Skip to main content

Tools: Take Your Pick Part 3



In Part 1 of this series I observed my behaviour in identifying problems, choosing tools, and finding profitable ways to use them when cleaning my bathroom at home. The introspection broadened out in Part 2 to consider tool selection more generally. I speculated that, although we may see someone apparently thoughtlessly viewing every problem as a nail and hence treatable with the same hammer, that simple action can hide deeper conscious and unconscious thought processes. In Part 3 I find myself with these things in mind, reflecting on the tools I use in my day-to-day work.

One class of problems that I apply tools to involves a route to the solution being understood and a desire to get there quickly. I think of these as essentially productivity or efficiency problems and one of the tools I deploy to resolve them is a programming or scripting language.

Programming languages are are tools, for sure, but they are also tool factories. When I have some kind of task which is repetitive or tiresome, or which is substantially the same in a bunch of different cases, I'll look for an opportunity to write a script - or fabricate a tool - which does those things for me. For instance, I frequently clone repositories from different branches of our source code using Mercurial. I could type this every time:

$ hg clone -r branch_that_I_want https://our.localrepo.com/repo_that_I_want

... and swear a lot when I forget that this is secure HTTP or mistype localrepo again. Or I could write a simple bash script, like this one, and call it hgclone:

#!/bin/bash

hg clone -r $1 https://our.localrepo.com/$2

and then call it like this whenever I need to clone:

$ hgclone branch_that_I_want repo_that_I_want

Now I'm left dealing with the logic of my need but not the implementation details. This keeps me in flow (if you're a believer in that kind of thing) or just makes me less likely to make a mistake (you're certainly a believer in mistakes, right?) and, in the aggregrate, saves me significant time, effort and pain.

Your infrastructure will often provide hooks for what I sometimes think of as micro tools too. An example of this might be aliases and environment variables. In Linux, because that's what I use most often, I have set things up so that:
  • commands I like to run a particular way are aliased to always run that way.
  • some commands I run a lot are aliased to single characters.
  • some directory paths that I need to use frequently are stored as environment variables.
  • I can search forwards and backwards in my bash history to reuse commands easily.

One of the reasons that I find writing (and blogging, although I don't blog anything like as much as I write) such a productive activity is that the act of doing it - for me - provokes further thoughts and connections and questions. In this case, writing about micro tools I realise that I have another kind of helper, one that I could call a skeleton tool.

Those scripts that you return to again and again as starting points for some other piece of work, they're probably useful because of some specific piece of functionality within them. You hack out the rest and replace them in each usage, but keep that generally useful bit. That bit is the skeleton. I have one in particular that is so useful I've made a copy of it with only the bits that I was reusing to make it easier to hack.

Another class of problem I bump into is more open-ended. Often I'll have some idea of the kind of thing I'd like to be able to do because I'm chasing an issue. I may already have a tool but its shortcomings, or my shortcomings as a user, are getting in the way. I proceed here in a variety of ways, including:
  • analogy: sometimes I can think of a domain where I know of an answer, as I did with folders in Thunderbird.
  • background knowledge: I keep myself open for tool ideas even when I don't need tools for a task. 
  • asking colleagues: because often someone has been there before me.
  • research: that frustrated lament "if only I could ..." is a great starting point for a search. Choosing sufficient context to make the search useful is a skill. 
  • reading the manual: I know, old-fashioned, but still sometimes pays off.

On one project, getting the data I needed was possible but frustratingly tiresome. I  had tried to research solutions myself, had failed to get anything I was happy with, and so asked for help:
This lead to a couple of useful, practical findings: that Fiddler will read pcap files, and that chaosreader can provide raw HTTP in a form that can be grepped. I logged these findings in another tool - our company wiki - categorised so that others stand a chance of finding them later.

Re-reading this now, I notice that in that Twitter thread I am casting the problem in terms of the solution that I am pursuing:
I would like a way to dump all HTTP out of .pcap. Wireshark cuts it up into TCP streams. 
Later, I recast the problem (for myself) in a different way:
I would like something like tcpdump for HTTP.
The former presupposes that I have used tcpdump to capture raw comms and now want to inspect the HTTP contained within it, because that was the kind of solution I was already using. The latter is agnostic about the method, but uses analogy to describe the shape of the solution I'm looking for. More recently still, I have refined this further:
I would like to be able to inspect raw HTTP in real time, and simultaneously dump it to a file, and possibly modify it on the fly, and not have to configure my application to use an external proxy (because that can change its behaviour).
Having this need in mind means that when I happen across a tool like mitmproxy (as I did recently) I can associate it with the background problem I have. Looking into mitmproxy, I bumped into HTTPolice, which can be deployed alongside it and used to lint my product's HTTP.  Without the background thinking I might not have picked up on mitmproxy when it floated past me; without picking up on mitmproxy I would not have found HTTPolice or, at least, not found it so interesting at that time.

