Hiccupps

This post is a prettied-up version of the notes for my talk at the second Cambridge Exploratory Workshop on Testing last weekend. The topic for the workshop was When Testing Went Wrong .  Cold fusion is a type of nuclear reaction that, if it were possible, would provide a cheap, clean and safe form of energy. In 1989 two scientists, Fleischmann and Pons, made worldwide headlines when they claimed to have generated cold fusion in a test tube in their lab. Unfortunately, subsequent attempts to replicate their results failed, other scientists started to publicly doubt the experimental methodology, and the evidence presented was eventually debunked. Cold fusion is a bit of a scientific joke. Which means that if you are a researcher in that field - now also called Low Energy Nuclear Reactions - you are likely to have a credibility problem before you even start. And, further, that kind of credibility issue will put many off from even starting. Which is a shame because the potent...

This is the first part of the transcript of a conversation about the relationship between joking and testing. The jokers were  Jerry Weinberg  (JW),  Michael Bolton  (MB),  James Lyndsay  (JL),  Damian Synadinos  (DS), and  me  (JT). See also Intro , Part 2 and Part 3 . --00-- JL: I wrote one joke for this. It turned up in my head and it may not be original, but it's mine. And the process of arrival is an interesting thing for me because you don't necessarily design a joke, you ready yourself for the arrival of the joke. And that certainly parallels some of the things I do when I'm testing ... where you are prepared and you've got your data and you're waiting for something to give you a hint, give you a smell, and then you might tune it a bit. So the joke, post-tuning, is this: My name is James and I'm a workaholic ... I haven't had a job in 22 years. JW: Do you get a special medal for 22 years? A little coin? JL: I kno...

At the tail end of his recent interview at System Smarts  Jerry Weinberg talked about the aha! moment of discovery and its relationship to humour: Don’t take yourself too seriously. Because humour ... arises from something unexpected. You start to tell a joke and the punch line [is something] people weren’t looking for and so they laugh and you laugh. And that’s the ... aha! experience.  Develop your sense of humour; your ability to look at things and laugh. My friend once said, when some work was really miserable, “some day we’ll look back at this and laugh. Why not now?” And I was delighted to hear that because I spoke on the same topic at EuroSTAR in 2015  ( slides ), noting that testers and comedians try to find ways to see the world differently and end up doing things like exposing ambiguity pointing out things that’ve been ignored in plain sight violating expectations making surprising connections I've written about it on this blog in  Pizza ...

My kids begged to go to the Funky Fun House this half-term. I've got nothing against these soft play barns particularly - I've been to stacks of them - but, for me, there's generally little that's funky about echoing industrial spaces crammed with primary-coloured foam, covered in crumbs and reeking of decades worth of half-eaten fish and chips. To be fair, though, this one is in a (ware) house and the girls do have a lot of fun . In fact, I used to have fun too when they wanted me to play on the thing with them. These days they just see me as the shoe and coat monitor and provider of snacks. (Oh, and somone to take the mickey out of in front of their friends.) And that's how it went down this time too, except that I was engrossed in a book called Are We All Scientific Experts Now? by Harry Collins . A book I read in its entirety at my sticky table, that blocked out the noise of the toddlers in the padded prison enclosure that I'd ended up sitting next t...

One of the effects of being asked to explain yourself  can be that you get to find out what you really think. This has potentially many outcomes: sometimes your view might turn out to be a surprise even to you; sometimes you realise that you don't have a justification for what you said at all; sometimes you are reminded that you established your perspective in another context or another time and it would be sensible to revisit it ( as I did the other day in Me and My Bestimates ). Another possibility is that the challenge surfaces an opinion that you realise you are comfortable with but have previously held only implicitly. That happened to me most recently a few weeks ago. I was talking to one of my team about some actions that had been taken and also about those that had not but, I suggested, perhaps could or should have been  without needing to wait to consult me . Understandably, given the particular situation, I was asked about the potential consequences...

Adam Knight spoke at the Cambridge Tester Meetup last night on Fractal Exploratory Testing, a topic he's blogged about a couple of times: Fractal Exploratory Testing Fractal Exploratory Testing Revisited Fractals can be roughly defined as having similar properties whatever level of magnification you apply to them. The Mandelbrot Set is a famously fractal shape and zooming into into it  exposes characteristics that make each image recognisably from the same family. Going 10x or 100x into some other image, say a photograph of my head, would not have the same effect. There's an analogy to be made with Exploratory Testing - in fact, with exploration of any kind - and this is reinforced by Adam's choosing to cast exploration in terms of charters written in a concise but formal way inspired by Elisabeth Hendrickson along the lines of "Explore <area> with <resources> to achieve <aim>". Each exploration uses appropriate testing approaches...

As Test Manager I fit my team's work into multiple overlapping project schedules which are not under my control. The schedules have, as you might expect, multiple constraints that operate simultaneously, such as: end dates or other milestones dependencies on other parts of the schedule or other schedules level of effort we are able or prepared to commit to different tasks in absolute terms (e.g. contractually) or in relative terms (e.g. based on perceived risk) methodology; different teams in Linguamatics operate different development methodologies, and we work with non-development teams too desired quality level (whatever that means in any given case) Scheduling in this environment is a challenge even without the wildcard that is the unknowns; the stuff you find out as you go and the contexts that change under your feet. To do my best to provide the service my (most often internal) clients want - which generally includes some kind of estimate, even if there is little ...

I'm delighted to say that  Adam Knight will be talking about  Fractal Exploratory Testing  at the Cambridge Tester Meetup on 21st January at 7pm. Karo is hosting it here at Linguamatics with pizza and drinks. Whet your appetite with these posts: Fractal Exploratory Testing Fractal Exploratory Testing Revisited Testing is Simple (and Complicated) And then sign up here . Image:  https://flic.kr/p/4Q8xDo Edit: My notes from Adam's talk .

Years ago I chucked a faulty video recorder and bought a cheap and compact PC to use as a PVR. (I run MythTV on Ubuntu, for those interested in such things.) Because me and Mrs Thomas don't watch telly that much, and record less, and because we're interested in not wasting electricity, we only have the box on when we're watching something on it or when we've scheduled something to record. Of course, sometimes that means that we have to remember  to leave it on. And we kept forgetting. But being a problem-solver, and interested in proportionate solutions, I implemented a quick fix. In fact it was more an initial trial, just a simple little sign that we stick next to the telly. It says VIDEO  and has served us so well that we found no need for anything more sophisticated. Until now. Our kids have come along and control the telly, operate the computer and so on. We're helping them to become interested in not wasting electricity too, and so their habit is to...

Testing can take a lot of inspiration from the sciences and the scientific method and I've blogged about some concepts that I think cross over in the past. Here's a few examples: equipoise metascience mandated science The science around policy - and the policy around science - is particularly interesting because it mirrors in useful respects the relationship between a tester and a stakeholder. In  What makes an academic paper useful for health policy?  Christopher Witty looks at ways that scientists can better serve policy makers and  much of what he's saying is also relevant to testers who want to do their best to: put the most valuable information they can  into the hands of the stakeholders who are asking for it at a time where it's useful at a cost which is acceptable in a manner which is easily consumable and at the right level with caveats and methodology clear and biases minimised. Which is all testers, I hope. Image:  https://f...