Cambridge Lean Coffee

This month's Lean Coffee was hosted by Roku. Here's some brief, aggregated comments and questions on topics covered by the group I was in.

My favourite context-free test is ...

Turn everything up to 11. Put all of the settings on their highest levels and see what happens.
Power cycling rapidly and repeatedly.
Sympathetic testing. Just getting a view for what the product offers.
Simply trying to use the product.
Smoke test.
Try to do the opposite of what any documentation says.
Ask how the users will use it.
Ask what the customer wanted.
Find someone without prior experience of the product to look at it.

How do you enhance your personal development in a busy environment?

We are given time for personal development at work, but I end up dong work stuff instead.
The company empowers us but it's on us to use the time.
I don't want the others on my team to feel that I am slacking by taking the personal development time.
I might come in to work early to do some personal development but then find myself picking something up from the backlog.
I want to learn python but, because I know I can do it, I'll always revert to bash for quick scripts.
I did a Masters degree and the structure, and deadlines, particularly exams, helped me to focus on it.
Book slots in the diary for it.
Make joint commitments with others because you'll keep them more reliably.
Our company puts tasks into backlogs for training, so it's explicit.
Can you find goals that can be done on every project, rather than needing time set aside?
We might like to do a hack day.
We had an internal team conference.

A development process with no mention of testing.

Our company has produced a process for architecting or rearchitecting software, something all teams must follow.
It says things like "talk to X before going too far down the road in such-and-such an area".
... but it has no mention of testing in it. Should it have?
If it's about rearchitecting, perhaps there are already tests?
Or you can use the original implementation as a reference.
It's on you to explain the value of testing.
Any change to the code base can yield bugs.
"We're just moving classes around" being safe is a dangerous assumption.
Where's do you think there might be problem? For example, is it that there's no mention of testing in the document, or that you think that nothing you'd call testing will happen, or something else?

How do you avoid mini waterfalls in Agile?

There is a natural process: work has to be done and won't be ready until the sprint end. Then it's handed over and needs testing!
Are sprints a necessity?
No. Some teams work in continuous flow.
Could you try pairing, to remove or reduce the impact of the handover point?
Could you break work down into smaller chunks?
Could you have predetermined acceptance criteria? (And non-acceptance criteria?)
Could the stories be closed earlier (e.g. are the developers hanging on to them after finishing?)
Could there be too much work in progress, so stories progress slowly?
Can you sit with the developers? Proximity breaks down barriers.

What is a good job interview?

From whose perspective?
Do you ask interviewees to do a task, write tests, talk through their CV?
How do you react to tasks as an interviewee?
I've rejected roles because of how the company has come across to me.
I've accepted roles because the task was interesting and enjoyable.
Interviewee: show their best in whatever respects are important to them and for the role.
Interviewer: facilitated in a way that let the interviewee show their best in areas that are important to the company, got some sense of the interviewee as a person, and saw how they can think.
I think of interviews as auditions.

Image: https://flic.kr/p/5YB8zB

Meet Me Halfway?

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Beginning Sketchnoting

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How do I Test AI?

Recently a few people have asked me how I test AI. I'm happy to share my experiences, but I frame the question more broadly, perhaps something like this: what kinds of things do I consider when testing systems with artificial intelligence components . I freestyled liberally the first time I answered but when the question came up again I thought I'd write a few bullets to help me remember key things. This post is the latest iteration of that list. Caveats: I'm not an expert; what you see below is a reminder of things to pick up on during conversations so it's quite minimal; it's also messy; it's absolutely not a guide or a set of best practices; each point should be applied in context; the categories are very rough; it's certainly not complete. Also note that I work with teams who really know what they're doing on the domain, tech, and medical safety fronts and some of the things listed here are things they'd typically do some or all of. Testing ...

Don't Know? Find Out!

In What We Know We Don't Know , Hillel Wayne crisply summarises a handful of research findings about software development, describes how the research is carried out and reviewed and how he explores it, and contrasts those evidence-based results with the pronouncements of charismatic thought leaders. He also notes how and why this kind of research is hard in the software world. I won't pull much from the talk because I want to encourage you to watch it. Go on, it's reasonably short, it's comprehensible for me at 1.25x, and you can skip the section on Domain-Driven Design (the talk was at DDD Europe) if that's not your bag. Let me just give the same example that he opens with: research shows that most code reviews focus more on the first file presented to reviewers rather than the most important file in the eye of the developer. What we should learn: flag the starting and other critical files to receive more productive reviews. You never even thought about that possi...

My Adidas

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Not a Happy Place

A few months ago I stopped having therapy because I felt I had stabilised myself enough to navigate life without it. For the time being, anyway. I'm sure the counselling helped me but I couldn't tell you how and I've chosen not to look deeply into it. For someone who is usually pretty analytical this is perhaps an interesting decision but I knew that I didn't want to be second-guessing my counsellor, Sue, or mentally cross-referencing stuff that I'd researched while we were talking. And talk was what we mostly did, with Sue suggesting hardly any specific tools for me to try. One that she did recommend was finding a happy place to visualise, somewhere that I could be out of the moment for a moment to calm disruptive thoughts. (Something like this .) Surprisingly, I found that I couldn't conjure anywhere up inside my head. That's when I realised that I've always had difficulty seeing with my mind's eye but never called it out. If I try to imagine ev...

Notes on Testing Notes

Ben Dowen pinged me and others on Twitter last week , asking for "a nice concise resource to link to for a blog post - about taking good Testing notes." I didn't have one so I thought I'd write a few words on how I'm doing it at the moment for my work at Ada Health, alongside Ben. You may have read previously that I use a script to upload Markdown-based text files to Confluence . Here's the template that I start from: # Date + Title # Mission # Summary WIP! # Notes Then I fill out what I plan to do. The Mission can be as high or low level as I want it to be. Sometimes, if deeper context might be valuable I'll add a Background subsection to it. I don't fill in the Summary section until the end. It's a high-level overview of what I did, what I found, risks identified, value provided, and so on. Between the Mission and Summary I hope that a reader can see what I initially intended and what actually...

Going Underground

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Heads Up

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Hiccupps

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