Hiccupps

I'm slowly learning German ... for fun, believe it or not.  To limit my time commitment I've been mostly studying with lessons on apps or in-person supplemented by YouTube, ChatGPT, DeepL, blogs, an ancient CD-based box set that my well-meaning parents bought in a charity shop, subtitled German-language films and ... Peppa Wutz.   I've pushed ahead in some areas, for example by completing Babbel lessons all the way to  B2  even though I'm nowhere near speaking at that level, and starting again at  A1  even though I'm well past it. Being exposed to the advanced content can give some useful context, and redoing the basics can cement understanding, reinforce learning, and make connections that were missed the first time around. What I wasn't doing was rote learning verb conjugations, grammatical structures, or vocab lists. And that was fine for a long time, at least until I got good enough to have simple conversations...

I'm enjoying The Vernon Richard Show  a lot recently because the vibe Vern and Richard have created is one where two knowledgeable and experienced mates talk around a topic they are both interested in with curiosity and open minds.  Also, there's less football than there used to be. This week's show is titled When Everything Sounds Like Testing… How Do You Explain What You Really Do?  and sees the pair discussing the meanings of quality assurance, quality engineering, testing and other related terms. There's no firm conclusions, and enough left unsaid that they're carrying the dialogue over into the next episode, but I was still interested to see these two models put forward: In the first, proposed by Vernon, quality engineering consists of preventing bugs (QA) and detecting bugs (testing). In the second, floated by Richard almost in spite of his better judgement, quality assurance is the holistic term. In this ver...

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! . .: :: :; ;: .;; .;;: ::;: :;;: ;;;: ...

The other day I got tagged on a Twitter thread started by Wicked Witch of the Test about people with a background in linguistics who’ve ended up in testing. That prompted me to think about the language concepts I've found valuable in my day job, then I started listing them, and then realised how many of them I've mentioned here over the years .   This post is one of an occasional series collecting some of those thoughts.  --00-- In this series so far we've looked at words and syntax. In both cases we've found that natural language is an imprecise medium for communication. We might know the same words and grammar as others ... but they will have their own idea about what they mean ... and even where we agree there is ambguity ... and all of us, the world, and the language are evolving ... all the time. Today we'll add semantics which, in a pleasing twist, is itself ambiguo...

The other day I got tagged on a Twitter thread started by Wicked Witch of the Test about people with a background in linguistics who’ve ended up in testing. That prompted me to think about the language concepts I've found valuable in my day job, then I started listing them, and then realised how many of them I've mentioned here over the years .   This post is one of an occasional series collecting some of those thoughts.  --00-- If you're not familiar with the term syntax, you've probably heard of it by another name, grammar . It's the set of rules that defines the acceptable combinations of words in a language. Most native speakers have an instinctive grasp of it in their language, even if they were never taught it explicitly. Knowledge of English syntax is what can tell you that the first two of these are legitimate structures (even if the second makes no sense) and the third is not:  As a customer I want to log in using two-factor authentication to protect...

  The other day I got tagged on a Twitter thread started by Wicked Witch of the Test about people with a background in linguistics who’ve ended up in testing. That prompted me to think about the language concepts I've found valuable in my day job, then I started listing them, and then realised how many of them I've mentioned here over the years .   This post is one of an occasional series collecting some of those thoughts.  --00-- In The Complete Plain Words , Ernest Gowers notes, acidly, that: What appears to be a sloppy or meaningless use of words may well be a completely correct use of words to express sloppy or meaningless ideas. It surely sounds trite to say it but our choice of words can make a significant difference to how well our message is understood, and how we are judged. We choose from amongst those words we know, our lexicons . The more my lexicon agrees with yours,...

    The other day I got tagged on a Twitter thread started by Wicked Witch of the Test about people with a background in linguistics who’ve ended up in testing. That prompted me to think about the language concepts I've found valuable in my day job, then I started listing them, and then realised how many of them I've mentioned here over the years . Like all collaborative activities, software development requires a medium for communication. As humans we tend to choose language, written and spoken. This is great! Most humans come preinstalled with language. This is terrible! Most humans come preinstalled with ambiguous language and a huge blindspot about it. Who hasn't been in a conversation where it turns out that was delivered, despite being precisely what was asked for, turns out to be nothing like what was asked for?   We all know intuitively how low the signal-noise ratio can be, but the field of linguistics has terminology and theory that can help us to tease out w...

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...

At CEWT 3 I offered a definition of testing up for discussion. This is it: Testing is the pursuit of actual or potential incongruity As I said there , I was trying to capture something of the openness, the expansiveness of what testing is for me: there is no specific technique; it is not limited to the software; it doesn't have to be linear; there don't need to be requirements or expectations; the same actions can contribute to multiple paths of investigation at the same time; it can apply at many levels and those levels can be distinct or overlapping in space and time.   And these are a selection of the comments and questions that it prompted before, during and after the event, loosely grouped: Helicopter view it is sufficiently open that people could buy into it, and read into it, particularly non-testers. it's accurate and to the point. it has the feel of Weinberg's definition of a problem.  it sounds profound but I'm not sure whether there is a...

I was invited to the fifth Midlands Exploratory Workshop on Testing (MEWT) yesterday. In it, the MEWTs were asking:  What is Professional Testing? Wikipedia has this to say about what a professional is: A professional is a member of a profession or any person who earns their living from a specified activity.  Hmm. So what’s a profession then?  A profession is a vocation founded upon specialized educational training, the purpose of which is to supply disinterested objective counsel and service to others, for a direct and definite compensation, wholly apart from expectation of other business gain. (also from Wikipedia.)  In MEWT 5 we’ll be asking – what exactly does it mean to be a Professional Tester? And, since I already cited the quotes above. You won’t be allowed to. In fact, we’ll expect you to delve deep and reach far and wide into the many and varied facets of what it means to demonstrate professionalism in the face of a rapidly changing technol...

In his EuroSTAR 2015 talk, Iain McCowatt described an ongoing project which involves establishing testing principles for his teams, across projects. In a large organisation in a heavily-regulated environment such as his, this is a really significant challenge, but he described an interesting, pragmatic approach based on Simon Sinek's Golden Circle . While discussing the principles that he and his team arrived at, he said something slowly and with great emphasis: We really sweated the semantics. The principles are important. They are directly tied to and defined to support the purpose of testing for his company. They are the foundation for all decisions that will be made about testing in the company. As you might expect given this, he was careful to also define what he means by a principle. For the record, this is it: Principles are heuristics and shared values that guide our thinking about how to test and organize our testing.  I enjoyed Michael Bolton 's talk, No M...

Managing a complex set of variables, of variables that interact, of interactions that are interdependent, of interdependencies that are opaque, of opacities that are ... well, you get the idea. That can be hard. And that's just the job some days. Investigating an apparent performance issue recently, I had variables including platform, product version, build type (debug vs release), compiler options, hardware, machine configuration, data sources and more. I was working with both our Dev and Ops teams to determine which of these seemed most likely in what combination to be able to explain the observations I'd made. Up to my neck in a potential combinatorial explosion, it occurred to me that in order to proceed I was adopting an approach similar to the ideas behind chart parsing in linguistics. Essentially: keep track of all findings to date, but don't necessarily commit to them (yet) maintain multiple potentially contradictory analyses (hopefully efficiently) pack ...