Hiccupps

  It's all relative. There's enough wrong in the world that having an imperfect job in tough economic times is still a privilege that many would cherish.  And yet, in its own isolated context, the daily grind can genuinely feel like being physically ground down, minced, fragmented.  Which is why it's important to find a glimmer of joy where you can. And I found one this week, in the accidental coining of the word cliction, a portmanteau of click and friction,  while exploring the user experience of a new front end. It doesn't solve any global, or even local, problems, but it raised a few smiles and lifted a few eyebrows, and improved my mood. I hope sharing it can do the same for you. Image: Gemini , " A close-up view of a human finger (drawn simply) gently touching or hovering over a single, large computer mouse button"

  I was in the shed earlier on, spraying the footrest I've made for my daughter a metallic purple.  As I ghosted the can back and forth, a waft of paint drifted onto the workbench adding another colourful contribution to the happenstance Pollock that's been building up since I fished the boards out of a skip in the centre of town *cough* years ago. That's not to mention the various scratches, cuts, dents, dinks, and drill holes that pepper the surface. Yes, I thought to myself, this bench has a real patina . On seeing my bench, a fellow maker and fixer would recognise it. The layers and shapes are archeological evidence of the variety of activities at different times, with different materials, operated on by different tools.  Which got me thinking: how and where am I building up patina in my work in testing? And how would anyone ever see it? And would they be able to appreciate it if they did? Edit: I followed up with a few ideas in A Testing Patina

Over Christmas I thought I'd have a look at ChatGPT . Not to "break" it, or find more examples of its factual incorrectness , but to explore it sympathetically, for fun. And it was fun. In particular, the natural language generation and understanding capabilities of the system are really impressive. However, even without trying it's not hard to expose weaknesses in the tool. So much so that I doubt I would have bothered to blog about what I found, except that I enjoyed the accidental semantic connection between a handful of my observations. I asked for ASCII art to celebrate my 600th blog post on software testing and got this whopper! . .: :: :; ;: .;; .;;: ::;: :;;: ;;;: ...

I recently flew from London to Austin, Texas and back. It's a tedious flight in both directions and despite my thick book, my lengthy podcast playlist, and a Kama Sutra of attempted sleeping positions, there were still times when I found myself at a loose end and decided to fiddle with the in-flight entertainment system. Here's a few of the fun things I found, where the pictures came out bearably ... Zooming in as far as possible to the destination, it appears the plane's trajectory ends before the airport. (Gulp!) There is some disagreement about how far it is to the destination (59km, 61km?) and, by zooming and rotating the view appropriately, Austin and Austin Airport (with the star) are apparently located adjacent to one another while somehow Austin also looks to be closer to the plane (just along the yellow path off screen to the right) and simultaneously further away (63km). On the way home now, and we've reached the end of the flight somewhere wes...

It's become an annual tradition in our team to run a Testing Can Be Fun session at Christmas. In them, we'll do a group activity that exercises our testing muscles in a context outside of our usual work, have a laugh, and eat something sweet. The first one was back in 2009 and saw us evaluating panettone, stollen, and mince pies as candidates for integration with our forthcoming Christmas Dinner product (or some other thin pretext to scarf multiple portions of cake) and it just carried on. Why Testing Can Be Fun ? To be honest, this far away in time, I forget why I chose the name. I mean, no-one's saying we don't have fun the rest of the year. At least, not to my face... Aaaaaanyway, last week we got together with a big box of traditional British Christmas biscuits and Decrypto . It's a team game where the objective is to communicate codes securely to your team mates and to intercept and decrypt the codes transmitted by the opposing team. Although it s...

Games that can say something about testing, then. Christmas brought a new one to our house, for my kids, from my Aunty Wendy. It's called Hedbanz and it's a game you probably already know as 20 Questions or Who Am I ? Essentially, each player takes a card and, without looking at its face, places it on a band around their head so that the other players can see it. The player then has a limited time to ask the others yes/no questions about their card, in an attempt to work out what it is. A typical game might go like this: Player: Am I alive? Players: no. Player: Am I manufactured? Players: no. Player: Do you find me in the home? Players: yes. And so on. A skill in the game is asking questions that together partition the space of all things in different ways to narrow down to a specific item. I like playing the game with my kids because it allows me to see their logic at work, and allows me to show them different strategies for getting to an answer. For our an...

The Test team book club read Lessons Learned in Software Testing  the other week. I couldn't find my copy at the time but Karo came across it today, on Rog 's desk, and was delighted to tell me that she'd discovered a bug in it...

