Hiccupps

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--  "Why don’t we replace the testers with AI?" We have a good relationship so I feel safe telling you that my instinctive reaction, as a member of the T...

Tonight I attended What could possibly go wrong? Ethics and software development with Fiona Charles and James Christie , hosted by Quare Meetcast .  I could listen to Fiona and James talk on this all day. Although they both protested that they are practitioners rather than philosphers, the ethics of the software business is a topic they've both lived and thought long and hard about. Here's a handful of points that stood out for me: Act ethically for the benefit of society. Not focussing only on the cash, but instead on the quality and value, will make customers happy and result in fewer software-related disasters. Don't be ethical in secret. If you find unethical activity, evaluate your level of comfort in your workplace, and the risk you'd take by blowing the whistle, and then either blow it or leave if you possibly can. It's possible for an organisation to be carelessly unethical. We can help them to avoid this by asking "what could possibly go wrong?...