Hiccupps

For a while now I've been collecting  fieldstones  on the topic of  heuristics for working . Some of these are things that I've said to others, some of them are things that I've thought about when considering some aspect of myself or how I work, and others have come from books I've read, talks I've attended, and workshops I've participated in. I've made a handful of rough categorisations and I'll put each set in a post under the tag  Heuristics for Working . But what do even I mean by heuristics for working? Good question. I mean rules of thumb for situations that arise in the workplace. They are bits of advice that can be useful to consider but don't offer any guarantees and will not always apply. The collection is surely idiosyncratic, context-sensitive and perhaps too specific and too general in turn. Welcome to my head. I haven't sat down and tried to elaborate or enumerate more, or to try to fill the gaps. Everything here has arisen

For a while now I've been collecting  fieldstones  on the topic of  heuristics for working . Some of these are things that I've said to others, some of them are things that I've thought about when considering some aspect of myself or how I work, and others have come from books I've read, talks I've attended, and workshops I've participated in. I've made a handful of rough categorisations and I'll put each set in a post under the tag  Heuristics for Working . But what do even I mean by heuristics for working? Good question. I mean rules of thumb for situations that arise in the workplace. They are bits of advice that can be useful to consider but don't offer any guarantees and will not always apply. The collection is surely idiosyncratic, context-sensitive and perhaps too specific and too general in turn. Welcome to my head. I haven't sat down and tried to elaborate or enumerate more, or to try to fill the gaps. Everything here has arisen

For a while now I've been collecting fieldstones on the topic of heuristics for working . Some of these are things that I've said to others, some of them are things that I've thought about when considering some aspect of myself or how I work, and others have come from books I've read, talks I've attended, and workshops I've participated in. I've made a handful of rough categorisations and I'll put each set in a post under the tag Heuristics for Working . But what do even I mean by heuristics for working? Good question. I mean rules of thumb for situations that arise in the workplace. They are bits of advice that can be useful to consider but don't offer any guarantees and will not always apply. The collection is surely idiosyncratic, context-sensitive and perhaps too specific and too general in turn. Welcome to my head. I haven't sat down and tried to elaborate or enumerate more, or to try to fill the gaps. Everything here has arisen an

At this week's Cambridge Tester Meetup we played Questions for Testers , a card game created by James Lyndsay which is intended to "trigger conversations and build connections." The deck consists of cards containing questions or statements with three responses. We took it in turns to read out a question or statement and the others quizzed us to help them decide which response they thought we'd give. Eventually they'd guess at our response, and we'd reveal it, and then talk about why we'd chosen as we did. Stefan 's choice was the one at the top:  Bugs and testers are like ... A. Ants and aardvarks B. Bees and beekeepers C. Cars and Cops Questions, did you say? Boom! Head explosion. Are we mapping bugs and testers to one of the entities in each response?  Does the order of the entities matter? Do they each map to just one? Could they each map to both? What relationships might motivate that mapping?  Does it need to be the same mappin

It reminded me once more of Harnessed Tester  asking whether he could switch his testing off .  I mean, I never intended to start testing when I began reviewing those abstracts. All I wanted to do was think about a strategy for reviewing conference submissions, implement it, and reflect on it. That's all. Honestly. But here I was, testing. Again. I'd been asked to review submissions for a conference. On the one hand it was a tiny bit flattering to be asked, I was certainly interested to see what goes on behind the scenes, and I thought I might learn something about submitting proposals of my own in future. On the other hand, I'm not naive enough to think that I was being asked because of who I am rather than because they needed eyeballs, a large number of reviews were being asked for, and the deadline was just four days away. But I decided to go for it, on the basis that it was a novel experience for me. Limited time, a new task, little context: not unusual paramet