I came across this quote in Managing the Unmanageable , attributed to Doug Linder: A good programmer is someone who looks both ways before crossing a one-way street. It made me chuckle - churlishly, childishly - as I imagined a developer crossing testing off their list because each time they'd happened to cross the street they'd implemented they'd checked it was working. Well, perhaps that some aspect of it wasn't not working , at that time, for that person, etc etc. Reflecting as I write this, I wonder if I'd been having a bad day... Anyway, I offered the quote to the Test team at Linguamatics yesterday, along with mince pies, and posed a different question as part of our annual festive Testing Can be Fun session (see also The So in Absolute , Last Orders , Further Reading , Testing is Like Making Love ): What might a “good” tester say or do, when encountering a one-way street? Ten minutes allowed, and as many mince pies as you can eat. Stick your a...

I've written before (e.g.  1 , 2 ) about how I like to find fun ways to challenge my children to think about the world and the part they play in it, how they interact with it and others, about the things they take for granted and what possibilities there might be in what they know and what scope there is for possibilities they haven't considered. Some mornings that means we play games, or listen to some records they haven't heard before, or try to make up jokes or songs or noises ("who can do the dirtiest raspberry?") or silly rhymes. Yesterday the conversation over breakfast was Barbie and bickering, and, desperate for something else, I blurted out: "Let's think of some things that fly." Daughters: Plane, bird, space ship, aeroplane ... Me: Isn't aeroplane the same as plane? Daughters: No. They're pulling the 'Duh!' face. The spelling seems to be enough to make a difference to them here. Me: Can you think of any more? ...

If you give yourself some space you can usually find another perspective. I'm British, and so European, but wouldn't call myself a star and I rarely look at warez these dayz.  I am speaking at EuroSTAR next week, though:  eurostarsoftwaretesting.com . Image:  https://flic.kr/p/mwHHWC

We're used to talking about delivering what the stakeholders want (or perhaps what they need, to the extent that we or they understand either). You'd generally hope to find at least one stakeholder engaged directly in a project - if not, it's likely doomed - and sometimes more. These stakeholders are known, their role is clear, perhaps a Product Owner and domain expert, and they are given the opportunity to state their requirements in some way. And if they aren't, the project is probably still doomed. Some stakeholders exert little influence even when directly engaged. They are present and visible but quiet, or even silent. (Often until quite late on when they reveal that they really wanted something else and, at this point, the project is doomed.) The reasons for this are many and varied and include that they are shy, they are out of their depth, they suffer from impostor syndrome, they don't get on with someone else on the team, they doubt the value of the p...

I've had a nice reaction to Only Kidding , a post about how I try to help my kids experience wonder, take control and look for scope in the world around them. So here's something else that we've been doing recently which I like to think is fun, thought-provoking and stimulates creative problem solving. I'll say something like this to them: I've got a problem; I'm on one side of the river and all my toys are on the other. I want to get to my toys ... but the only thing I've got to help me is food . It's always food. And then it's on them to come up with suggestions. Answers to that one included: make a raft out of breadsticks glued together with Nutella throw bread into the river until it absorbs all of the water make a dam out of sausages use half an Easter egg as a ladle to empty the river throw piles of chocolate into the river and use them as stepping stones We've established a few conventions as we've played, for exampl...

For the last week of the recent school holidays I was off work to look after my daughters, Hazel (7) and Emma (6). Amongst other things designed to occupy time and tire them out we went to the Centre for Computing History  in Cambridge and on an adventure walk. The Centre for Computing History is a bit of a nostalgia trip for me - Atari VCS , ZX Spectrum , Gorf (sadly not playable when we went) and the rest - but my girls don't carry that baggage and for them it stands or falls on its own merits. Although we did enter and run the classic BASIC program on the BBC micros (they chose to PRINT insulting things about their dad, naturally) the two things that really got them fired up were Big Trak and an Oculus Rift headset. Big Trak is a 1980's toy moon rover with a keypad on the top for entering simple programs in a Logo-like language. The programs control forwards and backwards movement, rotation and the rover's lights. We spent ages experimenting with what they could...

