QA it Again Sam

The other day, a developer of my acquaintance said "well, a click is just a click." To be fair, in that discussion in that context in the limited way in which he meant it in the environment under consideration for the purpose we had in mind on that particular occasion he was probably sufficiently close to something not too objectionable that I didn't bother to raise a red flag.

Didn't bother and (a) by the time I'd thought all that the conversation had moved on and, more importantly, (b) I've been around long enough and burned myself enough times that I've finally realised that nobody likes a smart-arse. Me included. Especially when I realise it's me. (Have the same problem? Let it all out in a blog!)

But the notion stuck with me: is a mouse click ever really just a click?

If we consider a mouse click to be an atomic action then a single click exists as an entity in its own right and distinct from other clicks. Distinct, yes, but it could still be the first, second, third, ... in a sequence and usually the number of clicks is significant. But a click isn't an atomic operation. A click has component parts - the down and the up - and even they might not be truly binary at the electrical circuit level. Just when does a click start and end? Actually, that's easy: at the cl and the ick.

Anyway, how long between clicks is it reasonable to call the clicks part of the same sequence? Two identical clicks separated by ten seconds might cause the same effect twice, but separated by a tenth of a second cause a single, other, effect.

Perhaps some notion of a standard click works inside an application? Many devices permit gestures that mimic clicks, or are equivalent to clicks: keyboard shortcuts and accelerators, tapping on touchpads, graphics pens, styluses, touch screens and so on. But the physical properties of these devices make their "clicks" practically different from a mouse click in invocation and they depend on some interface to map them onto an internal notion of a click. So the application can interpret a click as a click after normalisation? But who ensures that all the normalisation is consistent. Is a click output from interface A the same as a click from interface B?

Even on the device click gestures aren't universal: touchpads often have areas which function as scroll-wheels, for example. And let's not get into the click and a half or even begin to think about the variability that might be present in the component parts of a physical device.

Many laptops have multiple mouse analogues - touchpads and pointing sticks - and you can plug in additional devices too. Are clicks equal from all of these? Could you make a double-click using two different devices? How is conflict or competition between the devices resolved? Can clicks be physically made and not registered? Does every click count?

But assume we have a standard click and consistent click at some interface layer. We still have multiple buttons. Is a click on button 1 the same as a click on button 2? On button 3? On a mouse wheel? What about when the user has configured a mouse to have non-standard button actions in the OS level, outside of the application? Is that click still a click?

We haven't even begun to think about where the clicks are directed. What OS they're on, what application they're on, what component they're on, what widget inside the component, if any, which pixel on the component. All of these could be significant.

Users rule us. It's important to think about why the click was made. The intent of the user is relevant in considering whether clicks are equivalent. (But to who or what?) What guided the user to click where they clicked anyway? They might have the same intent on two completely different clicks but have been advised badly by poor UI or doc.

Did we think about clicks with duration? Is a press and hold the same as a click? If not, how long is a hold? Is it the same on all devices? For all applications? Who decides? What about clicks on the move? If the mouse is moving, when the button is depressed, is that still a click? If the movement starts first, or only after the button is already down, or along with the release, is that still a click? Is it the same as a static click? Is there a notion of force of a click? Can you click harder and softer?

I'm sick of clicks now, but they've reminded me that as time goes by I find myself learning and relearning an important lesson: nothing is ever just a something.
Image: Danilo Rizzuti/FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Meet Me Halfway?

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 answ...

How do I Test AI?

Recently a few people have asked me how I test AI. I'm happy to share my experiences, but I frame the question more broadly, perhaps something like this: what kinds of things do I consider when testing systems with artificial intelligence components . I freestyled liberally the first time I answered but when the question came up again I thought I'd write a few bullets to help me remember key things. This post is the latest iteration of that list. Caveats: I'm not an expert; what you see below is a reminder of things to pick up on during conversations so it's quite minimal; it's also messy; it's absolutely not a guide or a set of best practices; each point should be applied in context; the categories are very rough; it's certainly not complete. Also note that I work with teams who really know what they're doing on the domain, tech, and medical safety fronts and some of the things listed here are things they'd typically do some or all of. Testing ...

Notes on Testing Notes

Ben Dowen pinged me and others on Twitter last week , asking for "a nice concise resource to link to for a blog post - about taking good Testing notes." I didn't have one so I thought I'd write a few words on how I'm doing it at the moment for my work at Ada Health, alongside Ben. You may have read previously that I use a script to upload Markdown-based text files to Confluence . Here's the template that I start from: # Date + Title # Mission # Summary WIP! # Notes Then I fill out what I plan to do. The Mission can be as high or low level as I want it to be. Sometimes, if deeper context might be valuable I'll add a Background subsection to it. I don't fill in the Summary section until the end. It's a high-level overview of what I did, what I found, risks identified, value provided, and so on. Between the Mission and Summary I hope that a reader can see what I initially intended and what actually...

