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?

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...

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...

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...

Open Your Mind

Jerome Groopman, in How Doctors Think , reviews ways in which doctors can make poor choices, identifies potential causes, and suggests some practices, for both doctor and patient, that can help to prevent them. I find this interesting for a couple of reasons: first, I work in the health space, although not in a therapeutic area and, second, I like to reflect on my own thought processes. I'll take three broad themes from Groopman's analysis: the business of healthcare and how that impacts a physician's ability to practice; the doctor-patient relationship and how that impacts the experience of both sides; and the cognitive failings that impact a correct and timely diagnosis for any given patient. Naturally, these overlap. The book is written from the perspective of the notoriously commercialised American medical system and is around 20 years old, so doubtless some of the details are different outside of the US and have changed since pu...

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...

Better Isolate Than Never

How do you test a product with distributed logic and non-deterministic components? Well, it depends on the product and when the question is asked. This post is one answer, for now. A service I work on exposes an API for internal and external clients and calls multiple other services. It orchestrates a reasonably complex journey for a user, with their inputs and the responses of the services determining each step. Our customers can configure the service to provide a variant of the standard journey for their users. This gives them choices on the available steps, the order of the steps, and, importantly, some of the logic for taking particular steps. This configuration lives in a different repository to the service, not owned by us, and it can be changed and deployed independently from the service. As you can imagine, we test our service in multiple ways at different granularities using the usual tooling, including unit tests fo...

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