Hiccupps

I'll leave it as an exercise in creative thinking to come up with reasons I might have been buying a Ken Dodd triple album: That aside, is there a problem here? The Guardian (amongst others) has been enjoying in-store pricing oddities for a while and, on the face of it, there's something not quite right about this Amazon item either. But would you simply chuckle and shout  bug ? Let's make it an exercise in creative thinking to suggest scenarios where it's reasonable for it to be cheaper to buy the CD and the MP3s than to buy the MP3s alone. Stick 'em in the comments if you like. Image:  https://flic.kr/p/9Xzstx

Connections. We spend our time searching for them, stumbling across them, postulating them, making them, questioning them, confirming them, creating them and breaking them. They might be between products, between bits of your product, between people, between the ideas different people have, between different ideas that you have, between what you've seen, what you're seeing and what you might hope or fear seeing next. finding associations (or the lack of them) between the system under test and something else.  connecting the product's behaviour with some notion of what it's supposed to do - or not do. building links between components in your mental model of how an application works. relating a new bug to previous ones. identifying areas of consensus or disagreement, bringing concepts and people together. I think therefore I am is fine and dandy, M. Descartes, but for testers I wonder if this would be better: If I am not connecting, I am not. I am. Or, at le...

One of the names I considered for this blog - and one that made it right to the final cut - was There's no F in Spec . It appealed to me for several reasons, including: The literal correctness. There really is no letter "f" in the string "spec". The indirect contradiction. "Spec" is short for "specification" and there is an "f" in that. The implied rudeness. See also There's Only One F in Fulham . The pun on the rudeness. As Homer says , it's funny cos it's (so often) true. The metaphorical contradiction. Even if there is no f-ing spec, or story, or whatever, there's  always   something  you can base an investigation on. The number of interpretations and nuances I could find in it. Part of our job as testers is to be able to recognise this kind of potential for ambiguity and multiplicity, maintain contradictory interpretations for as long as it's useful but then tease apart what can and should be se...

The Dev Manager has just posted another of his  next-to-incoherent ramblings [1] . This one exposes a trait of his that I share: A recurring theme of mine is building flimsy analogies between software processes and other processes To give a very recent trivial, but valuable to me, example: I use filters aggressively for sorting much of my mail into a hierarchy of folders for batch reading or archiving.  However, there's a category of mail that I want to sort manually, not least because it forces me to read it. Over time, sub-categorisation within it has become more complex but for now I still see value in preserving it. This means that my manual filtering progressively involves more and more dragging and dropping through hierarchies of folders. This is inefficient and irritating. In this example it's no great conceptual leap to think of some kind of analogy between the mail client folder structure and a file system. When I move an email from one folder to another I am p...

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...