Hiccupps

Anne-Marie Charrett delivered a beta version of her Testbash Manchester keynote at the Cambridge Tester meetup this week . Her core message was that quality and testing are not the same thing: there are non-testing aspects of software development that contribute to product quality there are non-product aspects of quality which should be considered in software development. A theme of the talk was that customer benefit could be threatened by the second of these, by factors such as code hygiene, speed of delivery, and time to recover after a failure in production. Testers, and others in software development, were urged to reframe their view of quality to encompass these kinds of activities. A Venn diagram represented it like this: Interesting, but it didn't quite hang together for me. I slept on it. In the morning, I found myself thinking that what Anne-Marie was trying to visualise really had two notions of quality, and they were not the same. Perhaps she could mov...

I took my daughters to the  We're Here. Hi! Let's Play  pop-up exhibition about women in computer gaming that's running as part of  Where Did All The Women Go?  One display board caught my eye: Research shows that women play games just as much as men do. This fact is often dismissed using the argument that women don't play 'proper' games. A stereotype has emerged that women mostly play 'casual' titles, like puzzlers and tile-matching games, that shouldn't count in this research — but who gets to decide what gaming is? All forms of media have this problem: film buffs disparage blockbusters and literary critics dismiss genre fiction. The difference with gaming is that both sides are becoming gendered. Men are seen as the serious gamers and women as 'causals' with lower skill and investment in the medium. These attitudes risk excluding female players and preventing new ideas from flourishing in the industry. That situation is unlikely ...

At Quality Jam London 2017 I was introduced to the term design thinking . It sounded interesting. I  looked it up when I got home,  spoke to Rog , our UX specialist at work, and read a couple of references that he provided. Jared Spool's Shh! Don’t Tell Them There’s No Magic In Design Thinking was particularly intriguing: For decades, I’ve needed to do what every seasoned design professional has found themselves doing: explaining why design is more than just making something pretty. When I’ve worked with other designers, they get it.  But once someone who isn’t a designer — someone who is a layperson — is introduced into the mix, I’ve found I need to convince them that design isn’t only about making the thing pretty. That’s it’s about solving problems. That’s it’s about end-to-end solutions.  ...  The phrase design thinking changed all that. To a layperson, it was completely new. While it was made up of words they thought they knew, the combination w...

I tell you what: of all the things I might've expected to see on the first slide at Quality Jam London 2017 , my own professional-work-photo-grinning, shiny-pated, blue-tinted face peering back down at me from behind a massive Thank You! wasn't it. Expectations are grist to the working tester's mill, yet also often the bane of their lives. Tony Bruce , in  Manual Testing is Dead. Long Live Manual Testing , called for testers to set the expectations of the people that they interact with. The term "manual testing" undersells what testing is, or can be, with its connotations of manual labour, unthinking monotony, apparent separation from (woo! sexy!) automation and the historical association with scripted test cases. For Bruce, testing is "the pursuit of information" but he doesn't necessarily rush into meetings spouting from that kind of lexicon (although he's singing my kind of song right there). Instead he promotes the use of PAC (purpos...

Hands up if you're suspicious of vendor-run conferences. Yeah, me too. But I'm pleased to report that QASymphony didn't ram qTest down our throats at  Quality Jam London 2017 . Better still, they had a programme that included some speakers who had (a) nothing to do with the tools, and (b) interesting stuff to say.  At 100 people, and with a single track, it was a good size and shape for my taste, and having the talks in the (quite cosy) repurposed subterranean beer tank of an old Whitbread brewery added to the atmosphere and charm. I took the opportunity to practice sketchnoting again in all the talks. Mixed results, for me, but here's the ones I'm prepared to share. See my notes on the conference too.

We've just run a two-part assertiveness training course for my Test and Doc teams at Linguamatics . What exactly is assertiveness? you ask. From our trainer's web site : Assertiveness is a highly effective communications model ...  Assertive behaviour is professional behaviour. It is about being able to express yourself calmly and clearly and on equal terms with others; to stand your ground when necessary without becoming aggressive, or manipulative, or backing down unnecessarily. I found it interesting and engaging, and with some immediate practical value: to create a drill to be practised and used in situations where I think I'm at risk of becoming non-assertive, and to remind myself that even if the outcome of some interaction isn't ideal I can still try to give myself credit for how I behaved during it. I also enjoyed trying to fit ABCDE (always be calm, direct, and equal) into the behaviour space I've come to by other means, such as congruent communication...

This month's  Lean Coffee  was hosted by  DisplayLink . Here's some brief, aggregated comments and questions on topics covered by the group I was in. Are testers doing less and less testing? The questioner is finding that testers today are doing more "other" activities, than he was in his early days of testing. Where's the right balance between testing and other stuff? What's your definition of testing? I think that exploring ideas is testing. I fall into a "support" role for the team; I'm the "glue" in the team, often. I focus on the big picture. I am thinking about what needs to be ready for the next phase, and preparing it. I am thinking about information gathering and communication to stakeholders. Is there a contradiction: testers are a scarce resource, but they're the ones doing "non-core" activities. Perhaps it's not a contradiction? Perhaps testers are making themselves a scarce resource by d...

Last weekend, one of the testers from my team was speaking at Developer! Developer! Developer! East Anglia , a .NET community event. Naturally, because I'm a caring and supportive manager — and also as it was in Cambridge, and free — I went down to have a look. Despite not being a developer, it wasn't hard to find something of interest in all five sessions, although it's a shame the two talks on testing were scheduled against each other. Here's thumbnails from my notes. Building a better Web API architecture using CQRS (Joseph Woodward): Command Query Responsibility Segregation is a design pattern that promotes the separation of responsibility for reading data (query) from writing data (command). A useful intro to some concepts and terminology for me, it went deeper into the code than I generally need, and in a language and libraries that I'm unfamiliar with. I found  Martin Fowler's higher-level description from 2011  more consumable. I do like listenin...

Now where was I? Oh yes, The Organized Mind by erm ... hold on a minute ... it's on the tip of my tongue ... err ... ummm ... there you go:  The Organized Mind by Daniel Levitin , a self-subtitled guide to thinking straight in the age of information overload. And surely we all need a bit of that, eh? One of the most productive ways to get your mind organised, according to Levitin, is to stop trying to organise your mind (p. 35): The most fundamental principle of the organized mind, the one most critical to keeping us from forgetting or losing things, is to shift the burden of organizing from our brains to the external world ... This is not because of the limited capacity of our brains — rather it's because of the nature of memory storage and retrieval in our brains. Essentially, memory is unreliable. There are numerous reasons for this, including: novelty being prioritised over familiarity, successful recall being reliant on having a suitable cue, and — somewhat scaril...

There was once a young man, a handsome, moral, and brave young man, dexterous beyond compare, sharp of eye, voracious in the consumption of information and with sagacity and recall to rival that of the wisest of elephants. Oh yes, and he was also a software tester. This preternaturally blessed young man, over the course of time, had occasion to visit many conveniences, both public and private. As was his way, he declined to waste those periods of forced repose and so took the opportunity to exercise and practice the skills that served him so well elsewhere in his life while sequestered in those littlest of rooms. To this end, over repeated visits to a particular water closet he began to observe that, while the cleanliness in general could not be faulted, there was one area which was reliably hygienic to a significantly lower standard than the rest. This region, populated by dust, tiny fragments of tissue, hair, and other detritus, he noted, was along the base of the wall directl...