Hiccupps

The other day I got tagged on a Twitter conversation between a couple of my colleagues, Ben Dowen and Dan Ashby , which ended with Ben citing me as an example: But there is a trap, in that a Dev who Tests, or Tester who codes both risk becoming Test Automators ... The counter argument is Testers who code can do as @qahiccupps does, and use and build tools to explore. A jumble of thoughts tumbled out as I read it and here they are, in no particular order. It is flattering to be mentioned but I'm far from the only person doing this. Maaret Pyhäjärvi   and Rob Sabourin are vocal about the value it can bring and go out of their way to tell and teach others how to get it. Ben is right when he says I use coding as a tool, and as a tool factory. It's a means to an end. Coding itself doesn't give me a lot of pleasure. Having created a useful thing gives me an enormous amount of pleasure. I am not a great developer. But then I rarely need to be.   Yes, I have made bug fixes that...

Tonight's Atlanta Quality Assurance Association meetup was an interview, of Harry Collins by Michael Bolton , on the topic The Impact of AI on Software Testing. Collins' definition of artificial intelligence is "the ability to pass a demanding Turing Test." This kind of test requires knowledge of, and reasoning about, the society in which the dialogue is taking place. He gave an example from Roald Dahl's Big Friendly Giant where snozzcumber is considered an acceptable name for an imaginary vegetable, but shitcumber probably wouldn't be.  That may seem obvious to us, but on what basis would a machine learning algorithm fed tons of textual data, perhaps scraped from the chaotic mess that is the internet, be able to tell? He relates this question to his taxonomy of expertise in which interactional expertise is what gives a conversational participant the language of practice — so much more than simply words and grammar — of their community. Although it's ...

Much of Definition of The Engineering Method by Billy Vaughn Koen chimes with what I've come to believe about testing.  In part, I think, this is because thinkers who have influenced my thinking were themselves influenced by Koen's thoughts. In part, also, it's because some of my self-learned experience of testing is prefigured in the article. In part, finally, it's because I'm reading it through biased lenses, wanting to find positive analogy to something I care about.  I recognise that this last one is dangerous. As Richard Feynman said in Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!: "I could find a way of making up an analog with any subject ... I don’t consider such analogs meaningful.”  This is a short series of posts which will take an aspect of Definition of The Engineering Method that I found interesting and explore why, taking care not to over-analogise. Getting Myself Koen Sota so Good Meta is Better The Tester as Engineer? --00-- The ...

I'm reading The Design of Everyday Things by Donald Norman on the recommendation of the Dev manager , and borrowed from our UX specialist . (I have great team mates.) There's much to like in this book, including a taxonomy of error types: at the top level this distinguishes slips from mistakes. Slips are unconscious and generally due to dedicating insufficient attention to a task that is well-known and practised. Mistakes are conscious and reflect factors such as bad decision-making, bias, or disregard of evidence. discussion of affordances: an affordance is the possibility of an action that something provides, and that is perceived by the user of that thing . An affordance of a chair is that you can stand on it. The chair affords (in some sense is for ) supporting, and standing on it utilises that support. focus on mappings: the idea that the layout and appearance of the functional elements significantly impacts on how a user relates them to their outcome. For examp...

Another of the capsule insights I took from The Shape of Actions by Harry Collins (see also Auto Did Act ) is the idea that a function of the value some technology gives us is the extent to which we are prepared to accommodate its behaviour. What does that mean? Imagine that you have a large set of data to process. You might pull it into Excel and start hacking away at its rows and columns, you might use a statistical package like R to program your analysis, you might use command line tools like grep, awk and sed to cut out slices of the data for narrower manual inspection. Each of these will have compromises, for instance: some tools have possibilities for interaction that other tools do not have (Excel has a GUI which grep does not) some tools are more specialised for particular applications (R has more depth in statistics than Excel) some tools are easier to plug into pipelines than others (Linux utilities can be chained together in a way that is apparently trickier in R ...

You are watching me and a machine interacting with the same system. Our actions are, to the extent that you can tell from your vantage point, identical and the system is in the same state at each point in the sequence of actions for both of us. You have been reassured that the systems are identical in all respects that are relevant to this exercise; you believe that all concerned in setting it up are acting honestly with no intention to mislead, deceive, distort or otherwise make a point. The machine and me performed the same actions on the same system with the same visible outcomes. Are we doing the same task? This is a testing blog. You are a tester. You have been around the block. More than once. You perhaps think that I haven't given you enough information to answer this question with any certainty. What task is being performed? Are the visible outcomes the only outcomes? To what extent does skill and adaptability form part of the task? To what extent does interpretation...

My kids begged to go to the Funky Fun House this half-term. I've got nothing against these soft play barns particularly - I've been to stacks of them - but, for me, there's generally little that's funky about echoing industrial spaces crammed with primary-coloured foam, covered in crumbs and reeking of decades worth of half-eaten fish and chips. To be fair, though, this one is in a (ware) house and the girls do have a lot of fun . In fact, I used to have fun too when they wanted me to play on the thing with them. These days they just see me as the shoe and coat monitor and provider of snacks. (Oh, and somone to take the mickey out of in front of their friends.) And that's how it went down this time too, except that I was engrossed in a book called Are We All Scientific Experts Now? by Harry Collins . A book I read in its entirety at my sticky table, that blocked out the noise of the toddlers in the padded prison enclosure that I'd ended up sitting next t...