Hiccupps

Hiccupps just turned six years old. Happy birthday to us. And thank you for reading; I hope you're getting something out of it still. Unwittingly I've stumbled into a tradition of reflecting on the previous 12 months and picking out a few posts that I liked above the others for some reason. Here's this year's selection: What We Found Not Looking for Bugs : a headrush conversation with Anders Dinsen on the nature and timing of testing  The Dots : a headrush conversation with myself on the connections between the connected things  Fix Up, Look Sharp : a headrush reading experience from Ron Jeffries' Extreme Programming Adventures in C#  Quality != Quality : a headrush of being picked up by Hacker News, my page views going nuts, and developers debating quality  A (Definition of) Testing Story : a headrush last-minute conference proposal accepted at UKSTAR 2018  And in the meantime my mission to keep my testing mind limber with rule-of-three punning ...

They were chuckling at me when I came back from the kitchen next to the meeting room. They were grinning and smirking at each other because they'd heard me laugh out loud and knew that I was the only person in there. So I felt compelled to explain that I was laughing because I value highly in testers the ability to find more than one way to look at any given situation. Stated drily like that, it  doesn't sound worthy of a solo guffaw does it? But what I actually said went a bit like this ... You know that scene in The Lord Of The Rings where they're trying to get into a mine? There's a clue phrase in Elvish above the door that Gandalf translates as "Speak, friend, and enter" but then he can't remember what the password is. Eventually he sees an alternative interpretation, "Say friend and enter", and they get in. Well , I was in the kitchen looking at the door to the car park and there's a sticker on it which I'm sure I m...

Sometimes a phrase just lights up the room when it's spoken. I encountered one today. One of my team was debriefing us, giving her analysis of our answers to her survey of our experiences of the team pairing experiment that she ran. I say it lit up the room, but really for me it was writ large in fireworks, sounding a fanfare, and flying loop-the-loops. Here it is: Respond to the context. I'll just leave it there for you. And also this . Image:  https://flic.kr/p/UWL4d5

Unfortunately, last night's Cambridge Tester Meetup  talk about database unit testing was cancelled due to speaker illness. No problem! We had Lean Coffee instead. Here's a few aggregated comments and questions from the group discussion. How do you deal with internal conflicts? Give overt, verbal appreciation to the other person and their perspective. Be humble. Leave your ego behind. Conflict is healthier than the alternative.  Conflict betrays a lack of common understanding. I seek conflict. Conflict of personality or of ideas? I want to squeeze out ambiguity and lack of clarity. A stand-up row can be acceptable to achieve that. (Even if it isn't the first thing I'll try.) Some people avoid conflict because they feel they won't win the argument. What is the source of the conflict? That makes a difference. Try to keep discussion to facts; objective not subjective; technical not personal. Try to get to know each other as people. Try to build te...

I'm speaking on the Storytelling track at UKSTAR 2018. In eight minutes I'm going to explain how I arrived at my own definition of testing, why I bothered, and what I do with it now I've got it.  You can find some of the background in these posts: Another Define Mess Testing All the Way Down and Other Directions The Anatomy of a Definition of Testing and I made a kind of sketchnote video thing to promote it too: If you still want to come after all that, get 10% off, on me: See you there I hope.