Hiccupps

  Kent Beck, in More What, Less How , identified an unknown. But how will he move towards knowing? By exploring in 3X: Explore/Expand/Extract. The rules of exploration are that it’s a numbers game. More experiments, more value. Try a little bit of a lot of things. One of those experiments will have dramatically more impact than anything to date. Follow up that. This speaks to me.  On Friday I picked up the latest build of a new service with a partially-implemented API. The ticket that produced it was for some internal plumbing and, after various smoke tests and other poking around, followed by a demo of my approach and findings to the team, and some fixes, I could have stopped looking at it. But I thought enough functionality might be enabled that I could begin to navigate the API a little so I tried hand-rolling requests in Postman. After some false starts and a couple of workarounds (for those unfinished pieces of the API) I was able to make the bare bones of a user journey....

Introduction James : A few years ago, Claire, a friend from the Cambridge tester meetups, asked if I’d be her mentor. I said yes and we collaborated for around 12 months as she took stock of her role and career direction, and worked to get to where she wanted to be in both. We blogged about it in Don't be a Prick . Then, last year, I found myself doing the same thing with a colleague from my team at work, Yasemin . We’ve just ended that relationship and now we’re blogging about it too! (Thanks to Claire for suggesting we should.) Yasemin : Two years ago I moved from Turkey to Berlin. I know that I thrive on learning new things and challenging myself with joy, and what better way to do that than in a new culture, language, and company? And it has been an adventure: I've had brain surgery, taken a journey of self-discovery, explored new opportunities, and really pushed my limits.  One of those opportunities was meeting James. I watched him work for a year, observing how he inclus...

Last November I gave a talk, Random Exploration of a Chatbot API , at the BCS Testing, Diversity, AI Conference .  It was a nice surprise afterwards to be offered a book from their catalogue and I chose Artificial Intelligence and Software Testing by Rex Black, James Davenport, Joanna Olszewska, Jeremias Rößler, Adam Leon Smith, and Jonathon Wright.  This week, on a couple of train journeys around East Anglia, I read it and made sketchnotes. As someone not deeply into this field, but who has been experimenting with AI as a testing tool at work, I found the landscape view provided by the book interesting, particularly the lists: of challenges in testing AI, of approaches to testing AI, and of quality aspects to consider when evaluating AI.  Despite the hype around the area right now there's much that any competent tester will be familiar with, and skills that translate directly. Where there's likely to be novelty is in the technology, and the technical domain, and the eff...

A couple of weeks ago I was asked to facilitate a group risk analysis for a project. The session would be remote and, having participated in this kind of thing before there were some things I knew I wanted to avoid: unclear mission participant overwhelm and underwhelm intangible outcome The tools I had to work with were Miro and Google Meet. Unclear Mission I wanted to minimise time on the call where we were not looking at risk so I decided to prepare a concise intro to the project, the mission for this session, and our approach to the analysis. I was the facilitator rather than a participant and it's not my project so I didn't need deep knowledge but in order to scope the mission I wanted some background.  I briefly reviewed the project documentation, got a picture of its status from a couple of people, and proposed to the PO that we review only a slice of it.  That slice was one I thought we could plausibly fit into a two-hour session, that would have value to the project ri...