Trait Laced

Musing on the recent call for articles on skills for The Testing Planet I got to thinking about the difference between skills and traits. The former is sometimes described as something learned and the latter as something innate. A quick web search throws up plenty of examples of this (e.g. 1 and 2) but that explanation is too glib for me, particularly the second of those articles which advises "If you’re having trouble separating skills and traits, think in terms of action verbs for skills, such as: training, implementing, leading, promoting, developing, presenting, organizing, planning".

Questioning?

I've ended up in software testing and (on the good days) I like to think that I've got skills appropriate to the role. With the benefit of ~~confirmation bias~~ hindsight I can think of things in my boyhood that suggest I've always been the kind of person my colleagues think I am.

Weinberg, amongst other things, challenges himself and us to find at least three alternative interpretations of whatever we are presented with. When I was younger I found that I'd often prefer less-common readings of the stuff I heard. A couple of trivial ones have stuck in my head.

"a friend in need is a friend indeed": OK, but why would someone who needs something from you be a good friend to have?
"I don't like cricket, oh no, I love it": as 10cc sing it without stress on "like" or "love" the young me couldn't parse this sensibly.

Long before I found that there was such a thing as linguistics, I used to find the way people spoke and the nuances and differences and oddities of that fascinating. I remember when I noticed that I'd use "us" where other people we saying "me" (it was on the crowded top deck of a bus and I said 'scuse us) although I didn't know about singular or plural nouns or dialects. When playing football in the street and the ball hit someone's hand, most of us would shout accidental! and the game would carry on. Occasionally, someone would shout accident with the stress on DENT as if they were going to say "accidental" but stopped at a prefix which was also a proper word and appropriate in the situation.

I am James Thomas and I am a punaholic. The Dev manager claims that the puns I like best are the ones that are especially contorted, maintaining a tenuous or perhaps multi-step - but real - link to the source. And I think he's right. Since I can remember I have been intrigued by this kind of wordplay and now I can almost feel my mind running through associations when I see a picture or hear a word.

Elements of these things can and do help with my work - and sometimes hinder it. I don't know if they are skills or traits, whether they are accidents of genetics that I've been blessed or cursed with or that I've nurtured by use, whether they're behaviours copied from my parents, forced on me by my environment, whether any kind of classification is possible, or valuable, whether that would depend on the context anyway or if it even matters at all.

I often hear people say things like "testers need to be pedantic" but my own view is that testers need to have a capability toolbox - regardless of how those abilities have been acquired - and they need to know the tools in it and they need to be able to take out the appropriate tool and use it appropriately. The experienced (or, probably more correctly, the wise) tester will agree with this but they'll also have learned, or perhaps they just intuitively know, that sometimes something else is needed. Traitors!
Image: http://flic.kr/p/Avc4R

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 ...

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...

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...

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...

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...

Great Shot, Kid

This week I've been playing with altwalker , a model-based testing tool. To get the hang of it, I attempted to build a very simple model of a workflow that is supported by the service my team owns. Hacking away at the example code, and looking frequently at the docs, I was able to get up and running in a few hours, creating: a basic model: nodes for system states, edges for operations simple assertions: mainly consistency checks on the states client: HTTP client to implement the operations against the service's API I configured this so that altwalker will perform a random walk of the model, starting state data is randomised, and the client will choose randomly whenever offered an option. Why so much randomness? Because it means that, over successive runs, more of the infinite space of possible workflow executions will be covered. Once I had that basically working I wrote a shell script that would run this loop a number of times: call altwalker ...

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...

Exploring It!

This week the test team at Linguamatics held our first internal conference. There was no topic, but three broad categories could be seen in the talks and workshops that were given: experience reports, tooling, and alternative perspectives on our work. (The latter included the life cycle of a bug, and psychology in testing.) My contribution was an experience report looking at how I explore both inside and outside of testing. I've tidied up some of my notes from the prep for it below. There are testing skills that I use elsewhere in my life. Or perhaps there are skills from my life that I bring to testing. Maybe I'm so far down life's road that it's hard to tell quite what started where? Maybe I'm naturally this way and becoming a tester with an interest in improvement amped things up? Maybe I've so tangled up my work, life, and hobby that deciding where one starts and another ends is problematic? The answers to those questions is, I think, almost certai...

PR Coup!

My team uses Dependabot to keep software dependencies up to date. The tool submits PRs against our repositories and we use a checklist/decision tree to help us judge how deeply to review and provide an audit trail of the decision. Patch-level updates of company-internal packages might be just waved in if the tests pass, for example, but a major update of an external library could require us to review or redo a risk analysis. For reasons , the Markdown source for the tree is not automatically added to the PR so we pick it up from another repo, copy it, and paste it into the PR we're looking at. This has got sufficiently irritating to me that I looked for another way. I know about bookmarklets and I've made them before, so I first tried to make one that would paste the text into a comment box on the PR. The checklist is long and I needed to escape various characters and retain line breaks and it was tricky to edit and debug in a simple URL field, so I aborted. I wondered if the...

Hiccupps

Search This Blog