Hiccupps

I'm lucky that my current role at Ada Health gives me, and the rest of the staff, a fortnightly community day for sharing and learning. I've done my, erm, share of sharing, but today I took advantage of the learning on offer to attend a workshop on our approach to making medical terminology accessible to non-experts, a presentation on how we manage our medical knowledgebase, another on the single sign-on infrastructure we're using in our customer integrations, and a riskstorming workshop using TestSphere to assess an air fryer. So that would have been a great day by itself, but I, erm, capped it off by attending Capgemini's TestJam event, to see the keynotes by Janet Gregory and Lisi Hocke . Janet talked about holistic testing, or the kinds of critical review, discovery, and mitigation activities that can take place at any point in the software development (and deployment, and release) life cycle. The foundation for all of this is good communication and relationship...

Sliding doors , naturally, but it feels like the Sinclair ZX Spectrum 16k I got as a combined birthday and Christmas present when I was a boy was significant in where I've ended up. I recall with fondness the tedium-expectation opposition of typing in BASIC programs from printouts and then debugging them only to find that the monster was a letter M, and you were an asterisk and collision detection was a concept the author had only a passing grasp of. I have nightmares about trying and failing to install several sets of RAM chips to upgrade the machine to 48k and instead ending up with a wobbly and unreliable external RAM pack. I mourn the times we had to take the whole computer back to the shop for repairs. I regret spending my hard-earned paper round money on a Brother printer and then spending my hard-won free time trying to work out how to get it to print reliably, or at all.  I can still feel the covers of the thick ring-bound manuals, introducing me to BASIC and helping me to...

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 ,  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-- "What percentage of our test cases are automated?" There's a lot wrapped up in that question, particularly when it's a metric for monitoring the state of testing. It's not the first time I've been asked either. In my...