or can actually slide into) the rigid adherence to requirements.

It's not worth getting worked up about the term itself because, for example, to people who operate at helicopter altitudes on projects, the details are often just that, the details, the potential stains on the big picture and not their main focus or responsibility. And let's not kid ourselves. It works both ways and I'm sure you've got a few favoured adjectives for the teams you work with on a regular basis.

It is worth thinking about whether the description has some validity, and trying to demonstrate that it's not a fair blanket description of testers all the time. Look at yourself and wonder whether (a) now is the right forum and time for raising questions of detail; (b) whether any particular wrong you're concerned about really is not right given all the context or (c) whether despite being wrong it's also perhaps not not right for now and (d) whether you should monitor it and/or record the need to change it later, when it's more likely to be invalid and risky to have a spot fix buried in the codebase.

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Can Code, Can't Code, Is Useful

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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-- "Testers are the gatekeepers of quality" Instinctively I don't like the sound of that, but I wonder what you mean by it. Perhaps one or more of these? Testers set the quality sta

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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-- "Stop answering my questions with questions." Sure, I can do that. In return, please stop asking me questions so open to interpretation that any answer would be almost meaningless and certa

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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-- "When is the best time to test?" Twenty posts in , I hope you're not expecting an answer without nuance? You are? Well, I'll do my best. For me, the best time to test is when there

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A Qualified Answer

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 , 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-- "Whenever possible, you should hire testers with testing certifications" Interesting. Which would you value more? (a) a candidate who was sent on loads of courses approved by some organisation you don't know and ru

README

This week at work my team attended a Myers Briggs Type Indicator workshop. Beforehand we each completed a questionnaire which assigned us a personality type based on our position on five behavioural preference axes. For what it's worth, this time I was labelled INFJ-A and roughly at the mid-point on every axis. I am sceptical about the value of such labels . In my less charitable moments, I imagine that the MBTI exercise gives us each a box and, later when work shows up, we try to force the work into the box regardless of any compatiblity in size and shape. On the other hand, I am not sceptical about the value of having conversations with those I work with about how we each like to work or, if you prefer it, what shape our boxes are, how much they flex, and how eager we are to chop problems up so that they fit into our boxes. Wondering how to stretch the workshop's conversational value into something ongoing I decided to write a README for me and

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