Hiccupps

This post is a conversation and a collaboration between Anders Dinsen and me. Aside from a little commentary at the top and edits to remove repetition and side topics, to add links, and to clarify, the content is as it came out in the moment, over the course of a couple of days. A question I asked about not looking for bugs at Lean Coffee in Cambridge last month initiated a fun discussion. The discussion suggested it’d be worth posing the question again in a tweet. The tweet in turn prompted a dialogue. Some of the dialogue happened on public Twitter , some via DM, and on Skype, and yet more in a Google doc, at first with staggered participation and then in a tight synchronous loop where we were simultaneously editing different parts of the same document, asking questions and answering them in a continuous flow. It was at once exhilarating, educational and energising. The dialogue exposes some different perspectives on testing and we decided to put it together in...

When Karo asked whether it'd be OK if she nominated me along with Chris George and Neil Younger as meetup heroes for a UKSTAR competition I said I was sure we'd all be flattered. Know any Software Meetup Heroes? I nominated @chrisg0911 @norry_twitting @qahiccupps - with a heartfelt thanks! https://t.co/6q68WU4fW1 — karo. stoltzenburg (@karostol) December 14, 2016 I guess I didn't really expect it to go anywhere and I certainly didn't expect that I'd feel somewhat embarrassed if it did. But it has . And so there you go, I learned something about myself. Again. I've read the short-listed nominations and Emma, Oana, Alexandru, Leigh, Tony, and Hugh all look like great candidates doing great work for their local testing communities. I'd love you to go and read about them and vote for a hero right now. Except that as I write this, it looks like, with delightful irony, that might not be possible ... @qahiccupps there a bug in votin...

I came across this quote in Managing the Unmanageable , attributed to Doug Linder: A good programmer is someone who looks both ways before crossing a one-way street. It made me chuckle - churlishly, childishly - as I imagined a developer crossing testing off their list because each time they'd happened to cross the street they'd implemented they'd checked it was working. Well, perhaps that some aspect of it wasn't not working , at that time, for that person, etc etc. Reflecting as I write this, I wonder if I'd been having a bad day... Anyway, I offered the quote to the Test team at Linguamatics yesterday, along with mince pies, and posed a different question as part of our annual festive Testing Can be Fun session (see also The So in Absolute , Last Orders , Further Reading , Testing is Like Making Love ): What might a “good” tester say or do, when encountering a one-way street? Ten minutes allowed, and as many mince pies as you can eat. Stick your a...

This month's  Lean Coffee  was hosted by  Cambridge Consultants . Here's some brief, aggregated comments and questions  on topics covered by the group I was in. How to get work in testing having been a developer for 25 years? The questioner is an experienced developer/consultant who consistently sees "poor quality" development. You don't need a formal background; it's possible to learn testing on the job. The job market seems to be about 'technical testers' these days, so a developer could be suited to it. Are you applying for roles and being rejected. (Not yet; this is a recent idea.) What do you mean by testing? ("Separation of concerns, loose coupling, SOLID, good requirements. Unit testing is just there for the taking ... you just do it.") They sound like full life-cycle or architectural ideas that might enable testing or reduce the need for it? ("Yes.") Think about what motivates the person you're pitching to....

This week, Maaret Pyhäjärvi published How to write 180 blog posts in a year .  Maaret's blog is one that I make a point of reading whenever Feedly tells me there's a new post there. Why? Because her posts are thoughtful, often deeply thoughtful. Here's a couple of paragraphs from Thinking you're the best : For years, I prepared in the previous night for every relevant meeting. I went in with a ready-made plan, usually three to prep my responses for whatever might emerge in the meetings. Back in school, my Swedish teacher made me translate things out loud every class, because of my "word-perfect translations". Truth is I had them pre-translated with great effort because I was mortified with the idea of having to do  that work on the fly.  Through my own experiences, I've grown to learn that the pre-prep was always my safety blanket. I did not want to look bad. I did not want to be revealed. I was the person who would rather use 3 days on a half-an-ho...

