Sota so Good

Much of Definition of The Engineering Method by Billy Vaughn Koen chimes with what I've come to believe about testing.

In part, I think, this is because thinkers who have influenced my thinking were themselves influenced by Koen's thoughts. In part, also, it's because some of my self-learned experience of testing is prefigured in the article. In part, finally, it's because I'm reading it through biased lenses, wanting to find positive analogy to something I care about.

I recognise that this last one is dangerous. As Richard Feynman said in Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!: "I could find a way of making up an analog with any subject ... I don’t consider such analogs meaningful.”

This is a short series of posts which will take an aspect of Definition of The Engineering Method that I found interesting and explore why, taking care not to over-analogise.

--00--

The leaping off point for Definition of the Engineering Method is the scientific method. From Wikipedia:

The scientific method is an empirical method of acquiring knowledge that has characterized the development of science since at least the 17th century. It involves careful observation, applying rigorous skepticism about what is observed, given that cognitive assumptions can distort how one interprets the observation. It involves formulating hypotheses, via induction, based on such observations; experimental and measurement-based testing of deductions drawn from the hypotheses; and refinement (or elimination) of the hypotheses based on the experimental findings.

Specifically Koen observes that, while the scientific method has been much studied, he does not believe that engineering is simply "applied science" and there is little literature on what he calls the engineering method. Yet engineering has been, is, and will continue to be critical to the way our world is shaped and the way we live in it. Shouldn't we care about how we engineer our environment and ourselves?

(Answer: yes.)

As Koen develops his ideas on what the engineering method could be, he co-opts a term, state of the art (abbreviated as sota), which he takes to be the set of heuristics known by an individual or a group at a specific time. For any pair of engineers, it is likely that their sotas will intersect at some foundational points and then differ where their experience has caused them to specialise on tasks. A given engineer's sota will change through her career, as she finds some heuristics more or less valuable.

This concept is interesting because it allows him to visualise, with simple set diagrams, how problems fall into or outside of the sotas of individuals and groups. This feels neat and I found it easy to nod along to until I read this (p. 31):

The [sota] of the engineering profession defines the best possible engineering solution. This overall solution represents best engineering practice and is the most reasonable practical standard against which to judge the individual engineer. It us a relative standard instead of an absolute one, and like all sotas it changes in time

As a card-carrying context-driven tester, I flinched. Best practice? Really?

Fortunately, in Koen's context, "best" has a specific interpretation (p. 12):

A fundamental characteristic of an engineering solution is that it is the best available from the point of view of a specific engineer. If this engineer knew the absolute good, he would do that good. Failing that, he calculates his best based on his subjective estimate of an informed society's perception of the good.

Sotas allow Koen to represent an engineering sota distinct from a society's sota, and speculate on how this difference can lead to solutions to the wrong problem, or the wrong problem being put forward to be solved. Where sota intersection is smaller, there is likely to be less shared understanding and more chance of problem and solution being incompatible in some important way.

In this consideration of the relationships between the expert and the public, there are echoes of Harry Collins' work on Science Studies. Take this passage (p. 39):

Some argue that we are witnessing a shrinking of [joint efforts between the general population and engineers] as society disciplines the engineering profession because of disagreement over past solutions. No longer is it sufficient for an engineer to assert that a mass transportation system or nuclear reactor is needed and safe ... What is most urgently needed is research to determine the minimum overlap necessary for a non engineer to be technologically literate.

I was also struck by similarities between sotas and the thoughts on the propagation of theory (a term we were using more broadly than its conventional meaning) around communities that Sneha Bhat and I presented in Transforming Theory and Practice:

... we perceive two broad types of theory: behavioural (what the system does) and practical (how to exercise the system). In a typical project the first of these is likely to get reported back to the team in general, but the latter is likely to remain local with either this tester or her peers when they share information that helps them to do their job.

This flow of theory aligns well with the idea that the sotas of different individuals and different can be populated differently, and perhaps even helps to explain how that can be the case for members of the same team with different areas of expertise.

An angle we explored, but I don't think Koen does, is the idea that practitioner knowledge may be tacit, again per Harry Collins. In Transforming Theory and Practice we wrote:

An expert practitioner may add enormous value to a project by virtue of being able to divine the causes of problems, find workarounds for them, and gauge the potential impacts on important scenarios. But they may find it hard to explain how they arrived at their conclusions ... This kind of tacit knowledge is learned over time, and with experience ...

