Make, Fix, and Test

A few weeks ago, in A Good Tester is All Over the Place, Joep Schuurkes described a model of testing work based on three axes:

do testing yourself or support testing by others
be embedded in a team or be part of a separate team
do your job or improve the system

It resonated with me and the other testers I shared it with at work, and it resurfaced in my mind while I was reflecting on some of the tasks I've picked up recently and what they have involved, at least in the way I've chosen to address them. Here's three examples:

Documentation Generation

We have an internal tool that generates documentation in Confluence by extracting and combining images and text from a handful of sources. Although useful, it ran very slowly or not at all so one of the developers performed major surgery on it.

Up to that point, I had never taken much interest in the tool and I could have safely ignored this piece of work too because it would have been tested by its maintainers and the consumers of its output. However, I decided to review the change precisely because I was unfamiliar with this part of our infrastructure.

When I say this was primarily a learning opportunity for me don't take it the wrong way. I found a nice way to test and I uncovered some interesting issues with the new implementation, but my motivation was to do something new and see what it could teach me. In the absence of other constraints I will often bias towards picking up tasks which give me that.

Schema Validation

We have a pipeline that generates a handful of large JSON files and had been asked to update the format to align with changes to the underlying source data. I had paired with the developer to understand the task before implementation and so had an idea that I would start my testing by dumping the same source content in both old and new formats and diffing them by eye to look for examples of expected changes, then attempting to reverse the new formatting with a simple Python script to check for unwanted changes.

That worked fine, so I turned my attention to validation. The pipeline asserts that the JSON output is valid against a schema and so naturally the schema had changed. I reviewed the edits and they looked like the kinds of changes I might expect ... if I understood the syntax of JSON schemas ... which I do not.

So I decided to go a little further and installed ajv, a tool for using JSON schemas to validate content, because it supports the version of the schema standard that we had used and because it has a command line interface that I can interact with. When I applied it to the new-format JSON files it warned that there was a problem with the schema, but I did not understand the warning and saw that it was flagged as a "strict mode" issue only anyway.

Keeping that in mind, I proceeded with my testing and found that it claimed the JSON was valid according to the schema. So I started to break the JSON in ways that I thought validation should pick up and found that it didn't. This looked interesting so I kept experimenting and cross-referencing with the JSON schema documentation until I discovered that part of the schema appeared to validate nothing and that it related to the strict mode warning in a way that now made some sense.

I could have reported a bug and finished at that point but I decided to try to fix the schema. Why? Because I already had a lot of context and I thought there was an opportunity to learn more. I made a handful of edits, pushed them back into the still-open PR and asked the developer who wrote the schema to check that I hadn't broken some assumption that he'd made.

Writing Definition Files

One of the products I work on is a platform that exposes services defined in reasonably complex files. It's a new product this year and so no-one has much experience of writing these files and, with understandable prioritisation, we haven't built tooling for creating them yet either. As the files are so fundamental for the platform I have taken every opportunity I can to write them which means I have picked up implementation tasks for demos, proofs of concept, and documentation.

Along the way I have built throwaway tools to help me to write and test the files and the exposed services, found issues in both the syntax and semantics of the files, and exploited the files as tools themselves to help me to test the platform.

There was no pressure to pick up these implementation tasks. I chose to do it because I thought there was advantage to me and the team if I did, and I pick up other implementation tasks on the same basis. I don't enjoy programming enough — and frankly I'm not good enough at it — to take on anything that makes large changes or requires deep language-level knowledge, but I will attempt bug fixes, or fiddle with the Jenkins pipeline, or sketch possible approaches in spikes.

So What?

So what has this got to do with Joep's axes? Well, nothing that challenges them significantly but I think that there are additional dimensions that Joep didn't represent that are also interesting, including:

immediate result vs invest in the future
fix the brokenness vs report the brokenness
build the thing vs test the thing

I initially wondered if any of these might be covered by Joep's third axis, "improve the system." In the article, a footnote refers to this LinkedIn post from Maaret Pyhäjärvi which expands the idea but suggests that it is talking about the context in which work is done, rather than the system under test. I pinged Joep on Mastodon and he confirmed that was the case.

His original post does touch briefly on a related topic, that of roles and activities:

This confusion of people, roles, and process steps means we rarely talk about what we do in a smart way. In a more specific, more granular way. What are the different activities that need doing? What skills and perspectives are needed for those activities? Who on our team can contribute?

It's a good point but I think there's another important aspect: why would any given person (or persons) do any particular task? Whose needs are being met, in what ways, to what ends?

I believe that being aware of and intentional about those questions is important and I keep them in mind as I make, fix, and, of course and mostly, test.
Image: Bing Image Creator

Meet Me Halfway?

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 , Mastodon , 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-- "Stop answering my questions with questions." Sure, I can do that. In return, please stop asking me questions so open to interpretation that any answ...

How do I Test AI?

Recently a few people have asked me how I test AI. I'm happy to share my experiences, but I frame the question more broadly, perhaps something like this: what kinds of things do I consider when testing systems with artificial intelligence components . I freestyled liberally the first time I answered but when the question came up again I thought I'd write a few bullets to help me remember key things. This post is the latest iteration of that list. Caveats: I'm not an expert; what you see below is a reminder of things to pick up on during conversations so it's quite minimal; it's also messy; it's absolutely not a guide or a set of best practices; each point should be applied in context; the categories are very rough; it's certainly not complete. Also note that I work with teams who really know what they're doing on the domain, tech, and medical safety fronts and some of the things listed here are things they'd typically do some or all of. Testing ...

