Hiccupps

You can find Weinberg's famous Rule of Three in a variety of formulations. Here's a couple that showed up when I went looking just now ( 1 , 2 ): If you can't think of at least three things that might be wrong with your understanding of the problem, you don't understand the problem.  If I can’t think of at least three different interpretations of what I received, I haven’t thought enough about what it might mean.  At work I challenge  myself to come up with ideas in threes and, to keep that facility oiled , when I'm not testing I challenge myself to turn the crap joke I've just thought of into a triad.  By providing constraints on the problem I find the intellectual joking challenge usefully similar to the intellectual testing challenge. Here's an example from last week where, after I happened onto the first one, I constrained the structure of the others to be the same and restricted the subject matter to animals: If I had three pet lions I wo...

Most working days I go for a walk round the block after I've eaten my dinner. As I leave our office I've got two primary choices: lift or stairs. I say primary because there's obviously many things I could do at that point (although I have promised my wife that naked star jumps will not feature in my daily exercise regimen ... again). In any case I go for the stairs. At the bottom of the stairs I have two more choices: left or right. Each takes me to a different exit from the building but both open onto the circuit that I stroll round, and if I leave by one of them I will naturally arrive back at the other so there's (again, to the level of granularity that I care about) no significant difference between them. I can't go straight on at the bottom of the stairs because the lift is there and a u-turn sends me back into work so every day I am forced to make the choice - left or right.  And every day until recently I've been making that choice without any con...

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...

So the other day I bleeted  about how I like to write to help me collect my thoughts  and how that feels like a dialogue through the page. Somewhat ironically, you might think, I hadn't intended that action to be more than jotting down the realisation I'd just had.  But, of course, as soon as it was out there I began to challenge it, and by proxy myself. Here's a sample: "When I need to think through an issue, I write."  Really? Always? Does getting the ideas down free mental resource for inspection of the ideas?  Does making it concrete mean that it's easier to spot inconsistency? I know people who are adept at maintaining multiple views of a thing. When a different angle of attack is used a different kind of defence is made. The defences are not compatible, but because they are never seen together, this can be overlooked. Why didn't I talk about pictures? I draw a lot too. I recalled that James Lyndsay mentioned the other day that he makes ...

A trend is better than a snapshot, right? That's Joel Montvelisky, introducing the State of Testing Survey 2015 . I'm certainly in  favour of data  and I'd agree that a trend can be better than a snapshot. But if you want to know the state of some system right now for the investigation you're performing right now and you've no reason to think that right now is related to back then, then perhaps right now you'll take the snapshot, right? Openness and openness to challenge was one of the things I liked most about the previous, inaugural, survey. In the discussion between Jerry Weinberg and Fiona Charles about the results ( transcript here ) Weinberg's opening remarks include: We need to be careful on how we interpret this data [...] One way to look at the survey is that it’s giving information about what information we should be getting.  I'm looking forward to seeing what was learned. Image:  https://flic.kr/p/oq5E3x

When I need to think through an issue, I write. And when I do that I feel I'm having a dialogue with myself. I write. I challenge. I rewrite. I re-challenge. Within or across drafts. Dynamically or with reflection. At length or fleetingly. As a means to an end, or as an end in itself. It both clarifies and exposes the need for clarification. For me. When I asked on Twitter  I got a couple of useful references to similar things: The Feynman Technique Expressive Writing I'd be very interested in any others. Edit: I followed up on this post  later. Image:  https://flic.kr/p/5UWSs9

Linguamatics hosted James Lyndsay at the Cambridge Tester Meetup  last night. His workshop started with some improv games based on the work of Keith Johnstone  which, by exposing our awkwardness, showed us that we were conditioned to behave in certain ways, that we have patterns of operation. As testers we want to be free to think, investigate, explore, perform. A second round of exercises had us giving and receiving imaginary presents to illustrate the notions of offers and blocking . Here, one person creates a context for the other (the offer) which can be accepted or rejected, but both parties must be aware of the ways in which they might constrain that context (the block). For example, I might mime the shape of something to pass to my partner and then, as their hands reach for it, change the shape. This constitutes a block - I am not collaborating as fully as I might. Blocks come in many varieties; the receiver may block by not accepting the gift or refut...

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

A year ago, I wrote about reaching the milestone of 100 blog posts . Part of my initial challenge to myself had been to write regularly: Trying to post around once a week has been a useful discipline. If nothing else it's motivational. I've managed to carve out time even when life and work have been hectic ... Twelve months on and I was surprised to see that I'd gone past the 150 without noticing. Some of my motivation back when I started came from a bit of self-analysis: I started to think more deeply about what I was doing and how I was doing it and tried to tease out where my actions, intuitions, ideas and mistakes were coming from.  Now, having introspected  some more I realise that one of the things I'm getting out of blogging these days is the act itself. Phil Kay talked about "keeping loose" in the interview I quoted  recently and Rick Rubin , describing Eminem , said much the same thing  in another: he is always writing ... he knows 99% of ...

Phil Kay is a stand-up comedian known for his love of live work and improvisation. In his interview  for The Comedian's Comedian  recently he said some things that resonated with me. When he's talking about the impression others may have that there are rules of improvisation, I'm thinking about testing: There's not a principle that I must avoid things I've done before ... There's plenty of room in the form for doing brand new things [but that's] not the aim, that I must do it brand new. When he's talking about how he constantly watches for and collects data that he hopes will come in useful later, that will help him to make connections and that will keep his mojo working when he's not on stage, I'm thinking about testing: I write notes all the time ... anything interesting that comes to me ... but [the notes] are not the thing. The thing is the fact that I'm watching out for stuff ... like a boxer keeping loose ... on stage I h...