Hiccupps

  I seek to minimise friction in my working practices. I seek to minimise friction in my team's working practices. I seek to minimise friction in the interactions and integrations me and my team have with others. I bias to action in these activities. I implement a tiny delta on what was done before.  I evaluate the impact of that itty-bitty difference. I make more, regularly, without fuss, each time lubricating the process a little more. I am happy to fly under the radar, doing my thing.  I am happy to pay the low price that each step costs me. I share that value has been added, when it becomes significant enough. I demonstrate to others that I or we, or perhaps both, are getting benefit from my work. I see that they begin to do similar things themselves. I see the power of bottom-up incremental improvement to have wide-ranging long-lasting benefit. It may be small change, but look after the pennies and the pounds look after themselves . Image: https://flic.kr/p/aHp45R

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--  "Will the testing be done by Friday?" If the question relates to some prior discussion about scenarios we've agreed to run through before Friday then I'll do my best to base my answer on experience gathered so far . How sim...

And this is how it goes. One thing to another ... At the weekend I  was listening to Gene Kim's Idealcast interviews with Dr. Nicole Forsgren and Jez Humble . Jez Humble was talking about the importance of rapid feedback and referenced a  Brett Victor  talk that had stuck with him over the years: ... he built this little JavaScript game and he was changing parameters and the game was changing in real time. And his whole comment is like, if you can change something and see the change as you are changing it, it's incredibly powerful.   And so I looked it up in the show notes and watched it. Wow ... Inventing in Principle shows examples of experimental tooling for creative activities, particularly those that include a temporal dimension. The essential idea is to reduce the friction of having to maintain a model outside of the tool. In the image at the top, the left side is a traditional IDE and the right side is a dynamic visualisation of the function being develo...