Skip to main content

Pizza Chants


So my wife caught me giggling to myself in the kitchen. Why? I'd just seen a really corny pun on peace and peas. It wasn't the "classic" above but it was the same kind of thing. In fact, it wasn't the joke itself that had caused me to crack my face at all, but the thoughts spurred from the desire to make a better one from the same phonetic premise.

The first thing I come up with is:
Give Pisa chance
This slight variation on the well-known punchline is a plausible sentence but to make it work as a joke I need a context that can produce it. I'm working backwards from a result to look for some setup in which it is coherent:
Did you know that casinos are illegal in some parts of Italy? Apparently a bunch of gamblers held a candlelit protest overnight. 
They were singing "All we are saying is give Pisa chance."
This is also a testing pattern. When you're looking at responses from a system, a useful approach to finding potential issues can be:
  • I've got X. 
  • By changing X a little I can get Y. 
  • Y is plausible. 
  • Y would be bad. 
  • What context could give me Y?
The comedian Milton Jones has a beautiful gag which is a series of one-liners with the punch line "Your house stinks" spread out in his set:
 Anyone here own a cat?
 Any students in tonight?
So, you know what the punch line is going to be, what context might give a laugh here?  He goes for:
Is anyone in the audience an aromatherapist?
Which is not only funny, but also a (comedy) rule of three.

Meanwhile, back in the kitchen, I am busy applying another pattern - I think of it loosely as the Spooner - where you can look for the funny by permuting some aspect(s) of multiple elements. For example switching the initial sounds of peace and chance:
Give cheeser pants
Give cheetahs pants
Give cheaters pants
Give cheetah's pants
Small beer, perhaps. No obviously gut-busting laughs here, I'll grant you. But you could imagine contexts in which you could set these some of these up as jokes, although I will say that if you search for "cheetahs pants" as I did, looking for clues to such a context, you get a lot of photos of leopard skin leggings. Which - fashion naif that I am - violated both my expectations and my eyes.

But that's testing too: generate ideas and choosing to use them or not (at the moment). Sometimes rote generation  by some formula like this is productive and sometimes not so much. As it happens, I decide to try to stretch this line further (like some of those leggings) and end up with:
Give peaches pants
Which I found an amusing idea (this was the point my wife came to ask what had happened to her coffee) although probably a step too far in terms of plausibility... but I later found this picture:


To relate this back to testing with a specific example: imagine you have some functionality that accepts a couple of arguments. You might ask yourself questions like these:
  • what happens if the arguments are given in the wrong position?
  • does the structure, naming, usage etc of this functionality make it likely that users will mix up the arguments?
  • how would someone spot that they had made this kind of mistake?
I find an interesting overlap in techniques and skills I use for joking and testing and I use one to keep in trim for the other. I'll be talking about it at the Cambridge Tester Meetup and the UKTMF next month and then EuroSTAR in November.
Labels:

Comments

  1. Conrad BraamJune 29, 2015 at 5:07 PM

    The last possibility: "how would someone spot that they had made this kind of mistake?" is academic and would not add quality in my opinion. But I am brute force kind of guy and hence I would use that in two ways, to randomize the input data ordering, or to systematically validate failure for all combinations except for the valid combinations. Interestingly enough swapping arguments around unpredictably is bound to open up cases where the parameter values may randomly have the same semantic value and hence once again automation may draw false positives out. Lets use an example in a language-agnostic or type-insensitive way:
    test1 = "hello", "conrad", 1 , FALSE
    test2 = "conrad", "hello", FALSE, 1
    Would both pass the case for the function prototype:
    Greeting ([string]anouncement , [string]recipient, [integer]repeatTimes, [bool]broadcastTweet)
    But would produce a passing result even though the parameters are randomly ill placed. I'm no fan of fuzzing, but I'm warming to it as a away of understanding ways of breaking APIs in a useful fashion by first feeding them data that "kinda" fits a mould. A bit like the rhyme:
    Give peas a chance = verb+noun+verb and/or optional conjunction ?

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Can Code, Can't Code, Is Useful

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-- "If testers can’t code, they’re of no use to us" My first reaction is to wonder what you expect from your testers. I am immediately interested in your working context and the way
Post a Comment
Read more

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 answer would be almost meaningless and certa
Post a Comment
Read more

Not Strictly for the Birds

  One of my chores takes me outside early in the morning and, if I time it right, I get to hear a charming chorus of birdsong from the trees in the gardens down our road, a relaxing layered soundscape of tuneful calls, chatter, and chirrupping. Interestingly, although I can tell from the number and variety of trills that there must be a large number of birds around, they are tricky to spot. I have found that by staring loosely at something, such as the silhouette of a tree's crown against the slowly brightening sky, I see more birds out of the corner of my eye than if I scan to look for them. The reason seems to be that my peripheral vision picks up movement against the wider background that direct inspection can miss. An optometrist I am not, but I do find myself staring at data a great deal, seeking relationships, patterns, or gaps. I idly wondered whether, if I filled my visual field with data, I might be able to exploit my peripheral vision in that quest. I have a wide monito
1 comment
Read more

Postman Curlections

My team has been building a new service over the last few months. Until recently all the data it needs has been ingested at startup and our focus has been on the logic that processes the data, architecture, and infrastructure. This week we introduced a couple of new endpoints that enable the creation (through an HTTP POST) and update (PUT) of the fundamental data type (we call it a definition ) that the service operates on. I picked up the task of smoke testing the first implementations. I started out by asking the system under test to show me what it can do by using Postman to submit requests and inspecting the results. It was the kinds of things you'd imagine, including: submit some definitions (of various structure, size, intent, name, identifiers, etc) resubmit the same definitions (identical, sharing keys, with variations, etc) retrieve the submitted definitions (using whatever endpoints exist to show some view of them) compare definitions I submitted fro
Post a Comment
Read more

Testers are Gate-Crashers

  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-- "Testers are the gatekeepers of quality" Instinctively I don't like the sound of that, but I wonder what you mean by it. Perhaps one or more of these? Testers set the quality sta
3 comments
Read more

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
Post a Comment
Read more

Build Quality

  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-- "When the build is green, the product is of sufficient quality to release" An interesting take, and one I wouldn't agree with in general. That surprises you? Well, ho
1 comment
Read more

Make, Fix, and Test

A few weeks ago, in A Good Tester is All Over the Place , Joep Schuurkes described a model of testing work based on three axes: do testing yourself or support testing by others be embedded in a team or be part of a separate team do your job or improve the system It resonated with me and the other testers I shared it with at work, and it resurfaced in my mind while I was reflecting on some of the tasks I've picked up recently and what they have involved, at least in the way I've chosen to address them. Here's three examples: Documentation Generation We have an internal tool that generates documentation in Confluence by extracting and combining images and text from a handful of sources. Although useful, it ran very slowly or not at all so one of the developers performed major surgery on it. Up to that point, I had never taken much interest in the tool and I could have safely ignored this piece of work too because it would have been tested by
Post a Comment
Read more

The Best Laid Test Plans

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-- "What's the best format for a test plan?" I'll side-step the conversation about what a test plan is and just say that the format you should use is one that works for you, your coll
Post a Comment
Read more

Test Now

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-- "When is the best time to test?" Twenty posts in , I hope you're not expecting an answer without nuance? You are? Well, I'll do my best. For me, the best time to test is when there
Post a Comment
Read more