So my wife caught me giggling to myself in the kitchen. Why? I'd just seen a really corny pun on peace and peas . It wasn't the "classic" above  but it was the same kind of thing. In fact, it wasn't the joke itself that had caused me to crack my face at all, but the thoughts spurred from the desire to make a better one from the same phonetic premise. The first thing I come up with is: Give Pisa chance This slight variation on the well-known punchline is a plausible sentence but to make it work as a joke I need a context that can produce it. I'm working backwards from a result to look for some setup in which it is coherent: Did you know that casinos are illegal in some parts of Italy? Apparently a bunch of gamblers held a candlelit protest overnight.  They were singing "All we are saying is give Pisa chance." This is also a testing pattern. When you're looking at responses from a system, a useful approach to finding potential issue...

Early yesterday morning I was setting up a bunch of scripts to run a bunch of requests against a bunch of servers in a bunch of permutations over the course of a few days. Bitter experience has taught me that this kind of thing rarely works right the first time so if I can, I find a way to start with a small version of the setup.  Here, that meant choosing a sensible subset of the requests, letting things run for a few minutes, keeping an eye on progress (files created in the right place, servers generating the kind of messages, execution times reasonable, CPU load and number of processes in the right ballpark and so on) and then inspecting logs at the end. As I worked the bugs out of the configuration I had a little time to kill on each iteration. But what to do? I'd stumbled across a couple of haiku I'd enjoyed just the day before and I'd been pondering something  Chris George  had said about factory testers during  Cambridge Lean Coffee  last w...

When I was a boy there was a huge department store in Birmingham called  Lewis's  and one year I got a badge from its Christmas Grotto. Meet Me At Lewis's it said. Meet Meat Lewis's I read. I like to think  this was an early indication that I was alert to alternative interpretations ... because the alternative interpretation isn't very appealing. And I like to keep that in mind when I'm reporting an issue ... because there is invariably an alternative to my interpretation and it might be more appealing. Image: Badge Collectors Circle

In a job interview once, the candidate said to me All software requires regression testing and I said   All software requires regression testing? (I didn't think I could put stress on  regression testing  as well. It might have sounded like I was shouting.) The candidate said - after a reasonably lengthy pause - simply Yes.  When reporting something as apparently absolute, I want my testers to caveat, to contextualise, to define the scope of the statement I'm saying X, so long as ... When presented with an unequivocal, absolute, universal statement, I want my testers to be thinking about the ramifications, to be testing it You're saying X,  so  what about ... Well, if I want to stay on the right side of Batman, I want them to do those things so far as it makes sense in their context. So here's a bit of seasonal fun: what scenarios can you think of where software doesn't require regression testing? Be as creative as you like and stuff...

I've read a lot of Dr Seuss books over the years and McElligot's Pool is one of my favourites, in part because of this passage, spoken by a boy after being told he's wasting his time fishing: "Hmmm ..." answered Marco, "It may be you're right. I've been here three hours Without one single bite. There might be no fish ...  "... But again, Well, there might! "  " Cause you never can tell What goes on down below!   "This pool might be bigger Than you or I know!" Testers, I give you McElligot's Rule* : when you're chasing a might on the basis of a  never-can-tell , it's worth putting your rod aside now and again to think about what you're tying to achieve, how, why and for who. * OK, heuristic , but we're rhyming today. Image: Amazon

I'm in a Scheme  study group run by  one of our developers  and based on Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs , a classic computer science textbook. This week, chatting about our homework opened up a Java discussion, specifically the way that a particular library class makes it easy to have code fail at run time rather than compile time. One developer said that the documentation made it clear how the class should be used so this was fine. The other developers were shocked that this was considered an acceptable defence. That's right: the developers said that, where the software enables the wrong thing, even though somewhere there is doc explaining the potential consequence of the wrong thing, expecting the users to do the right thing was unacceptable . Yes, really. We all laughed at the time but I've hardly stopped chuckling since. Image: Wikipedia

Display caption:  Any resemblance to software development activities, living or dead, is purely coincidental. [Fade from black to bright sunshine.] The Test Manager was out of the office looking after his kids at half term. They were on what they called an adventure walk where he'd made a list of stuff for them to find on the stroll down to the river for a picnic. Their favourite on this journey was the window of wheels which they worked out in the end was a bike shop. (No, really, they actually asked for this.) When he returned to work the following week, nominally refreshed, the Test Manager found a jumper neatly folded and smelling freshly laundered on his desk. Tester 1, who sits behind him, said that BD, a member of the BizDev team, had left it there for him. The Test Manager was flattered. It was a tracksuit top affair, snazzy, and just the kind of thing he'd like. BD was quite a sporty chap and bigger than him, so perhaps it had got a bit tight and BD, ...