Could tacit knowledge be part of an individual's sota? Is it the case that all engineering decisions are thought to be justifiable in terms of some aspect of a sota? Could the "art" aspect of sota permit undefined intuition? I like these kinds of questions.

But how are sotas relevant to testing? It's relevant to me in my testing because, as part of an engineering team solving problems for people who are generally not engineers, I want to do these kinds of things:

recognise that the customer perspective is not the team's perspective
recognise that my personal perspective is not the same as my colleagues' perspective
look for the aspects of all relevant perspectives that are most relevant to the problem
look for ways to communicate with all parties such that the right information is available to make informed choices about aspects of the problem that matter

The sota, and Koen's Venn-style diagrams, give me some language for, and visualisation of, that space.

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...

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 ...

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...

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...

On Herding Cats

Last night I was at the Cambridge Tester meetup for a workshop on leadership. It was a two-parter with Drew Pontikis facilitating conversation about workplace scenarios followed by an AMA with a group of experienced managers. I can't come to work this week, my cat died. Drew opened by asking us what our first thoughts would be as managers on seeing that sentence. Naturally, sadness and sympathy, followed by a week ? for a cat ? and I only got a day for my gran! Then practicalities such as maybe there's company policy that covers that , and then the acknowledgement that it's contextual: perhaps this was a long-time emotional support animal . Having established that management decisions are a mixture of emotion, logic, and contingency Drew noted that most of us don't get training in management or leadership then split us into small groups and confronted us with three situations to talk through: Setting personal development goals for others. Dropping a clange...

Reasonable Doubt

In Your job is to deliver code you have proven to work Simon Willison writes: As software engineers we ... need to deliver code that works — and we need to include proof that it works as well. He is coming at this from the perspective of LLM-assisted coding, but most of what he says applies in general. I think this is a reasonable consise summary of his requirements for developers: Manual happy paths: get the system into an initial state, exercise the code, check that it has the desired effect on the state. Manual edge cases: no advice given, just a note that skill here is a sign of a senior engineer. Automated tests: should demonstrate the change like Manual happy paths but also fail if the change is reverted. He notes that, even though LLM tooling can write automated tests, it's humans who are accountable for the code and it's on us to "include evidence that it works as it should." Coincidentally, just the week before I read his post I told one of my...

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...

Why Test, Test What, Then How?

There was a time when testing was all about the mnemonics . Well, we had no AI back then so thinking about our human craft and how to share what we had learned using our human intelligence with other engaged humans for later recall in their human heads seemed important. But this post isn't about dumping on AI. It isn't about mnemonics either even if WTTWTH does look like something that'd fit well into that ancient world. No, this post is just a snappier version of what I said to my team this week when I was walking through some testing I'd done the day before. It was concerned with a change to a particular turn in the dialog system we're building where multiple variables are in play, some populated by an external call to an LLM service. I wanted to make the point that the bulk of the testing work was done in the research I did and the spreadsheet I made, not in the interaction with our product. That spreadsheet was the result of me looking in our service's cod...

Open Your Mind

Jerome Groopman, in How Doctors Think , reviews ways in which doctors can make poor choices, identifies potential causes, and suggests some practices, for both doctor and patient, that can help to prevent them. I find this interesting for a couple of reasons: first, I work in the health space, although not in a therapeutic area and, second, I like to reflect on my own thought processes. I'll take three broad themes from Groopman's analysis: the business of healthcare and how that impacts a physician's ability to practice; the doctor-patient relationship and how that impacts the experience of both sides; and the cognitive failings that impact a correct and timely diagnosis for any given patient. Naturally, these overlap. The book is written from the perspective of the notoriously commercialised American medical system and is around 20 years old, so doubtless some of the details are different outside of the US and have changed since pu...

Better Isolate Than Never

How do you test a product with distributed logic and non-deterministic components? Well, it depends on the product and when the question is asked. This post is one answer, for now. A service I work on exposes an API for internal and external clients and calls multiple other services. It orchestrates a reasonably complex journey for a user, with their inputs and the responses of the services determining each step. Our customers can configure the service to provide a variant of the standard journey for their users. This gives them choices on the available steps, the order of the steps, and, importantly, some of the logic for taking particular steps. This configuration lives in a different repository to the service, not owned by us, and it can be changed and deployed independently from the service. As you can imagine, we test our service in multiple ways at different granularities using the usual tooling, including unit tests fo...

Hiccupps

Search This Blog