A Glass Half Fool

While there's much to dislike about Twitter, one of the things I do enjoy is the cheap and frequent opportunities it provides for happy happenstance.

It's not interesting that you can fool a computer. The whole art is how to *not* accidentally fool the computer.
— Noah Sussman (@noahsussman) July 27, 2016

@noahsussman Only computers?

It's easy to put people in incongruous situations. The art is in not doing it accidentally.
— James Thomas (@qahiccupps) July 27, 2016

Without seeing Noah Sussman's tweet, I wouldn't have had my own thought, a useful thought for me, a handy reminder to myself of what I'm trying to do in my interactions with others, captured in a way I had never considered it before.

Image: https://flic.kr/p/a341bn

Comments

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

Testing (AI) is Testing

Last November I gave a talk, Random Exploration of a Chatbot API , at the BCS Testing, Diversity, AI Conference . It was a nice surprise afterwards to be offered a book from their catalogue and I chose Artificial Intelligence and Software Testing by Rex Black, James Davenport, Joanna Olszewska, Jeremias Rößler, Adam Leon Smith, and Jonathon Wright. This week, on a couple of train journeys around East Anglia, I read it and made sketchnotes. As someone not deeply into this field, but who has been experimenting with AI as a testing tool at work, I found the landscape view provided by the book interesting, particularly the lists: of challenges in testing AI, of approaches to testing AI, and of quality aspects to consider when evaluating AI. Despite the hype around the area right now there's much that any competent tester will be familiar with, and skills that translate directly. Where there's likely to be novelty is in the technology, and the technical domain, and the effect of

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

Am I Wrong?

I happened across Exploratory Testing: Why Is It Not Ideal for Agile Projects? by Vitaly Prus this week and I was triggered. But why? I took a few minutes to think that through. Partly, I guess, I feel directly challenged. I work on an agile project (by the definition in the article) and I would say that I use exclusively exploratory testing. Naturally, I like to think I'm doing a good job. Am I wrong? After calming down, and re-reading the article a couple of times, I don't think so. 😸 From the start, even the title makes me tense. The ideal solution is a perfect solution, the best solution. My context-driven instincts are reluctant to accept the premise, and I wonder what the author thinks is an ideal solution for an agile project, or any project. I notice also that I slid so easily from "an approach is not ideal" into "I am not doing a good job" and, in retrospect, that makes me smile. It doesn't do any harm to be reminded that your cognitive bias

Play to Play

I'm reading Rick Rubin's The Creative Act: A Way of Being . It's spiritual without being religious, simultaneously vague and specific, and unerring positive about the power and ubiquity of creativity. We artists — and we are all artists he says — can boost our creativity by being open and welcoming to knowledge and experiences and layering them with past knowledge and experiences to create new knowledge and experiences. If that sounds a little New Age to you, well it does to me too, yet also fits with how I think about how I work. This is in part due to that vagueness, in part due to the human tendency to pattern-match, and in part because it's true. I'm only about a quarter of the way through the book but already I am making connections to things that I think and that I have thought in the past. For example, in some ways it resembles essay-format Oblique Strategy cards and I wrote about the potential value of them to testers 12 years ago. This week I found the f

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

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

Rage Against the Machinery

I often review and collaborate on unit tests at work. One of the patterns I see a lot is this: there are a handful of tests, each about a page long the tests share a lot of functionality, copy-pasted the test data is a complex object, created inside the test the test data varies little from test to test. In Kotlin-ish pseudocode, each unit test might look something like this: @Test fun `test input against response for endpoint` () { setupMocks() setupTestContext() ... val input = Object(a, OtherObject(b, c), AnotherObject(d)) ... val response = someHttpCall(endPoint, method, headers, createBodyFromInput(input) ) ... val expected = Object(w, OtherObject(x, y), AnotherObject (z)) val output = Object(process(response.getField()), otherProcess(response.getOtherField()), response.getLastField()) assertEquals(expected, output) } ... While these tests are generally functional, and I rarely have reason to doubt that they

A Qualified Answer

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 , 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-- "Whenever possible, you should hire testers with testing certifications" Interesting. Which would you value more? (a) a candidate who was sent on loads of courses approved by some organisation you don't know and ru

README

This week at work my team attended a Myers Briggs Type Indicator workshop. Beforehand we each completed a questionnaire which assigned us a personality type based on our position on five behavioural preference axes. For what it's worth, this time I was labelled INFJ-A and roughly at the mid-point on every axis. I am sceptical about the value of such labels . In my less charitable moments, I imagine that the MBTI exercise gives us each a box and, later when work shows up, we try to force the work into the box regardless of any compatiblity in size and shape. On the other hand, I am not sceptical about the value of having conversations with those I work with about how we each like to work or, if you prefer it, what shape our boxes are, how much they flex, and how eager we are to chop problems up so that they fit into our boxes. Wondering how to stretch the workshop's conversational value into something ongoing I decided to write a README for me and

Hiccupps

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