Hiccupps

In the recent peer conference organised by the Association for Software Testing and BCS SIGIST we asked ourselves the question Should the Public Care about Software Testing? I summarised the presentations in Who Cares? a couple of weeks ago and now the AST and SIGIST have published a joint report which manages to pull together and contextualise both the presentations and a whole day of conversation into a coherent whole. The report outlines a number of risks around contemporary software development that it's thought the general public are largely not aware of, but suggests that people should only need to care about software testing to the extent that they can trust that experts have exercised good judgement about where, what, how, why, and when to test.  It goes on to propose three categories of approach for establishing public trust — push , publicise , and punish — where pushes are applied up front to influence behaviour during the devel...

I attended Rob Sabourin's talk Experiences in Exploratory Test Automation for the Test Tribe this morning. If I had to summarise it I'd say something like this:  it is a myth that exploratory testing cannot exploit programmable tools exploratory testing is deliberate learning using whatever tools are appropriate automation in exploratory testing can be one-shot, just good enough, targeted at learning Rob is preaching to my choir , and I've written about ways that I combine exploratory investigation with automation many times over the years, for example: But is it Automation? UI Testing Excellence Migrate Idea The Honest Womaniser Geek and Ye Shall Find Maaret Pyhäjärvi has long been an evangelist in this area and, while we're here, take a look her Intersection of Automation and Exploratory Testing presentation where she demos exploratory testing using...

  Last year, in the days before SARS-CoV-2, I wrote a guide to peer conferences for the Association for Software Testing . It didn't mention running a peer conference remotely. This year, I found myself setting up a peer conference between AST and the BCS Special Interest Group in Software Testing which had to be run remotely. Much of the guide still holds, and in some respects organisational concerns are simplified without travel, accommodation, and catering to worry about. But — and it's a Sir Mix-a-Lot -sized but — we've all done enough calls now to understand how hard it is to get the vibe right during a lengthy video meeting with more than a couple of participants. So what did we consider, what did we do, and how did it work out? On the purely logistical front, we had a few decisions to make. AST and BCS have worldwide memberships so choosing a time that didn't disadvantage some members was impossible. In the end, we ran ...

Last night I attended a Heart of England Scrum User Group meetup where Mike Harris was asking So where did all this agile stuff come from? Luckily he was answering also: W. Edwards Deming . Mike's presentation was a high-level overview of the history of Lean and Agile in which he traced back to foundational work done by Deming and then to Deming's influence Walter Shewhart who integrated scientific methodology and statistics into industrial quality practices. I have read a little Deming but I'm motivated to look more deeply after this. In particular, Mike drew attention to the fact that Plan, Do, Study, Act and Plan, Do, Check, Act were, for Deming, very much not the same thing. I had never realised this.  The paper Circling Back: Clearing up myths about the Deming cycle and seeing how it keeps evolving by Ronald D. Moen and Clifford L. Norman talks about the strength of Deming's feeling about it, quoting him: The...

Tonight's Atlanta Quality Assurance Association meetup was an interview, of Harry Collins by Michael Bolton , on the topic The Impact of AI on Software Testing. Collins' definition of artificial intelligence is "the ability to pass a demanding Turing Test." This kind of test requires knowledge of, and reasoning about, the society in which the dialogue is taking place. He gave an example from Roald Dahl's Big Friendly Giant where snozzcumber is considered an acceptable name for an imaginary vegetable, but shitcumber probably wouldn't be.  That may seem obvious to us, but on what basis would a machine learning algorithm fed tons of textual data, perhaps scraped from the chaotic mess that is the internet, be able to tell? He relates this question to his taxonomy of expertise in which interactional expertise is what gives a conversational participant the language of practice — so much more than simply words and grammar — of their community. Although it's ...

Should the public care about software testing? That's the question that the Association for Software Testing and the BCS Software Testing Specialist Group asked at our first joint peer conference on 22nd November 2020. The remit was: It’s our contention that most people don’t think very much about software development and software testing, despite software being deeply embedded in almost all aspects of our lives. When there’s a publicised issue such as a national bank failing to process customer orders for several days, a government IT project overrunning for years and then being canned, or a self-driving car causing a fatal accident, then society might take notice for a while. However, even when that happens it’s rare for the complexities and risks associated with the creation, integration, and maintenance of software systems to be front and centre in the discussion, and testing almost never makes it ...

I was interviewed on Testers' Island Discs a few months ago. During the conversation, Mark Winteringham asked me about the Association for Software Testing and I said this: The AST is a professional body for software testers. It's a non-profit — we're all volunteers — and its mission is to advance understanding of the science and practice of software testing according to context-driven principles ... which sounds like a real mouthful. The way I like to gloss it, and the way it speaks to me, is that we value both expertise and experience when it comes to testing and generally speaking we favour context-driven testing too. My sense is that, these days, most people would, even if they don't really know the terms, probably be doing some kind of context-driven testing. The proportion of people doing old-school stuff, test cases and so on, is shrinking as far as I can see. I love talking about AST (why not come and join us ?) and I very...

The big news in my world at the moment is that I'm leaving Linguamatics . It's a massive decision for me because I'm one of the founders and I've ploughed untold time and effort, blood, sweat, and (yes) tears into it over the years.  I realise that I'm very fortunate to even be able to contemplate leaving the company given the global situation. However, despite all that's going on and the uncertain future, now still feels like a good time to part ways, for me and for the company.  I'm immensely proud of what we've achieved at Linguamatics and what the company is set up to achieve next. My Test team have been challenging and inspiring in equal measure (if you don't like everything you say being questioned, don't  build a team of excellent testers) and I am confident they can continue to do good work without me. I also manage a small team of technical authors and I've been delighted to see what people who agree what a good job looks like and c...

Last week I started to see tweets with the simple text "Like this tweet and I’ll write something about you." The replies, all by the author of the tweet, were fascinating: numbers apparently representing a person followed by praise, reminiscence, and gratitude. Elisabeth Hendrickson's thread is a particularly uplifting example.  I was intrigued, so I liked a couple of them. Shortly afterwards I got a direct message which explained that the tweet was part of a project for suicide prevention month with the aim of celebrating people while they are alive. If I wanted to join in I should provide a number to represent myself so that the author could write something about me, and I was invited to do the same for others. I'm naturally cautious of these chain letter-like activities and I'd heard of Suicide Prevention Day and Week , but not month. However, I found that September does appear to be promoted as suicide prevention awareness month by the National Alliance on M...

  Maaike Brinkhof tweeted this last week:   Give me your most brutally honest definition of software testing.  As it happens, I have a definition of software testing that works for me , and it is (honestly) my honest answer: Testing is the pursuit of relevant incongruity. But Maaike asked for the most brutally honest definition. How might that change what I'd say? Well, what is brutal honesty? As I interpret the term, it describes a statement of perceived truth given with no regards for the feelings of anyone who might hear it. That gives me a route in: can I find someone with a perspective that might offend us testing snowflakes, someone who is relevant to us, and someone whose view I can characterise with extreme candour? I thought about this for about, um, one second and chose THE BUSINESS. A perspective that might offend? Check. In the main, businesses run for the benefit of the business and, particularly as th...