Changing to a new tool can give you possibilities that you didn't know were there before. Or expose a part of the space of possible solutions that you hadn't considered, or change your perspective so that you see the problem differently and a different class of solutions becomes available.

Sometimes the problem is that you know of multiple tools that you could start a task in, but you're unsure of the extent of the task, or the time that you'll need to spend on it, whether you'll need to work and rework or this is a one-shot effort and other meta problems of the problem itself. I wondered about this a while ago on Twitter:





A common scenario for me at a small scale is, when gathering data, whether I should start in text file, or Excel, or an Excel table. Within Excel, these days, I usually expect to switch to tables as soon as it becomes apparent I'm doing something more than inspecting data.

Most of my writing starts as plain text. Blog posts usually start in Notepad++ because I like the ease of editing in a real editor, because I save drafts to disk, because I work offline. (I'm writing this in Notepad++ now, offline because the internet connection where I am is flaky.) Evil Tester wrote about his workflow for blogging and his reasons for using offline editors too.

When writing in text files I also have heuristics about switching to a richer format. For instance, if I find that I'm using a set of multiply-indented bullets that are essentially representing two-dimensional data it's a sign that the data I am describing is richer than the format I'm using. I might switch to tabulated formatting in the document (if the data is small and likely to remain that way), I might switch to wiki table markup (if the document is destined for the wiki), or I might switch to a different tool altogether (either just for the data or for everything.)

At the command line I'll often start in shell, then move to bash script, then move to a more sophisticated scripting language.  If I think I might later add what I'm writing to a test suite I might make a different set of decisions to writing a one-off script. If I know I'm searching for repro steps I'll generally work in a shell script, recording various attempts as I go and commenting them out each time so that I can easily see what I did that lead to what. But if I think I'm going to be doing a lot of exploration in an area I have little idea about I might be more interactive but use script to log my attempts.

At a larger scale, I will try to think through workflows for data in the project: what will we collect, how will we want to analyse it, who will want to receive it, how will they want to use it? Data includes reports: who are we reporting to, how would they like to receive reports, who else might be interested? I have a set of defaults here: use existing tooling, use existing conventions, be open about everything.

Migration between tools is also interesting to me, not least because it's not always a conscious decision. I find I've begun to use Notepad++ more on Windows whereas for years I was an Emacs user on that platform. In part this is because my colleagues began to move that way and I wanted to be conversant in the same kinds of tools as them in order to share knowledge and experience. On the Linux command line I'll still use Emacs as my starting point, although I've begun to teach myself vi over the last two or three years. I don't want to become dependent on a tool to the point where I can't work in common, if spartan, environments. Using different tools for the same task has the added benefit of opening my mind to different possibilities and seeing how different concepts repeat across tools, and what doesn't, or what differs.

But some migrations take much longer, or never complete at all: I used to use find and grep together to identify files with certain characteristics and search them. Now I often use ack. But I'll continue to use find when I want to run a command on the results of the search, because I find its -exec option a more convenient tool than the standalone xargs.

Similarly I used to use grep and sed to search and filter JSON files. Now I often use jq when I need to filter cleanly, but I'll continue with grep as a kind of gross "landscaping" tool, because I find that the syntax is easier to remember even if the output is frequently dirtier.

On the other hand, there are sometimes tools that change the game instantly, In the past I used Emacs as a way to provide multiple command lines inside a single connection to a Linux server. (Aside: putty is the tool I use to connect to Linux servers from Windows.) When I discovered screen I immediately ditched the Emacs approach. Screen gives me something that Emacs could not: persistence across sessions. That single attribute is enough for me to swap tools. I didn't even know that kind of persistence was possible until I happened to be moaning about it to one of our Ops team. Why didn't I look for a solution to a problem that was causing me pain?

I don't know the answer to that.

I do know about Remote Desktop so I could have made an analogy and begun to look for the possibility of command line session persistence. I suspect that I just never considered it to be a possibility. I should know better. I am not omniscient. (No, really.) I don't have to imagine a solution in order to find one. I just have to know that I perceive a problem.

That's a lesson that, even now, I learn over and over. And here's another: even if there's not a full solution to my problem there may be partial solutions that are improvements on the situation I have.

In Part 4 I'll try to tie together the themes from this and the preceding two posts.
Image: https://flic.kr/p/5mPY4G
Syntax highlighting: http://markup.su/highlighter
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

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...
Post a Comment
Read more

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 ...
Post a Comment
Read more

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...
Post a Comment
Read more

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...
3 comments
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

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...
Post a Comment
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 gener...
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

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 ...
Post a Comment
Read more