Une Oeuf Blogging

When I started Hiccupps I challenged myself to do 50 posts in the first year. If I could manage one piece a week, I reckoned, I'd have a decent idea whether I really wanted to write and whether the effort I was putting in was worth it.

At the end of that initial 12 months I found that I really did want to write and, that as far as I was concerned, the effort was worth it. In the almost nine years since then I've maintained an annual average of around 50 posts and as I've reached the half-century or October I've taken a moment to reflect on how things are going. This post will be the 456th — with something like the 400th awful pun of a title — and so now seems like a good time as any to look back down the track again.

Blog is a contraction of weblog and it occurs to me now, in a way that I'm not sure it has before, that Hiccupps genuinely is a log of stuff I've been pondering or doing or reading or viewing. The posts feel like a wander through my learning in the order I attempted it. Here's three highlights:

I continue to practice sketchnoting just enough to stop getting too rusty. Recently, I've also asked myself to write up concise notes of talks I've attended soon afterwards. Being able to get the essence of a thing down quickly is a skill I find extremely handy at work and this is a good opportunity to practice. The Cambridge Agile Exchange has been a great source of material for sketchnoting, and my favourite of the year was their Practice Makes Perfect because I got my sketchnotes down cleanly and I wrote my textual notes up within minutes of the talk finishing.

Finally, I got around to reading Billy Vaughn Koen's Definition of the Engineering Method and found that it set off fireworks in my head. No less than five posts were spun out of what is really only a pamphlet but which is packed to the gunnels with thoughtful review of how practitioners practice heuristically and the creation of a model of the shared context of the players in any implementation effort.

While I'm very pleased with my sketchnotes and reading Koen, the post I'm most proud of this year is Unsung Love Song, my review of a book written by my friend Laurence Dillon, about the rent that being castrated tore in his life. I have read my words back a couple of times since I wrote it, and it makes me cry. The book is brilliant, you should buy it.

Nine years in, then, have I had enough? No.

Image: https://flic.kr/p/6iwNgd

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...

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...

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...

Great Shot, Kid

This week I've been playing with altwalker , a model-based testing tool. To get the hang of it, I attempted to build a very simple model of a workflow that is supported by the service my team owns. Hacking away at the example code, and looking frequently at the docs, I was able to get up and running in a few hours, creating: a basic model: nodes for system states, edges for operations simple assertions: mainly consistency checks on the states client: HTTP client to implement the operations against the service's API I configured this so that altwalker will perform a random walk of the model, starting state data is randomised, and the client will choose randomly whenever offered an option. Why so much randomness? Because it means that, over successive runs, more of the infinite space of possible workflow executions will be covered. Once I had that basically working I wrote a shell script that would run this loop a number of times: call altwalker ...

LLEWT 2024

This weekend I was at LLEWT 2024, a peer conference on Anglesey , north Wales, discussing communication. Given the day jobs of the participants, it was no surprise that the experience reports and the conversations that followed them mostly focussed on software development contexts. Notes from my presentation are in Express, Listen, and Field . I made sketchnotes (below) for each presentation and a mindmap (above) to try to summarise the whole. Without much reflection yet, I guess I would pull these common high-level threads from the day: There are multiple reasons that communication fails ... like, duh! ... but having multiple strategies for framing a message can help ... and having multiple tactics for delivering a message can help too. Understanding what you want from an interaction is key ... so setting the context to make that more likely is wise ... which might mean meta-conversation, being transparent, or changing your approach...

Exploring It!

This week the test team at Linguamatics held our first internal conference. There was no topic, but three broad categories could be seen in the talks and workshops that were given: experience reports, tooling, and alternative perspectives on our work. (The latter included the life cycle of a bug, and psychology in testing.) My contribution was an experience report looking at how I explore both inside and outside of testing. I've tidied up some of my notes from the prep for it below. There are testing skills that I use elsewhere in my life. Or perhaps there are skills from my life that I bring to testing. Maybe I'm so far down life's road that it's hard to tell quite what started where? Maybe I'm naturally this way and becoming a tester with an interest in improvement amped things up? Maybe I've so tangled up my work, life, and hobby that deciding where one starts and another ends is problematic? The answers to those questions is, I think, almost certai...

PR Coup!

My team uses Dependabot to keep software dependencies up to date. The tool submits PRs against our repositories and we use a checklist/decision tree to help us judge how deeply to review and provide an audit trail of the decision. Patch-level updates of company-internal packages might be just waved in if the tests pass, for example, but a major update of an external library could require us to review or redo a risk analysis. For reasons , the Markdown source for the tree is not automatically added to the PR so we pick it up from another repo, copy it, and paste it into the PR we're looking at. This has got sufficiently irritating to me that I looked for another way. I know about bookmarklets and I've made them before, so I first tried to make one that would paste the text into a comment box on the PR. The checklist is long and I needed to escape various characters and retain line breaks and it was tricky to edit and debug in a simple URL field, so I aborted. I wondered if the...

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