The Enchanted Hammer

You know The Law of the Instrument in one form or another. Wikipedia attributes this version to Maslow:

I suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail.

Which is insightful, but it belongs to a simpler, slower era.

Today the problem is not whether you have a range of tools. It's still less whether you know how to use them, and it's not remotely about knowing when.

No, today the problem is that we don't have to bother, and many of us don't.

I suppose it is tempting, if you have an enchanted hammer, to treat everything as if it were a who-cares-just-hit-it-for-me.

And if that's who we are now, what's happening to our craft?
Image: Geronimo Giqueaux on Unsplash

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 ...

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...

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...

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...

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...

Vanilla Flavour Testing

I have been pairing with a new developer colleague recently. In our last session he asked me "is this normal testing?" saying that he'd never seen anything like it anywhere else that he'd worked. We finished the task we were on and then chatted about his question for a few minutes. This is a short summary of what I said. I would describe myself as context-driven . I don't take the same approach to testing every time, except in a meta way. I try to understand the important questions, who they are important to, and what the constraints on the work are. With that knowledge I look for productive, pragmatic, ways to explore whatever we're looking at to uncover valuable information or find a way to move on. I write test notes as I work in a format that I have found to be useful to me, colleagues, and stakeholders. For me, the notes should clearly state the mission and give a tl;dr summary of the findings and I like them to be public while I'm working not just w...

Why Test, Test What, Then How?

There was a time when testing was all about the mnemonics . Well, we had no AI back then so thinking about our human craft and how to share what we had learned using our human intelligence with other engaged humans for later recall in their human heads seemed important. But this post isn't about dumping on AI. It isn't about mnemonics either even if WTTWTH does look like something that'd fit well into that ancient world. No, this post is just a snappier version of what I said to my team this week when I was walking through some testing I'd done the day before. It was concerned with a change to a particular turn in the dialog system we're building where multiple variables are in play, some populated by an external call to an LLM service. I wanted to make the point that the bulk of the testing work was done in the research I did and the spreadsheet I made, not in the interaction with our product. That spreadsheet was the result of me looking in our service's cod...

Exploratory Testing Reimagined

Maaret Pyhäjärvi gave a talk, Exploratory Testing Reimagined , last week. There's a blog post to go with it, so I won't say much on top of what's in my sketchnotes above, just pull out a few reflections. I don't have the data or wide range of experience reports that Maaret does, but my own anecdotal results from using AI tools for testing align closely with what she says in the talk. I have created skills to assist me, and my colleagues, in our testing work. For example, I used the contents of this blog and five years of test notes in my current role to distil a conversational workflow, facilitated by Claude, which runs through risk identification, test idea generation, and test mission creation. All four skills (the facilitation is its own skill) are backed by a fifth, on general testing theory and practice, and a sixth about how I like to interact with the AI: which notably includes that I want it to be concise, evidence-backed, well-structured, and critical. I st...

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...

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