Skip to main content

MEWT 5


I've said before on here that I enjoy ideas just for their own sake. The CEWT meetings that I run are all about that: exposure to new ideas, novel angles on existing ideas, a view of the evolution, merging, death and resurrection of ideas, and challenges to, or support of, my own ideas and perhaps even my ways of generating or thinking about ideas.

So I was delighted to be invited to attend someone else's workshop, MEWT 5, on the topic What is Professional Testing? Apart from anything else, I had a blast simply coming up with what I thought was an interesting angle. The talks and discussion were wide-ranging but I'll just pick out bits from my notes on three of the threads that ran across the day that I found particularly interesting.

Relativism

Whether someone is acting professionally is entirely subjective. Variables in play include the person doing (the tester in this MEWT's context), the person that's having something done for them (a client; potentially the same person as the tester), the project, the project context. Change any of these and there's a chance that what is considered professional might change. Two different observers might see the same situation differently with respect to the professionalism of the participants. Dan Caseley saw something of this in the responses he got from colleagues when he asked them to characterise testers they'd worked with.

We talked about Jeremy Clarkson, the ex-presenter of Top Gear. He is well-known for controversial comments and actions which, for a long time, the BBC were prepared to put up with, and pay up for. Possibly - presumably - this was because he continued to return enough value to them to justify the risk and expense.

Eventually he did something sufficiently serious that his contract was not renewed. Question: was he acting professionally when he was deliberately controversial? Or was he just unprofessional?

Was it part of his remit, part of his employer's desires, that he was edgy (or plain old-fashioned offensive) in order, for example, to drive ratings and hence revenue? Did the BBC think he was professional? A professional? Acting professionally? Did the audience? Which parts of the audience? Was any given audience member consistent in their view of his professionalism over time?

Adam Knight brought another perspective: are we in the testing community, particularly the vocal and active context-driven community, creating and reinforcing a notion of what it means to be a professional tester? If so, can it be viewed as a reaction against perceived unprofessional "Factory Schoolers"? But wouldn't they in turn, and legitimately from their perspective, consider themselves professional testers and others less so? The debate that followed touched on subjective positions that motivate principles that in turn risk sliding into dogma.

A shared perspective isn't necessarily an invalid perspective, nor harmful, nor one without utility. But a uniform perspective can lead to uniform actions and, as Iain McCowatt put it, often the fringes are where the excellence is.

Commitment

Mohinder Khosla quoted Steve Pressfield on professionalism:
Amateurs let adversity defeat them. The pro thinks differently. He shows up, he does his work, he keeps on truckin’, no matter what.
Elsewhere the conversation included whether it was characteristic of a professional that they will knuckle down and get on with it, see a project to its conclusion, find ways to thrive in adversity, do whatever it takes to get it over the line.

But only up to a point? It was generally agreed that the professional will also recognise when a situation has become untenable, when they are unable to operate with integrity, when the only course of action that retains integrity is to bow out.

Related conversation spinning out of Abby Bangser's talk covered the idea that a professional would be able to ramp up on any topic and not be boxed in by some idea of what they should be. This in turn slid into contrasting testers who define themselves by some area - technical, performance, automation - with developers who will often define themselves by the language they favour - Java, Ruby, C++.

Ethics

For me, this was the most interesting theme of the day.  Mohinder referenced a blog by Uncle Bob Martin which plays out two variants of a doctor-patient scenario. In the first the doctor appears to be offhand and uncaring when the patient describes pain in their arm and in the second the doctor refuses to amputate a limb at the patient's request on the basis that it would violate a medical oath.

We revisited this and other medical scenarios, trying to make parallels between professional testing and other professions. It was suggested that the professional position was clear-cut in the arm example: the second doctor is the professional.

I'm less certain about this. I do think that one way we might define a professional (if we wanted to) is in terms of the ethical standards they hold themselves to. But I don't think that having standards or principles unequivocally forces the choice of any particular course of action.

The second doctor might be doing quite the wrong thing here if, for example, their patient has some condition - body dysmorphia, say - that might mean they would harm themselves or even commit suicide were the doctor not to remove the limb. A single abstract ethical principle can govern both courses of action - to operate or not - under appropriate circumstances.

Likewise, two different doctors, operating under the same code of ethics, could legitimately make different decisions in the same circumstances.

Some speakers - Doug Buck and Danny Dainton particularly - described personal ethics that govern their view of what it means to be a professional. These included
  • striving to do good work
  • taking responsibility
  • doing what you say you will
  • sharing knowledge
It was fascinating to see these enumerated. I am a practitioner and proponent of introspection and it takes no little strength of mind to decant motivations from the actions they provoked and the stories you tell yourself about them. The effort required to do that is seldom wasted, in my experience.

Much like the effort to organise and run a workshop like this. And I'd like to thank Bill, Simon, Vernon for doing it and and the Association for Software Testing for helping to fund it.
Image: discogs.com

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

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...

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 ...

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...

Beginning Sketchnoting

In September 2017 I attended  Ian Johnson 's visual note-taking workshop at  DDD East Anglia . For the rest of the day I made sketchnotes, including during Karo Stoltzenburg 's talk on exploratory testing for developers  (sketch below), and since then I've been doing it on a regular basis. Karo recently asked whether I'd do a Team Eating (the Linguamatics brown bag lunch thing) on sketchnoting. I did, and this post captures some of what I said. Beginning sketchnoting, then. There's two sides to that: I still regard myself as a beginner at it, and today I'll give you some encouragement and some tips based on my experience, to begin sketchnoting for yourselves. I spend an enormous amount of time in situations where I find it helpful to take notes: testing, talking to colleagues about a problem, reading, 1-1 meetings, project meetings, workshops, conferences, and, and, and, and I could go on. I've long been interested in the approaches I've evol...

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...

ChatGPTesters

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--  "Why don’t we replace the testers with AI?" We have a good relationship so I feel safe telling you that my instinctive reaction, as a member of the T...

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...

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 gener...

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...

Express, Listen, and Field

Last weekend I participated in the LLandegfan Exploratory Workshop on Testing (LLEWT) 2024, a peer conference in a small parish hall on Anglesey, north Wales. The topic was communication and I shared my sketchnotes and a mind map from the day a few days ago. This post summarises my experience report.  Express, Listen, and Field Just about the most hands-on, practical, and valuable training I have ever done was on assertiveness with a local Cambridge coach, Laura Dain . In it she introduced Express, Listen, and Field (ELF), distilled from her experience across many years in the women’s movement, business, and academia.  ELF: say your key message clearly and calmly, actively listen to the response, and then focus only on what is relevant to your needs. I blogged a little about it back in 2017 and I've been using it ever since. Assertiveness In a previous role, I was the manager of a test team and organised training for the whole ...