Hiccupps

Following through a chain of tweets recently I came across the profile of  TesPro , a company in India, with a web site at tespro.in  which consisted of only the company name and a couple of words, "under updation". Updation? My failure antennae were throbbing gleefully. But I've been caught out by my own certainty too many times, so I searched for the word on the web:   updation noun. (India, nonstandard) The act of updating something   updation noun. (informal) updating; the act or process of bringing up-to-date  The -(t)ion derivational suffix can't be applied to update . Derivations are almost all irregular, and restricted in the words they can appear on. And here's how my internal dialog continued: OK, so it's maybe a bit informal and used mostly in India, but as the web site is based in India let's just calm ourselves down. There's no issue here, right? But the web is a global tool and a couple of trusted references for English - ...

One of my colleagues sent round a link to a BBC news report from 2008  in the week. Chuckles aside, it's the kind of thing that time and distance from the issue - geographical and emotional - renders insignificant in the grand scheme of things. It's also the kind of thing that immediacy and proximity to the issue inflate into a big deal requiring things to be done to make sure this never happens again . Often that'll be some kind of instruction to immediately put more checking in place. Knee-jerk process is frequently fragile or deficient process and extra manual steps to secure an already manual process can easily have the opposite effect. It might be better to wait to see whether this is a one off or part of a pattern. It's likely to be productive to spend a little time thinking about the whole, and alternatives, rather than simply trying to fix up the end. Questioning a workflow, the need for the workflow, the implementation of the workflow and so on are task...

You say "defect", the customer hears "defective" and the developers anticipate blame. You say "failure", the customer hears "catastrophe" and the tech support staff anticipate overtime. You say "own goal" and the customer wonders what you're talking about and you anticipate an imminent conversation with your boss. As an industry we use many different names for bugs, including anomaly, call, crash, defect, DR, enhancement, error, events, exception, failure, fault, flaw, incident, issue, mistake, own goal, problem, side effect, suggestion, ticket, TR (collected from  1 ,  2 ,  3 ,  4 ). But surely it's as Shakespeare never said : What's in a name? That which we call errors By any other name would smell as sweat; Really? What exactly are we talking about here? I like the broad  Rapid Software Testing  take on what a bug is: A bug is anything about the product that threatens its value. The BBST Bug Advocacy course  h...

This is the 100th post on Hiccupps. I started the blog just under two years ago with the self-challenge of writing 50 posts in a year and a manifesto of sorts: to blog primarily about testing and related areas to explore and document my thinking to try to offer something different from other blogs to be truthful to write well to be myself ... ... but not come across as (too much of) a pretentious or pompous  pillock to protect the confidentiality of my company, customers and colleagues, where mentioned to have the freedom to write anything I want to, within the other constraints I was inspired most directly by Abakas  and QA Hates You which were both being updated frequently, spoke with a distinctive voice and were provocative in their own separate ways. Catherine Powell would frequently cover topics away from testing, with an eye to making a point relevant to it and always clearly from a practitioner's perspective. Brian Noggle's persona was - and is - mo...