Hiccupps

I was guest speaker for a software testing class at EC Utbildning  a couple of weeks ago. I talked about one of my hobby horses — using automation to amplify my ability to explore — and I'll give the same talk at the Ministry of Testing Cambridge next Tuesday. Perhaps you can make it? Chatting with the Swedish students on the call before my presentation I asked what they liked about testing and, as no-one seemed to want to go first, I gave my own answer: I enjoy testing because it mixes technical, social, and intellectual challenges. And that's true but it isn't always enjoyable in the moment . Last week at work, in a small group session, I offered to share my screen while we tried to exercise and then, when it wasn't working, debug some new monitoring functionality. Honeycomb is a valuable tool, and I've used it plenty of times, but not at an expert level. The instrumentation we'd been developing is based on existing...

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...

  My daughter's high school requires its students to have access to a laptop at home for school work. The school's trust is a Microsoft shop so her computer needs MS Teams to be installed locally and she has access to the online Office 365 suite through a school account. No problem, right? Yeah, right, until it was. Last year sometime she complained to me that she couldn't log in. When she tried she was confronted with a dialog box "Your Organization requires you to change your pin" that wouldn't let her proceed with setting a " Hello PIN ".  I have an account on her machine (because of course ) and I found that I was getting the same problem and the same message. But which organisation is this? I don't want to sound too full of myself but I am the Lord of IT in our household organisation and I certainly didn't ask for this. Naturally, I did some research online and on her machine ... after reluctantly setting th...

Last weekend I participated in the LLandegfan Exploratory Workshop on Testing (LLEWT) 2024, a peer conference in a small parish hall on Anglesey, north Wales. The topic was communication and I shared my sketchnotes and a mind map from the day a few days ago. This post summarises my experience report.  Express, Listen, and Field Just about the most hands-on, practical, and valuable training I have ever done was on assertiveness with a local Cambridge coach, Laura Dain . In it she introduced Express, Listen, and Field (ELF), distilled from her experience across many years in the women’s movement, business, and academia.  ELF: say your key message clearly and calmly, actively listen to the response, and then focus only on what is relevant to your needs. I blogged a little about it back in 2017 and I've been using it ever since. Assertiveness In a previous role, I was the manager of a test team and organised training for the whole ...

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...

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-- "What's the best format for a test plan?" I'll side-step the conversation about what a test plan is and just say that the format you should use is one th...

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...

In Cindy Lawless 's keynote at CAST 2022 we spent a few minutes testing a simple application as a group and then collaborated on a test report. The report was the kind of thing a team lead might be expected to provide to management before a software release in a traditional software shop but, with Cindy's guidance, we avoided dumb artefact counts, meaningless charts, and level-of-effort analysis rather than risk analysis. Cindy's report recipe is straightforward: summary, strategy, coverage, risks, bugs and other concerns.  She gave a nice summary of how this can be a simple and clean Slack message rather than the cumbersome slide deck that is often requested, and copy-pasted, although we did build a deck in the session. I think there are a handful of key points to take away: Management won't read it (all). Make the important stuff is concise, clear, and prominent.  The important stuff is what's important to them . What could affect business value? Don't let th...

  Rob Sabourin's Becoming a Code Listener session at Worqference has just finished. Although the presentation ostensibly covered technical practices, a recurring theme was how important collaboration is to establish shared understanding, intent, and context. During the Q&A, in response to a question about introducing code listening activities on a team where collaboration levels are low and testers have no access to source code, Rob dropped a beautiful analogy. As a student he used to go to high school dances. What he found was all the boys along one wall and all the girls along another. Not dancing. As a consultant he goes to client planning meetings. What he finds is testers sitting in the corner, silently, angry about the meetings being a waste of time. Not collaborating. Testers, if we want more satisfying interactions, if we want others to collaborate with us, if we want to show that we have something to offer, we have to step up and actively participate. It may feel revo...

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 ,  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--  "Will the testing be done by Friday?" If the question relates to some prior discussion about scenarios we've agreed to run through before Friday then I'll do my best to base my answer on experience gathered so far . How sim...

It takes a village to raise a child , they say. It can take a village to explore a piece of software. I noticed occasional spiky patterns of increased latency in the production data for a service I work on. Unfortunately for reproduction purposes, the requests contained personal information and so were not recorded. I experimented for a while but couldn't find a way to provoke the same shape behaviour. I spoke to the team whose library is invoked by that endpoint but we couldn't make it happen together either. I proposed that we log anonymised data under specific conditions to help diagnose the issue. My team agreed and our PO took the task of asking the relevant parties for approval. They gave it, we got the change made, tested, and deployed at the next opportunity. After that, as new occurrences of the issue began to appear, I collected and reviewed the data. It was unusual (and suspiciously so!) but my sight remained limited by the the systems I had access to. I reached out ...