Frustrated at Work?

I'm recruiting at the moment.

The beer mat was something I came up with a few years ago when Linguamatics was growing quickly and we were looking for ways to promote ourselves locally. Where might we find the hip young gunslingers of the software business, I wondered? In the pub, I thought.

It didn't get used in the end. I seem to remember we advertised on the packaging and serviettes of a food van near the Science Park instead. Even developers gotta eat, right?

I'm recruiting at the moment.

It's always a time of mixed feelings. I'm excited about the opportunity for growing and extending our team, of bringing in someone with new skills, new passions, new approaches and experiences. Someone who's going to refine and grow what we do, teach us, challenge what we do, challenge what I do, and who's going to be excited and challenged in turn by us, by our product and by the wide range of application of our testing services across the company. And I'm excited by the thought that I'll choose someone who can do those things and respond to that challenge, like my current team have and do.

But against that there's the mundane reality of wading through the CVs, doing the interviews, inspecting the exercises and weighing up the pros and cons of the candidates (who are usually apples and pears). Almost inevitably that's followed by an agonising choice that will have potentially large and irrevocable effects on the candidates and perhaps also me, the team, the company and the product. And then the wait to see if the chosen candidate will accept.

I'm recruiting at the moment.

It's traditional in test manager posts of this kind to talk about certification. I'll be completely frank - I don't care whether you've got the ISTQB certificates or not. It makes no difference to me either way.

One of the things that does make a difference to me is that you've taken the time and care and effort to make your CV explain why you're a good tester, what value you've given, what insight you've provided, what skills you have. And by skills I don't mean software you've used. And by used I don't mean seen. And by seen I don't mean heard of. And by heard of I don't mean searched Wikipedia for and then copy-pasted while injecting typos.

One of the things that does make a difference to me is that you're prepared to engage with me in interview. That you will listen to what I'm asking and respond in a way that shows you're thinking. That shows me you think, generally. That convinces me you have the kind of attitude and approach to do a job in the face of incomplete knowledge - because that's a position I will put you in if you interview with us - and the job will be a good one, one that you can justify based on reasonable criteria in the context you are given.

I'm recruiting at the moment.

I like to think we're a good company to work for, that the people here are good, that we provide a good working environment, that we're serious about what we do, but that we've got a sense of humour about things too.

And on that point, if you've suffered this stream of consciousness to the bitter end, perhaps it's because you've been wondering what I would've put on the other side of the beer mat. For you, then:

I'm recruiting at the moment.

Come and work with us.

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?

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The Best Programmer Dan Knows

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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...

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...

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 ...

Bottom-up or Top-down?

The theme at LLEWT this year was Rules and constraints to ensure better quality. My experience report concerned a team I'd been on for several years which developed (bottom-up) a set of working practices that we called team agreements. The agreements survived "natural" variation such as people leaving and joining and even some structural reorganisation which preserved most of the team members but changed the team's responsibilities or merged in a few people from a disbanded team. The agreements did not, however, persist through a significant round of (top-down) redundancies where the team was merged with two others. I'm interested in thinking about the ways in which constraints on how people work affect the work and whether there are patterns that could help us to apply the right kinds of constraints at times they are likely to be useful. I'm going to use this post to dump my thoughts. My starting po...

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...

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