Hiccupps

It was Father's Day recently and one of my daughters made me a card which I love for all sorts of reasons, not least because it says she sees me practising "dad philosophy": See a need, fill a need Sadly this particular gem is not mine, it belongs to Bigweld , a character in Robots . We watched that film loads when my kids were little and I quoted it to encourage them to contribute to the chores, not ignore a mess, and look for opportunities to help each other out.  So I can't claim credit but, hat tip to Bigweld, it is a mindset I use for myself at home and take with me to work. Image: Robots Wiki

I took my daughters to the  We're Here. Hi! Let's Play  pop-up exhibition about women in computer gaming that's running as part of  Where Did All The Women Go?  One display board caught my eye: Research shows that women play games just as much as men do. This fact is often dismissed using the argument that women don't play 'proper' games. A stereotype has emerged that women mostly play 'casual' titles, like puzzlers and tile-matching games, that shouldn't count in this research — but who gets to decide what gaming is? All forms of media have this problem: film buffs disparage blockbusters and literary critics dismiss genre fiction. The difference with gaming is that both sides are becoming gendered. Men are seen as the serious gamers and women as 'causals' with lower skill and investment in the medium. These attitudes risk excluding female players and preventing new ideas from flourishing in the industry. That situation is unlikely ...

Last month's Cambridge Tester meetup was puzzling. And one of the puzzles was an empty wordsearch that I'd made for my youngest daughter's "Crafternoon" fundraiser. At Crafternoon, Emma set up eight different activities at our house and invited some of her school friends to come and do them, with the entrance fee being a donation to charity. The idea of the wordsearch activity is simple: take the blank wordsearch grid and make a puzzle from it using the list of words provided. Then give it to someone as a present. If you fancy a go, download it here:  Animal Alphabet Wordsearch (PDF) (You're free to use it for your own workshops, meetups, team exercises or whatever. We hope you have fun and, if you do, please let us know about it and consider donating to an animal charity. Emma supports Wood Green .) After Crafternoon, I offered the puzzle to Karo for the Cambridge Tester meetup and she wrote about in Testing Puzzles: Questions, Assumptions, St...

Some time ago, maybe even a year ago now, one of my team said that she had been watching me. I acted cool - although that may have been the onset of a cold sweat - but fortunately my dark secrets remain mine and her observation was simply that, to her mind, I am always testing. She gave a couple of examples: When the test team were being given an expert-level product demo, I took notes not only on the functionality but also on the way that that information was being communicated to us, verbally and in slides, and I fed that back to the business because what we were watching was similar to the content of our customer demos. When I set a piece of work - for myself or others - I will frequently have a secondary aim other than simply getting the piece of work done, and that aim often has an evaluation or assessment element to it. And on reflection I think she's right. This is something that I have done, and do do. These days, I...

Colouring in affords great opportunity for mind-wandering, I find. And it was while I was assisting my eldest daughter in a felt pen marathon the other evening that I happened upon the thought that, to some approximation, colouring in is a coverage task: you start with a piece of paper empty save for lines  and set yourself a mission to cover paper with ink  until you have finished (by some criteria that matters to someone who matters).   Note that this does not mean that every square inch of paper has to be inked (although to my kids that often seems to be the goal). We'll typically achieve our desired level of coverage by slavishly observing the areas demarcated by lines. Or, rather, by doing our best to do that. Striving for this accuracy has a cost. For many pictures, particularly the very detailed ones my two daughters seem to be doing more and more these days, a significant cost is in the time taken to complete the task and another is the glaring obviousne...

Comedians and testers both know that the world can be different and strive to show how, in ways that mean something to someone else. I'm very interested in the connection between the creative processes in, and outcomes of, joking and testing.  The Comedian's Comedian podcast often tries to get into the methods that comedians use to come up with their material. Many times the comedians themselves don't know. There are some, like Phil Kay and Gary Delaney, who, while probably not philosophers of comedy - I don't recall ever hearing any conversation about theories of humour on the podcast, for example - are at least philosophers of their comedy . I got the impression that Spencer Jones is another who thinks about what he's thinking about, and how he thinks about it. Here's a couple of quotes from his recent interview that chimed with me as a parent, tester and manager. [Kids] are like comedians without any rules ... I've got this yellow box, it...

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? ...

Years ago I chucked a faulty video recorder and bought a cheap and compact PC to use as a PVR. (I run MythTV on Ubuntu, for those interested in such things.) Because me and Mrs Thomas don't watch telly that much, and record less, and because we're interested in not wasting electricity, we only have the box on when we're watching something on it or when we've scheduled something to record. Of course, sometimes that means that we have to remember  to leave it on. And we kept forgetting. But being a problem-solver, and interested in proportionate solutions, I implemented a quick fix. In fact it was more an initial trial, just a simple little sign that we stick next to the telly. It says VIDEO  and has served us so well that we found no need for anything more sophisticated. Until now. Our kids have come along and control the telly, operate the computer and so on. We're helping them to become interested in not wasting electricity too, and so their habit is to...

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...

  A friend, talking about running a project, said to me last week "it's like the partially-sighted leading the blind". Ian Jack, talking about his dad, wrote in the Guardian  at the weekend: "[As a child] I had no idea how new this was ... I imagined he had always known how to do these things ... of course he had to teach himself, listening to the helpful hints of [others] and reading books" Yep, implementation in an environment where tasks are not simply rote reproductions is often like this, e xploratory . You'll feel your way, based on what advice, experiment, evidence, research, intuition and experience you have. If you're sensible, and able, you'll set up feedback systems to help you know when you're going off track (and hopefully you'll know what on-track looks like). When leading others through it too, I find  that I want to be up front about the extent to which I feel like I know what I'm doing and be prepared to outline...

I'm wary of drawing parallels between managing and parenting, of analogising my team with my children (in a forum that I know some of them read, at least) but I find the proposition in “Helping” Versus “Being a Helper”: Invoking the Self to Increase Helping in Young Children   very appealing. Essentially it suggests that subtle differences in language used to describe behaviour can have an effect on observed behaviour. In the paper, the authors run experiments where they ask children to "be a helper" or "to help" and find that the former results in significantly more helpful actions. Even when the children are doing something else that they regard as enjoyable, they're more likely to stop it and help if they were asked to be a helper. There's similar research in adults linking the noun version of a behaviour more strongly to a sense of self than the verb version, both positively and negatively. For instance people are less likely to cheat when aske...

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, ...

You can learn a lot from your kids, and not just how much you hate High School Musical 1, 2 and friggin' 3. I play a game with my daughters (Hazel aged 5, Emma aged 3) that we call Follow the Leader, dreamed up one rainy afternoon. It's like the traditional game except that you play it on paper: one person draws something and the others have to copy along. When the pictures are finished we line them up and see how they compare. Here's three of our efforts from one recent game. In order below, Emma was the leader, Hazel sat next to her and I was on the other side of the table (click to enlarge the images): Emma likes to work bottom-up, incrementally building the big picture and often jumping from detail to detail without giving much, if any, indication of how they interconnect and which are the most significant. This is fine for her - she's a late-binding kind of leader - but it makes it harder for the followers to be sure they're building up the right...