Book Notes

I've had a good run of reading in the first three months this year and I thought I'd try to summarise it by picking out one or two thoughts on each book.

Becoming a Technical Leader, Gerald M. Weinberg

I'm not a vain or pretentious kind of chap, but I did enjoy discovering that leadership is all about moi. That is Motivation, Organisation and Ideas. A good technical leader will look to supply these things in the right measures at the right times for their teams; a great technical leader will look at themselves to see which of these is their weakest and find ways to work at improving it.

What Did You Say? The Art of Giving and Receiving Feedback, Charles N. Seashore, Edith W. Seashore, Gerald M. Weinberg

Before I started regular 1-1s with my test team last year, I cast around for ideas and found a series of Manager Tools podcasts which, despite being much longer than it needed to be, I liked a great deal. A few months in, I was looking for ways grow my own capacity in delivering feedback. One quote from What Did You Say? hits the spot:

Don’t concentrate on giving feedback; concentrate on being congruent–responding to the other person, to yourself, and to the here-and-now situation. Don’t go around hunting for opportunities to give feedback, because feedback is effective only when the need arises naturally out of congruent interactions.

And just last week I came across No Magic Words which aligns really well with the notion (and I hope practice) of 1-1 that I have arrived at.

Are Your Lights On? Donald C. Gause, Gerald M. Weinberg

Weinberg has a knack for pithy yet panoptic definitions. You're undoubtedly familiar with the widely-quoted definition of quality and in this book he provides another:

A problem is a difference between things as desired and thing as perceived.

Both desire and perception are up for grabs in any resolution of the problem.

You'll often see an iceberg metaphor being employed to illustrate limited visibility of some bounded-but-extent-unknown larger issue. Reading Weinberg for me is like taking that iceberg and picking off a snowflake from the top. It's easy to behold, even easy to hold, easy to comprehend at the high level but as you begin to think about it, deeper and denser than you imagined. In fact, as you look more closely you realise that that snowflake is itself an iceberg and, actually, it's icebergs all the way down.

The Gift of Time, Fiona Charles (ed.)

This collection of essays is a tribute to (and 75th birthday present for) Weinberg and is strongly influenced by his teachings. Michael Bolton's It's All Relative considers the way in which Weinberg frequently casts his analyses in terms of relationships - as in the problem definition above - and derives from it a generalisation which he calls the relative rule:

A description of something intangible as "X" really means "X, to some person at some time"

This gives us more variables to play with in any situation and so an approach to some problem might be to look at it from different time perspective or the viewpoint of a different person. He references a 1980s lecture by Jonathan Miller in which the ability of humour to alter perceptions of a scenario was proposed. A joke's punchline often hinges on revealing that what you thought you knew, or expected, was wrong.

Which lead me to ...

Laughing Matters, John Durant and Jonathan Miller (eds.)

Another collection of essays, the first of which is by Miller himself and covers the kind of ground that Bolton mentions. The copy I ordered arrived with perfect timing as I was preparing my proposal for EuroSTAR 2015, entitled Your Testing is a Joke, and dealing with the analogy I see between joking and testing. Try this short extract:

In all procedures of life there are rules of thumb which enable us to go on to 'automatic pilot' ... We depend on the existence of these categories in order to go about our everyday business. Jokes allow us to stand back from these rules and inspect them.

Yes. Yes. Yes. And testing too.

Agile Product Management with Scrum, Roman Pichler

The test team at Linguamatics services three different development teams working in different ways. Most recently, our Solutions team has started using Scrum and the SolDev Manager lent me this book. It didn't tell me much I hadn't already picked up from other reading, but it is clear, concise and readable for non-developers.

The Signal and The Noise, Nate Silver

One the Dev Manager lent me. In very roughly the same kind of area as Nicholas Taleb and dense, like Weinberg, although without the latter's easy style, this book was occasionally hard-going (for me) but worth persevering with. Each chapter is effectively self-contained so you can easily skip to the next chunk.

Silver tells a great story about Gary Kasparov and the chess computer Deep Blue in a series of high-profile matches in the late 1980s. In one game, the computer made an unexpected move which Kasparov noted and took time to analyse afterwards.

The only explanation he could come up with was that the move was motivated by a strategy that suggested Deep Blue was capable of looking ahead more than 20 moves. This was unheard of and placed the computer at a significant advantage if true. Unfortunately for Kasparov, he subsequently acted as if it were true - attributing ability and chess wisdom to the software which adversely affected how he played against it - while in fact it was simply a bug.

Lauren Ipsum, Carlos Bueno

I was turned onto this one by a Testhead blog post. It's an Alice-like story about a girl who finds herself in a strange land populated by strange characters with strange ideas. The ideas come from computer science, although they are not presented that way in the story, and the characters include Hugh Rustic (oh yes, and there's plenty of other puns) who says, of the problem of buying tomatoes from the market:

... to find the best tomato, you'd have to compare them all, right? ... don't waste your time looking for the best tomato when there are plenty that are Good Enough.

I read it to my seven year-old daughter who loved it. We had some conceptually deep but still fun and fantastical discussions on the back of it and played with some Logo apps - the book features "poems" which are really Logo-style programs. I've now lent it to my mate to read to his son.

More Secrets of Consulting, Gerald M. Weinberg

Although I talked about Weinberg's writing in terms of icebergs earlier, this book is more like a tornado. It's a whirlwind of rules, parables, anecdotes and insight tied together by the concept of a Wisdom Box, or a toolkit for consultants. Here's one rule:

When a triangle separates you from your data, choose the hypotenuse.

For example, if X says that Y thinks something, and you care what Y thinks, confirm Y's position with Y before proceeding.

Agile Testing, Lisa Crispin, Janet Gregory

Which I've borrowed from one of my team on her recommendation but only just started.
Image: https://flic.kr/p/99NLP and the sites I've linked to for each book.

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...

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...

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...

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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