Hiccupps

  I was invited onto the Testers' Island Discs podcast recently. Testers' Island Discs is ... a podcast focused around software testing and storytelling hosted by Mark Winteringham. The concept is straightforward: each episode, Mark interviews a different member of the global software testing community to talk about their career, interspersed with clips and discussions of the music that they love. Every guest gets to select five songs and one book to take with them to the island. I've written about the music I chose in Island Records . This post is for links to things that came up in the conversation. Puns Your Testing is a Joke from EuroSTAR 2015 The Rule of Three and Me CEWT How it started ( Blog ) Topics covered ( List of CEWTs )

I was invited onto the Testers' Island Discs podcast recently. Testers' Island Discs is ... a podcast focused around software testing and storytelling hosted by Mark Winteringham. The concept is straightforward: each episode, Mark interviews a different member of the global software testing community to talk about their career, interspersed with clips and discussions of the music that they love. Every guest gets to select five songs and one book to take with them to the island. Music was my life for a long, long time. I was in bands, I did my own solo music, I wrote a fanzine and occasionally for "proper" publications too, I attended gigs several nights a week, and I DJed on student and community radio stations. I built up a big record collection stacked around the house and in the loft but when my daughters got old enough to need their own bedrooms I had to sell it to make space. Although I never counted, I estimated that there were ar

    Jerry Weinberg discusses quality in Quality Software Management: Systems Thinking with an anecdote about a book his niece wrote. In the story, her book is released with significant sections missing due to bugs in the word processor she was using.  Weinberg happened to be working for the company that produced it and asked the project manager what was going on. The manager said that they knew about the issues but were unlikely to fix them any time soon: ... out of more than a hundred thousand customers we probably didn't have ten [who might have seen these problems] ... Eventually we'll probably fix them, but for now, chances are we would introduce a worse bug - one that would affect hundreds or thousands of customers. I believe we did the right thing. This situation motivates Weinberg's idea that quality is relative, encapsulated in the famous definition linking quality to value:     Quality is value to some person Hundreds of thousands of customers get value from this

A developer I don't work with often made a change, tested it against the problem case that motivated it, and then asked me to have a look. I started by reading his description of the testing he'd done, reviewed his commits, and then ran the application with and without the change. After testing for a short while I went back to him having found a major problem. This isn't a blog post slagging off how developers (don't) test, it's also not about how testers should strive to create a quality culture and coach the team, and it's not about how clever I was at finding the problem either. This blog post is about the response the developer gave when he heard my report: "what made you think to test it that way?" Which is a great question from someone who wants to improve themselves and their work. I didn't want to put him off ever asking me anything ever again by taking the opportunity of an apparently receptive audience to lard on the test