Hiccupps

I'm in a work book club that's reading The DevOps Handbook . This week part of our discussion was around work which is invisible and should be exposed. The conversation was fun, interesting, and relevant to our day-to-day activities but I felt like it had touched only isolated areas of a potentially very large space. For example, work might be visible to some but not others, at some times but not others, for some kinds of work but not others, for justifiable reasons or not, with positive effects or not. So this morning I set aside an hour to factor my thoughts into the mind map above. Interestingly, I found myself preferring "hidden" over "invisible" because it more explicitly acknowledges the contextuality of views of work.  I'd love to hear other people's thoughts or experiences, so if you have some please don't keep them to yourself.

Time for another anniversary reflection . My goal back in October 2011 was to write once a week for year, with a couple of weeks off for holidays. Two years and 100 posts in I paused to consider how things were going and since then I've done the same every 50 posts or calendar year. Today is post number 550. I am regularly asked how I manage this. It helps that I like writing and find it valuable to get my ideas straight, record experiences, and document my thinking and learning but mostly, I think, it's because I've made it my habit. Seth Godin calls it showing up : When we commit to a practice, we don’t have to wonder if we’re in the mood, if it’s the right moment, if we have a headache or momentum or the muse by our side. We already made those decisions. ... Outcomes are important ... But the outcome isn’t the practice, the practice leads us to the outcome. Find work worth doing, and begin there. When I think an ...

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...

Last week I posted a long list of reasons for testing software , crowdsourced from members of the Association for Software Testing and software professionals on Twitter and LinkedIn. This week I've done some rough and ready analysis to see what's common across them and the results are at the top. A few notes: Information includes learning and feedback. Risks are unspecified or explicit (such as damage to reputation and costs). Confidence covers reducing uncertainty and sleeping well. Finding problems incorporates the fallibility of (other) humans. There are definitely other ways to classify and cluster this data. Testing, for me, is the pursuit of relevant incongruity . I didn't include my answers in the previous post but this is what I dropped into the conversation on the AST Slack: To check that it can do what we intended it should do. To look for ways in which it does things it wasn't intended to do. I think they're in the space the leftmost columns cover but I...