The Best Programmer Dan Knows

I was pairing with my friend Vernon at work last week, on a tool I've been developing. He was smiling broadly as I talked him through what I'd done because we've been here before. The tool facilitates a task that's time-consuming, inefficient, error-prone, tiresome, and important to get right. Vern knows that those kinds of factors trigger me to change or build something, and that's why he was struggling not to laugh out loud. He held himself together and asked a bunch of sensible questions about the need, the desired outcome, and the approach I'd taken. Then he mentioned a talk by Daniel Terhorst-North, called The Best Programmer I Know, and said that much of it paralleled what he sees me doing. It was my turn to laugh then, because I am not a good programmer, and I thought he knew that already. What I do accept, though, is that I am focussed on the value that programs can give, and getting some of that value as early as possible. He sent me a link to the ta...

On Herding Cats

Last night I was at the Cambridge Tester meetup for a workshop on leadership. It was a two-parter with Drew Pontikis facilitating conversation about workplace scenarios followed by an AMA with a group of experienced managers. I can't come to work this week, my cat died. Drew opened by asking us what our first thoughts would be as managers on seeing that sentence. Naturally, sadness and sympathy, followed by a week ? for a cat ? and I only got a day for my gran! Then practicalities such as maybe there's company policy that covers that , and then the acknowledgement that it's contextual: perhaps this was a long-time emotional support animal . Having established that management decisions are a mixture of emotion, logic, and contingency Drew noted that most of us don't get training in management or leadership then split us into small groups and confronted us with three situations to talk through: Setting personal development goals for others. Dropping a clange...

Reasonable Doubt

In Your job is to deliver code you have proven to work Simon Willison writes: As software engineers we ... need to deliver code that works — and we need to include proof that it works as well. He is coming at this from the perspective of LLM-assisted coding, but most of what he says applies in general. I think this is a reasonable consise summary of his requirements for developers: Manual happy paths: get the system into an initial state, exercise the code, check that it has the desired effect on the state. Manual edge cases: no advice given, just a note that skill here is a sign of a senior engineer. Automated tests: should demonstrate the change like Manual happy paths but also fail if the change is reverted. He notes that, even though LLM tooling can write automated tests, it's humans who are accountable for the code and it's on us to "include evidence that it works as it should." Coincidentally, just the week before I read his post I told one of my...

Vanilla Flavour Testing

I have been pairing with a new developer colleague recently. In our last session he asked me "is this normal testing?" saying that he'd never seen anything like it anywhere else that he'd worked. We finished the task we were on and then chatted about his question for a few minutes. This is a short summary of what I said. I would describe myself as context-driven . I don't take the same approach to testing every time, except in a meta way. I try to understand the important questions, who they are important to, and what the constraints on the work are. With that knowledge I look for productive, pragmatic, ways to explore whatever we're looking at to uncover valuable information or find a way to move on. I write test notes as I work in a format that I have found to be useful to me, colleagues, and stakeholders. For me, the notes should clearly state the mission and give a tl;dr summary of the findings and I like them to be public while I'm working not just w...

Why Test, Test What, Then How?

There was a time when testing was all about the mnemonics . Well, we had no AI back then so thinking about our human craft and how to share what we had learned using our human intelligence with other engaged humans for later recall in their human heads seemed important. But this post isn't about dumping on AI. It isn't about mnemonics either even if WTTWTH does look like something that'd fit well into that ancient world. No, this post is just a snappier version of what I said to my team this week when I was walking through some testing I'd done the day before. It was concerned with a change to a particular turn in the dialog system we're building where multiple variables are in play, some populated by an external call to an LLM service. I wanted to make the point that the bulk of the testing work was done in the research I did and the spreadsheet I made, not in the interaction with our product. That spreadsheet was the result of me looking in our service's cod...

Exploratory Testing Reimagined

Maaret Pyhäjärvi gave a talk, Exploratory Testing Reimagined , last week. There's a blog post to go with it, so I won't say much on top of what's in my sketchnotes above, just pull out a few reflections. I don't have the data or wide range of experience reports that Maaret does, but my own anecdotal results from using AI tools for testing align closely with what she says in the talk. I have created skills to assist me, and my colleagues, in our testing work. For example, I used the contents of this blog and five years of test notes in my current role to distil a conversational workflow, facilitated by Claude, which runs through risk identification, test idea generation, and test mission creation. All four skills (the facilitation is its own skill) are backed by a fifth, on general testing theory and practice, and a sixth about how I like to interact with the AI: which notably includes that I want it to be concise, evidence-backed, well-structured, and critical. I st...

LLEWT 2024

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...

Hiccupps

Search This Blog