Hiccupps

  A friend, talking about running a project, said to me last week "it's like the partially-sighted leading the blind". Ian Jack, talking about his dad, wrote in the Guardian  at the weekend: "[As a child] I had no idea how new this was ... I imagined he had always known how to do these things ... of course he had to teach himself, listening to the helpful hints of [others] and reading books" Yep, implementation in an environment where tasks are not simply rote reproductions is often like this, e xploratory . You'll feel your way, based on what advice, experiment, evidence, research, intuition and experience you have. If you're sensible, and able, you'll set up feedback systems to help you know when you're going off track (and hopefully you'll know what on-track looks like). When leading others through it too, I find  that I want to be up front about the extent to which I feel like I know what I'm doing and be prepared to outline...

I was watching Stuart Hunter's  What is Design of Experiments?  ( 1 ,  2 ) lectures this morning. They were made in the mid-60s for Westinghouse Electric and, after a demonstration of the exploration of a space to find the interesting location guided by a cycle of experiment, data collection and analysis, the final sentences run like this: The purpose of statistics is to analyse the data in such a way as to lead to new conjecture ... the data are expensive and the data are variable and we don't know the true response function ... All of this is part and parcel of the arts of statistics.  But they're really not very valuable unless we can call upon the experience that people such as [you, the audience] have which comes only from working in an industrial environment. And our real objective is to wed together your experience with the practical uses of engineering and production and development and research with the arts of statistics so that you will be more ...

I'm wary of drawing parallels between managing and parenting, of analogising my team with my children (in a forum that I know some of them read, at least) but I find the proposition in “Helping” Versus “Being a Helper”: Invoking the Self to Increase Helping in Young Children   very appealing. Essentially it suggests that subtle differences in language used to describe behaviour can have an effect on observed behaviour. In the paper, the authors run experiments where they ask children to "be a helper" or "to help" and find that the former results in significantly more helpful actions. Even when the children are doing something else that they regard as enjoyable, they're more likely to stop it and help if they were asked to be a helper. There's similar research in adults linking the noun version of a behaviour more strongly to a sense of self than the verb version, both positively and negatively. For instance people are less likely to cheat when aske...

I'm in a Scheme  study group run by  one of our developers  and based on Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs , a classic computer science textbook. This week, chatting about our homework opened up a Java discussion, specifically the way that a particular library class makes it easy to have code fail at run time rather than compile time. One developer said that the documentation made it clear how the class should be used so this was fine. The other developers were shocked that this was considered an acceptable defence. That's right: the developers said that, where the software enables the wrong thing, even though somewhere there is doc explaining the potential consequence of the wrong thing, expecting the users to do the right thing was unacceptable . Yes, really. We all laughed at the time but I've hardly stopped chuckling since. Image: Wikipedia

So sometimes I'm a consumer . I like to think a reasonably savvy consumer, but a consumer nonetheless. And when something that I have paid for and depend on doesn't work, as a consumer, I don't like it.  Not just that, I actively resent it. Time I spend making it work is time I am not spending on something of more value to me. I already paid for that thing. It should work. But the intellectual challenge of finding the solution? Means nothing. But the sense of achievement when it's resolved? Don't give me that. I've no time for it. I'm all about how now I can get on with what I have to do, and with the backlog of stuff I didn't do because I was fixing that thing that I already paid for, and the new backlog that's building up while I deal with the old backlog, because of that thing that I depend on, that should just work. So an unreasonable consumer? Not from my point of view. As a consumer, I recently encountered a Windows 8.1 update issu...

This has so many parallels to the way I like to make it possible for interested parties to follow testing progress: Open notebook science is the practice of making the entire primary record of a research project publicly available online as it is recorded.This involves placing the personal, or laboratory, notebook of the researcher online along with all raw and processed data, and any associated material, as this material is generated. The approach may be summed up by the slogan 'no insider information'. Image: https://flic.kr/p/bhEfBg  

Display caption:  Any resemblance to software development activities, living or dead, is purely coincidental. [Fade from black to bright sunshine.] The Test Manager was out of the office looking after his kids at half term. They were on what they called an adventure walk where he'd made a list of stuff for them to find on the stroll down to the river for a picnic. Their favourite on this journey was the window of wheels which they worked out in the end was a bike shop. (No, really, they actually asked for this.) When he returned to work the following week, nominally refreshed, the Test Manager found a jumper neatly folded and smelling freshly laundered on his desk. Tester 1, who sits behind him, said that BD, a member of the BizDev team, had left it there for him. The Test Manager was flattered. It was a tracksuit top affair, snazzy, and just the kind of thing he'd like. BD was quite a sporty chap and bigger than him, so perhaps it had got a bit tight and BD, ...

You found a bug. Congratulations. Pause before you report it. Ask yourself whether what you saw is all there is. Perhaps it's a specific example of a general problem, a relatively benign instance of a potentially more serious issue or something that no-one who matters will ever see? You wrote a short blog post. Congratulations. Pause before you publish it. Ask yourself whether what you wrote etc etc. Erm, yeah;  RIMGEA . Image:  https://flic.kr/p/feLtra

I see this frequently, and fall for it still myself: just because what you're looking at has a label that suggests it is something or does something or represents something, you should still check that it really is the case if what you're doing depends on it. A couple of examples: when a list of user records you have pulled from your server contains one labelled  JamesThomas it   does not necessarily mean that I have an account on your server or even that anyone called James Thomas has an account on your sever or, even if they do, that it is active or valid or has other properties you're interested in. when you're using a test object named  x_4_y_5 it does not necessarily mean that it encodes the obvious variable assignments and, even if it once did, you might want to avoid assuming that no-one edited it to have some other values because it was a convenient way to run their quick test. when you find a script called clear_down_safe.sh in the test dat...

I am renowned at work for my sartorial panache (the image is from one of my t-shirts). So when I spotted a hole in the knee of my jeans on Monday last week there was no option other than to replace them immediately. Or, at least, next time I went shopping. In fact, those jeans were old and well-worn in many places, although not that funny little pocket just inside the main front pocket, which looked as good as new. I'd always known it as a ticket pocket. Others call it a watch pocket, fob pocket or even a condom pocket. I've never kept anything in one on all the pairs of jeans I've ever owned. Why is it there? Historically it apparently had some purpose but these days it's essentially invisible through familiarity, expected but ignored, unknown but non-threatening, an occasional irritation when something accidentally ends up in it and a  largely pointless  feature. And so in an unlikely analogy even for me, I find myself wondering what the ticket pockets woul...