Hiccupps

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...

Jerome Groopman, in How Doctors Think , reviews ways in which doctors can make poor choices, identifies potential causes, and suggests some practices, for both doctor and patient, that can help to prevent them. I find this interesting for a couple of reasons: first, I work in the health space, although not in a therapeutic area and, second, I like to reflect on my own thought processes. I'll take three broad themes from Groopman's analysis: the business of healthcare and how that impacts a physician's ability to practice; the doctor-patient relationship and how that impacts the experience of both sides; and the cognitive failings that impact a correct and timely diagnosis for any given patient. Naturally, these overlap. The book is written from the perspective of the notoriously commercialised American medical system and is around 20 years old, so doubtless some of the details are different outside of the US and have changed since pu...

In simpler times you had to go out of your way to find useless motivational banalities. There'd be an aisle in the shops that you could easily avoid or a spot on the office kitchen wall next to the milk rota that you could stare straight past while the kettle boiled and you fantasised about another job.  These days, unless you've vacated social media, it's much harder to avoid having decontextualised generalities with a side of misleading infographics thrust in your face. I scroll hard past that crap but I was reminded of one that comes around frequently the other day. It goes something like these ( 1 , 2 , 3 ): "Ready to unlock your 38X potential in just one year?" "Imagine being offered a 365% return on any investment!" "Every day: 1% stack or 1% slide. You choose." Naturally, "better" and "return" and "stack" are pretty vague and the directions for achieving these easy wins are even more so...

Whatever our workplace constraints, we have agency over our own actions and the choices we make impact us, those around us, and the work we do together. We'd prefer to make good choices, naturally, but good for who, when, why? In a short talk that I gave to one of my teams this week, I pulled out nine heuristics for working that have served me well over the years. Heuristics are rules of thumb: things that generally give the right kinds of result but are fallible, a good default but not a guarantee.   The talk covered three core areas: being clear to yourself and others navigating relationships doing the work effectively and here's the slides: You'll notice that there are no credits in the slides themselves. Instead I linked to blog posts where I've pointed to the sources and commented on the interpretation I've taken, or the use I've made, or the value I've extracted. That's important, because these ar...

  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...

In Episode 10 of The Guilty Tester podcast Dave Duke took questions from the Twitterverse . The first one was this: Think of a piece of work you’ve done recently, what did you actually do to test it and looking back, what surprised you? In his answer, Dave told a story about a recent series of bugs, his involvement in sharing knowledge about them, and how that prompted an unexpected fix. It's a nice story, but a different reading of the original question interests me too: how do we  test our own work? As he was asking for more questions, I suggested it to him, and he tweeted back : That's an interesting question. Back at you though. Do you test your own work differently to how you test others? Do you practice what you preach? Is it realistic to expect people to test their own work the same as they test others? Is there an advantage though. Juicy! I didn't want to spend loads of time trying to craft an answer into a sequence of 240-character soundbites but I lik...

For a while now I've been collecting  fieldstones  on the topic of  heuristics for working . Some of these are things that I've said to others, some of them are things that I've thought about when considering some aspect of myself or how I work, and others have come from books I've read, talks I've attended, and workshops I've participated in. I've made a handful of rough categorisations and I'll put each set in a post under the tag  Heuristics for Working . But what do even I mean by heuristics for working? Good question. I mean rules of thumb for situations that arise in the workplace. They are bits of advice that can be useful to consider but don't offer any guarantees and will not always apply. The collection is surely idiosyncratic, context-sensitive and perhaps too specific and too general in turn. Welcome to my head. I haven't sat down and tried to elaborate or enumerate more, or to try to fill the gaps. Everything here has aris...

For a while now I've been collecting  fieldstones  on the topic of  heuristics for working . Some of these are things that I've said to others, some of them are things that I've thought about when considering some aspect of myself or how I work, and others have come from books I've read, talks I've attended, and workshops I've participated in. I've made a handful of rough categorisations and I'll put each set in a post under the tag  Heuristics for Working . But what do even I mean by heuristics for working? Good question. I mean rules of thumb for situations that arise in the workplace. They are bits of advice that can be useful to consider but don't offer any guarantees and will not always apply. The collection is surely idiosyncratic, context-sensitive and perhaps too specific and too general in turn. Welcome to my head. I haven't sat down and tried to elaborate or enumerate more, or to try to fill the gaps. Everything here has arisen...

For a while now I've been collecting  fieldstones  on the topic of  heuristics for working . Some of these are things that I've said to others, some of them are things that I've thought about when considering some aspect of myself or how I work, and others have come from books I've read, talks I've attended, and workshops I've participated in. I've made a handful of rough categorisations and I'll put each set in a post under the tag  Heuristics for Working . But what do even I mean by heuristics for working? Good question. I mean rules of thumb for situations that arise in the workplace. They are bits of advice that can be useful to consider but don't offer any guarantees and will not always apply. The collection is surely idiosyncratic, context-sensitive and perhaps too specific and too general in turn. Welcome to my head. I haven't sat down and tried to elaborate or enumerate more, or to try to fill the gaps. Everything here has arisen...

For a while now I've been collecting fieldstones on the topic of heuristics for working . Some of these are things that I've said to others, some of them are things that I've thought about when considering some aspect of myself or how I work, and others have come from books I've read, talks I've attended, and workshops I've participated in. I've made a handful of rough categorisations and I'll put each set in a post under the tag Heuristics for Working . But what do even I mean by heuristics for working? Good question. I mean rules of thumb for situations that arise in the workplace. They are bits of advice that can be useful to consider but don't offer any guarantees and will not always apply. The collection is surely idiosyncratic, context-sensitive and perhaps too specific and too general in turn. Welcome to my head. I haven't sat down and tried to elaborate or enumerate more, or to try to fill the gaps. Everything here has arisen an...