Hiccupps

Do you think that a significant part of testing is asking questions? I bet you have lots of questions, don't you? But have you ever been frustrated by a lack of answers? What do you do about it? Could you answer the questions yourself? How do you think that might help? When I have questions that require a response from others, I often try to provide a selection of answers too. For me, this helps to think through what I might do next - perhaps I can discover the actual answer by experimenting to see which of the answers is likely, or maybe an answer prompts another question, a more interesting question, one which requires investigation itself. If I still go ahead and pose the question, having some potential answers alongside it shows that I've thought about the issue and gives the answerer some context. Also, in my experience, people are often more able to refute an assertion than generate an answer from cold, so my answers spur their thoughts too. (And by the way, don...

I took the National Institutes of Health 's course Protecting Human Research Participants  this week. It's aimed at people setting up experiments involving human subjects and covers areas such as risk (including identification, minimisation, compared to benefits - personal and communal), recruitment (including coercion, balance), rights of the participants (including consent, welfare, vulnerable groups) and statutes (including international research, differences between definitions in different US bodies). In a section on the design of a clinical trial (where interventions - such as drugs - are being compared for efficacy in treating some illness in humans), the term equipoise was introduced. The definition given is: Substantial scientific uncertainty about which treatments will benefit subjects most, or a lack of consensus in the field that one intervention is superior to another. and the course notes say: A state of equipoise is required for conducting research that...

So I wrote a Perl script this week. Just typed it straight in. Just ran it. Care? Schmare! The interpreter kicked it back. Minimal edit! Ran it again. Another error. Edit, run. Another. Edit/run. More. Editrun. More. Me: Done, run this for me! Perl: No, what about X? Me: Ah, yeah, perhaps this time. Perl: No, did you look at Y? Me: And now? Perl: No, have you seen Z? ... Ring any bells? I try not to be the interpreter these days, by avoiding the one-dimensional rejection that invites the instant edit/retry. Image:  http://flic.kr/p/844RQ3

Recently a couple of my colleagues have asked me to comment on process that they're setting up. As usual, the problem was less what to suggest and more what to keep back to avoid the well-intentioned but often understandably poorly-received feedback carpet bomb (FCB). Fortunately, in the blogosphere you can't hear your readers scream , so here's an FCB of heuristics and aides-memoire that I use when setting up processes, guidelines, checklists and the like. They're most appropriate when intended to be used on projects with multiple people, probably across teams, to manage collaboration on something that is considered valuable by a person or people who matter. There are usually a handful of roles: customers - the people who want the process, perhaps with quite specific demands owner - the person/s responsible for setting the process up manager - the person/s responsible for ensuring it is used as intended agents - the people participating in the process Som...

The key points in Writing is Thinking  can apply more generally to the navigation of an idea from inception to realisation. Don't be blocked by starting; get something - anything - down; refine it until it's more signal than noise. And on writing itself: if you've never coded then writing for an editor is a reasonable approximation to the implement/bug report/fix cycle, with you as the engineer. Do you take criticism as well as you give it? Can you learn from that? What's stopping you? Image:  http://flic.kr/p/dMSaZ9

I was on my way to see my brother just before Christmas when I stopped at Donington Park Services . While I was reviewing its compendium of value-for-money amenities, and trying to stop my young daughters running riot, I saw the sign above. Perhaps I just needed a drink, or maybe I've been at this game for too long, but my initial instinctive interpretation of this was that time was being called on alcohol. Is the space of all possible locations really covered by the restriction? Surely that can't be what it is meant to mean? For a bit of seasonal fun, I set my team and the Cambridge Software Testing Club Meetup this challenge: In my imaginary world (one where the compendium of value-for-money amenities at motorway services is a good deal larger) Moto have asked you to review their signage. Test this particular sign for them. You have 15 minutes to list questions, comments, interpretations, suggested experiments and so on.  I've recorded a few of the suggesti...

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