Hiccupps

I've read a lot of Dr Seuss books over the years and McElligot's Pool is one of my favourites, in part because of this passage, spoken by a boy after being told he's wasting his time fishing: "Hmmm ..." answered Marco, "It may be you're right. I've been here three hours Without one single bite. There might be no fish ...  "... But again, Well, there might! "  " Cause you never can tell What goes on down below!   "This pool might be bigger Than you or I know!" Testers, I give you McElligot's Rule* : when you're chasing a might on the basis of a  never-can-tell , it's worth putting your rod aside now and again to think about what you're tying to achieve, how, why and for who. * OK, heuristic , but we're rhyming today. Image: Amazon

It's a common claim that constraints feed creativity. But it doesn't have to be so; constraints may, well,  constrain creativity too. I use mnemonics such as SFDPOT in my testing. Seeding thoughts with each of the specific areas encourages idea generation but throwing away ideas that come from it, perhaps because they don't seem to fit into that category, holds it back. Ideas often form chains, and it may take several "invalid" links to get to a "valid" one. Breaking the chain loses that opportunity. Image: Zappa

I forget where I first heard this distinction between expertise and experience: expertise: theoretical knowledge  experience: practical knowledge It's possible to have degrees of one, or both, or to have neither in some area. Apart from its utility as a heuristic for remembering to look to test at different levels, it serves to remind me that the people on any project have different combinations of each and their mental models reflect that. The manager knows there's a hammer that can be applied to the current problem: just how hard can it be ? The implementer knows what to hit, and where, and just how hard it can be. Image:  https://flic.kr/p/6fbmsU

Spoiler alert: there is no happy ending here. Often a blog post or article will talk about some inspiration gained from outside of testing which was applied successfully to the author's testing and yielded useful results. Those are great posts to read  ... but this isn't one of them. This one starts with inspiration from outside of testing followed by research, discussion, criticism and thought experiment but ultimately no application. The yield here is the documentation of all of that. Hopefully it's useful and still a good read. What was the inspiration? I've long had the notion - sadly dormant and largely sidelined - that I'd like to look into the use of statistics in testing. (One of my earliest posts here was on entropy .) As testers we talk a lot about such things as the scientific method and about data, about running experiments, about crafting experiments such that they generate usable and valuable data, about making decisions on where to test next ...

Extracts from How Complex Systems Fail   by Richard I. Cook: [it is] impossible for [complex systems] to run without multiple flaws being present. Because these are individually insufficient to cause failure they are regarded as minor factors during operations ...  complex systems run as broken systems.  Organizations are ambiguous ... [and that] ambiguity is resolved by actions of practitioners at the sharp end of the system. Safety is an emergent property of systems ...  continuous systemic change insures that hazard and its management are constantly changing. ... all practitioner actions are actually gambles, that is, acts that take place in the face of uncertain outcomes ... after accidents ... post hoc analysis regards these gambles as poor ones. But ... successful outcomes are also the result of gambles ... Image:  https://flic.kr/p/7TxmXk

The novelty of hypertext  over traditional text is the direct linking of references. This allows the reader to navigate immediately from one text to another, or to another part of the same text, or expose more detail of some aspect of that text in place. This kind of hyperlinking is now ubiquitous through the World Wide Web and most of us don't give it a second thought. I was looking up hypermedia  for the blog post I wanted to write today when I discovered that there's another meaning of the term hypertext  in the study of semiotics and, further, that the term has a counterpart, hypotext . Thse two are defined in relation to one another, credited to Gérard Genette : "Hypertextuality refers to any relationship uniting a text B (which I shall call the hypertext) to an earlier text A (I shall, of course, call it the hypotext), upon which it is grafted in a manner that is not that of commentary." In a somewhat meta diversion, following a path through the p...

One of my team recommended The One Minute Manager to me in a recent 1-1. It's a slim book, not exactly a one-minute read but not far off. It takes the form of a parable about a man in search of effective management who encounters the One Minute Manager and his staff and learns essentially this: set clear goals and monitor progress towards them provide clear and timely feedback There are, of course, homilies along the way, including "We are not just our behaviour. We are the person managing our behaviour." and "The best minute I spend is the one I invest in people."  and the writing, not unlike the similarly-structured Quality is Free , can be cloyingly, clunkily patronising at times. Even so, the core lessons are sound enough and it does no harm for a manager to be reminded of them. But the aspect of the book that I find most appealing is that the One Minute Manager's team members use the same techniques on, for and by themselves and are encouraged...

  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...