Going with the Flow

You can waste a lot of time on formatting. In The Power of Fancy Plain Text I said that I prefer plain text when possible and for a while I've been using Ascii Flow, a web-based tool, for making quick and dirty flowcharts and simple block diagrams that I can store in text documents too.

Here's a bit of a chart I made recently to plot out some test scenarios for a timing-related issue I was investigating and wanted to share on our wiki. The blocks represent actions occurring over time and their relationship to a some significant times and events.

      t1                            t2
       +                             +
   +---|-----------------------------|------>  time
       |                             |
       |   +----+      +----+        |   +----+
E1     |   | A  |      | B  |        |   | C  |
       |   +----+      +----+        |   +----+
       |                             |
    +-----------------------------------------+
E9  |        V                                |
    +-----------------------------------------+
       |                             |
       | +----+                      | +----+  +  +----+      +----+
       | | W  |                      | | X  |  |  | Y  |      | Z  |
       | +----+                      | +----+  |  +----+      +----+
       |                             |         |
                                          external event

It took a couple of minutes to put together and now anybody can edit it easily without needing to fire up some other application and then save out an image that in turn has to be uploaded and can't be changed easily by the next person.
Image: http://flic.kr/p/8UkSQ3

Comments

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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-- "If testers can’t code, they’re of no use to us" My first reaction is to wonder what you expect from your testers. I am immediately interested in your working context and the way

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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-- "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&

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