The Best Programmer Dan Knows

I was pairing with my friend Vernon at work last week, on a tool I've been developing. He was smiling broadly as I talked him through what I'd done because we've been here before. The tool facilitates a task that's time-consuming, inefficient, error-prone, tiresome, and important to get right. Vern knows that those kinds of factors trigger me to change or build something, and that's why he was struggling not to laugh out loud. He held himself together and asked a bunch of sensible questions about the need, the desired outcome, and the approach I'd taken. Then he mentioned a talk by Daniel Terhorst-North, called The Best Programmer I Know, and said that much of it paralleled what he sees me doing. It was my turn to laugh then, because I am not a good programmer, and I thought he knew that already. What I do accept, though, is that I am focussed on the value that programs can give, and getting some of that value as early as possible. He sent me a link to the ta...

Notes on Testing Notes

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...

Reasonable Doubt

In Your job is to deliver code you have proven to work Simon Willison writes: As software engineers we ... need to deliver code that works — and we need to include proof that it works as well. He is coming at this from the perspective of LLM-assisted coding, but most of what he says applies in general. I think this is a reasonable consise summary of his requirements for developers: Manual happy paths: get the system into an initial state, exercise the code, check that it has the desired effect on the state. Manual edge cases: no advice given, just a note that skill here is a sign of a senior engineer. Automated tests: should demonstrate the change like Manual happy paths but also fail if the change is reverted. He notes that, even though LLM tooling can write automated tests, it's humans who are accountable for the code and it's on us to "include evidence that it works as it should." Coincidentally, just the week before I read his post I told one of my...

On Herding Cats

Last night I was at the Cambridge Tester meetup for a workshop on leadership. It was a two-parter with Drew Pontikis facilitating conversation about workplace scenarios followed by an AMA with a group of experienced managers. I can't come to work this week, my cat died. Drew opened by asking us what our first thoughts would be as managers on seeing that sentence. Naturally, sadness and sympathy, followed by a week ? for a cat ? and I only got a day for my gran! Then practicalities such as maybe there's company policy that covers that , and then the acknowledgement that it's contextual: perhaps this was a long-time emotional support animal . Having established that management decisions are a mixture of emotion, logic, and contingency Drew noted that most of us don't get training in management or leadership then split us into small groups and confronted us with three situations to talk through: Setting personal development goals for others. Dropping a clange...

Great Shot, Kid

This week I've been playing with altwalker , a model-based testing tool. To get the hang of it, I attempted to build a very simple model of a workflow that is supported by the service my team owns. Hacking away at the example code, and looking frequently at the docs, I was able to get up and running in a few hours, creating: a basic model: nodes for system states, edges for operations simple assertions: mainly consistency checks on the states client: HTTP client to implement the operations against the service's API I configured this so that altwalker will perform a random walk of the model, starting state data is randomised, and the client will choose randomly whenever offered an option. Why so much randomness? Because it means that, over successive runs, more of the infinite space of possible workflow executions will be covered. Once I had that basically working I wrote a shell script that would run this loop a number of times: call altwalker ...

Bottom-up or Top-down?

The theme at LLEWT this year was Rules and constraints to ensure better quality. My experience report concerned a team I'd been on for several years which developed (bottom-up) a set of working practices that we called team agreements. The agreements survived "natural" variation such as people leaving and joining and even some structural reorganisation which preserved most of the team members but changed the team's responsibilities or merged in a few people from a disbanded team. The agreements did not, however, persist through a significant round of (top-down) redundancies where the team was merged with two others. I'm interested in thinking about the ways in which constraints on how people work affect the work and whether there are patterns that could help us to apply the right kinds of constraints at times they are likely to be useful. I'm going to use this post to dump my thoughts. My starting po...

LLEWT 2024

This weekend I was at LLEWT 2024, a peer conference on Anglesey , north Wales, discussing communication. Given the day jobs of the participants, it was no surprise that the experience reports and the conversations that followed them mostly focussed on software development contexts. Notes from my presentation are in Express, Listen, and Field . I made sketchnotes (below) for each presentation and a mindmap (above) to try to summarise the whole. Without much reflection yet, I guess I would pull these common high-level threads from the day: There are multiple reasons that communication fails ... like, duh! ... but having multiple strategies for framing a message can help ... and having multiple tactics for delivering a message can help too. Understanding what you want from an interaction is key ... so setting the context to make that more likely is wise ... which might mean meta-conversation, being transparent, or changing your approach...

Exploring It!

This week the test team at Linguamatics held our first internal conference. There was no topic, but three broad categories could be seen in the talks and workshops that were given: experience reports, tooling, and alternative perspectives on our work. (The latter included the life cycle of a bug, and psychology in testing.) My contribution was an experience report looking at how I explore both inside and outside of testing. I've tidied up some of my notes from the prep for it below. There are testing skills that I use elsewhere in my life. Or perhaps there are skills from my life that I bring to testing. Maybe I'm so far down life's road that it's hard to tell quite what started where? Maybe I'm naturally this way and becoming a tester with an interest in improvement amped things up? Maybe I've so tangled up my work, life, and hobby that deciding where one starts and another ends is problematic? The answers to those questions is, I think, almost certai...

Hiccupps

Search This Blog