A few weeks ago I put out an appeal for resources for testers who are pulled into live support situations: Looking for blogs, books, videos or other advice for testers pulled into real-time customer support, e.g. helping diagnose issues #testing — James Thomas (@qahiccupps) October 28, 2016 One suggestion I received was The Mom Test  by Rob Fitzpatrick, a book intended to help entrepreneurs or sales folk to efficiently validate ideas by engagement with an appropriate target market segment. And perhaps that doesn't sound directly relevant to testers? But it's front-loaded with advice for framing information-gathering questions in a way which attempts not to bias the the answers ("This book is specifically about how to properly talk to customers and learn from them"). And that might be, right? The conceit of the name, I'm pleased to say, is not that mums are stupid and have to be talked down to. Rather, the insight is that "Your mom will lie to y...

This month's  Lean Coffee  was hosted by Abcam . Here's some brief, aggregated comments and questions  on topics covered by the group I was in. Suggest techniques for identifying and managing risk on an integration project. Consider the risk in your product, risk in third-party products, risk in the integration Consider what kinds of risk your stakeholders care about; and to who (e.g. risk to the bottom line, customer data, sales, team morale ...) ... your risk-assessment and mitigation strategies may be different for each Consider mitigating risk in your own product, or in those you are integrating with Consider hazards and harms Hazards are things that pose some kind of risk (objects and behaviours, e.g. a delete button, and corruption of database) Harms are the effects those hazards might have (e.g. deleting unexpected content, and serving incomplete results) Consider probabilities and impacts of each harm , to provide a way to compare them Advocate for...

In The Dots  I referenced How To Make Sense of Any Mess by Abby Covert. It's a book about information architecture for non-information architects, one lesson per page, each page easily digestible on its own, each page informed by the context on either side. As a tester, I find that there's a lot here that intersects with the way I've come to view the world and how it works and how I work with and within it. I thought it would be interesting to take a slice through the book by noting down phrases and sentences that I found thought-provoking as I went. So, what's below is information from the book, selected and arranged by one reader, and so it is also information about that reader. Mess: a situation where the interactions between people and information are confusing or full of difficulties. (p. 169) Messes are made of information and people. (p.11) Information is whatever is conveyed or represented by a particular arrangement or sequence of things. (p. 19) ...

One of the questions that we asked ourselves at CEWT 3 was what we were going to do with the things we'd discovered during the workshop. How would, could, should we attempt to share any insights we'd had, and with who? One of the answers I gave was that Karo and me would present our talks at Team Eating , the regular Linguamatics brown-bag lunch get-together. And this week we did that, to an audience of testers and non-testers from across the company. The talks were well-received and the questions and comments were interesting. One of them came from Rog, our UX Specialist. I presented a slide which showed how testing, for me , is not linear or strictly hierarchical, and it doesn't necessarily proceed in a planned way from start to finish, and it can involve people and objects and information outside of the software itself. Testing can be gloriously messy, I probably said: His comment was (considerably paraphrased) that that's how design feels to him. We sp...

The Cambridge Tester meetup last week was a workshop on note-taking for testers by Neil Younger and Karo Stoltzenburg . An initial presentation, which included brief introductions to techniques and tools that facilitate note-taking in various ways ( Cornell , mind map , Rapid Reporter , SBTM ), was followed by a testing exercise in which we were encouraged to try taking notes in a way we hadn't used before. (I tried the Cornell method.) What I particularly look for in meetups is information, inspiration, and the stimulation of ideas. And I wasn't disappointed in this one. Here's some assorted thoughts. I wonder how much of my note-taking is me and how much is me in my context ? ... and how much I would change were I to move somewhere else, or do a different job at Linguamatics ... given that I already know that I have evolved note-taking to suit particular tasks over time ... further, I already know that I use different note-taking approaches in different conte...