Hiccupps

So I submitted a short piece to The Ministry of Testing . A bit of fluff, really. An amusing (I thought, but remember that I do laugh at my own jokes most of the time) conceit. An animal-based classification of the brokenness of software. The editor,  Simon , asked me to tidy it, to tighten it, to tweak it. I tidied, tightened, tweaked and teased out the core thought more clearly. And then suddenly it was an e-book. With monster graphics. Get it here: My Software Under Test and Other Animals . Image:  http://www.flickr.com/photos/penguinbookaday/6911565003

I am not Ben Simo and this is not exactly a security issue at Healthcare.gov  but I was surprised to find that when I searched for Stoke on Trent at Premier Inn 's web site I was given a list of matches that included Abu Dhabi and Dubai ahead of the less glamorous but geographically more plausible Crewe and Uttoxeter. As I was on a mission to get a hotel near my brother's house at a price I was prepared to pay over Christmas I sailed gaily on past this oddity and, despite being a little frustrated by other aspects of the search result presentation and site navigation, booked the room I needed pretty easily. After that I went back and with a couple of minutes poking about, found that results are a mixture of at least proximity and quite relaxed string matching. In the case above, on appears in Abu Dhabi Exhibition Centre, Abu Dhabi International Airport, Dubai Silicon Oasis Authority (DSOA) and others. (Although searching for just on does not find Stoke-on-Trent.) ...

It's not a  typo , the title. I've been thinking about how - like a professional critic - a professional tester frequently needs to bridge the gap between the connoisseur and the consumer, to take the desires, constraints, needs, sensitivities and complaints of both into account when trying to make sense of and assess a product. I used to spend a lot of time on music: I'd listen to tens of new records every week and go to gigs all the time. I could, and did, talk about subtleties of a drum sound, listen to tracks because of who produced them, argue about whether this or that 12" single was dark acid techno or acid dark techno or dark/acid techno or whatever. I would play records because I appreciated technical aspects of the sounds on them as much, if not more than, the music. I would deliberately seek out ever more subtle or challenging sonic experiences, such as   Dog Pound Found Sound  (which I actually played on the radio). Or records made by someone linked t...

"Testing helmets the old fashion way" the tweet said. "It'd be better if that was a brick wall " one of my team said. "Yeah, that is  what the specs asked for" I said. And how we all laughed, for just a little too long, those sad chuckles of shared recognition. Image:  tweet

The other day Michael Bolton tweeted this "Art" is the activity of directing attention to things and providing affordances for interpretations. Which is why testing IS an art. I love this tweet not least because it itself affords so much opportunity for interpretation. I'm intrigued by its possibilities. I found myself picking at it, perhaps even  factoring it. A few thoughts ... "Art" is quoted. Are these  scare quotes ? Do they suggest some uncertainty, disagreement or ironic intent? Or are they merely an alternative to some stylistic markup such as bold font that you might see in a dictionary definition? "Is" is emphasised in the second sentence. On that verb, that kind of marker might signify a refutation of some other assertion. Could that be the case here? What else might it be contributing? Both "art" and "an art" are used. The former is frequently defined in terms of beauty whereas the latter is usually applied ...

More quotes from  The Complete Plain Words : George Saintsbury denounced the futility of trying to 'draw up rules and conventions for a language that is almost wholly exception and idiom'.  Jespersen preached that the grammar of a language must be deduced from a study of how good writers of it in fact write, not how grammarians say it ought to be written. Forget the debate about whether testing is art or science. I'm wondering: is testing a language ? Image: phpSyntaxTree

Happenstance. Ideally, I wouldn't have been reading two books at once. But I'd already started the one when the Dev manager chucked the other onto my desk as he stalked past, wild-eyed from some meeting, en route to the kitchen for a caffeine salve to the throbbing vein in his forehead. Intrigued (with the book not the vein, I've seen that plenty of times now), I started flicking through it, got hooked and then alternated between it and my own over the next few days, seeing the connections that both made to the, ah, idea that ideas (or lack of them) can be a problem. The Dev manager's book , Fooled by Randomness by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, talks about consequences of an insufficient grasp of potential outcomes. Taleb's domain is financial markets and the instruments that populate them and he attributes the false confidence of many traders - and the population at large, by generalisation - to a lack of understanding of first possible scenarios and second the abil...

Honestly? I usually find non-fiction books hard work but I'm reading The Complete Plain Words like a thriller (see also Long Time Gone ). I've only just started but I love quotes like these on clarity: 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.  Mistiness is the mother of safety. We need to choose the right words to make our position clear. If we don't, the words will make clear our position. Image: http://flic.kr/p/627MJn   Sounds: If I Could Only Remember My Name  

Of course (of course!) we were delighted to be asked to provide test support for an internal project which was upgrading an important and widely-used application and rationalising the data associated with it. Of course (of course!) the many application instances are intended to be standardised but, despite best efforts to be consistent, over time we've built up a load of special cases, workarounds, emergency patches and so on, all of which make this kind of migration task more difficult. Of course (of course!) the deadline was both close and ambitious but there was enough time for us start to write automation to obtain a client-side view of the data and configuration on each instance (via an API) to provide an initial audit and then agree policy for migration with the various stakeholders based on that. We then extended the test code to generate an expectation of the equivalent client-side view for each server on its migrated instance which we'd check (via equivalent API) ...

I have seen the look in a colleague's eye: "blah blah tester bleating on again". I have read a series of very short blog posts by Michael Bolton. Between a blog and a tweet. Blog. Tweet. Blog/tweet. Blogtweet. Bleet. Bleet? Bleet! I have a dream of testers blurting bleets with a tool called Blitter (or is Bitter better?) in, ooh, just 512 characters. I have a feeling that it wasn't implemented in this iteration. I see DIY bleets in blogs instead! I say: Testers, let's bleet ! Image: http://flic.kr/p/bjgTJ6 P.S. Other attempts to portmanteau blog & tweet .