Hiccupps

Just over a year ago now, I put out an appeal for resources on testers doing technical support. A tester on my team had asked for background material before his first support call and I didn't know of any, beyond our internal doc for support staff. Turns out there's not much out there: I got a book recommendation, for The Mom Test which isn't strictly about either testing or technical support, and a couple of offers to pool experiences from local testers Neil Younger and Chris George . I bought and blogged about The Mom Test , and started a Google doc where Neil, Chris, and me began to deposit notes, stories, and advice (our fieldstones ). Some of my own material was culled from blog posts here on Hiccupps (e.g. 1 , 2 ) at a time when I was managing both the Test and Support teams at Linguamatics . When the doc had got to about 20 pages, I began the painstaking process of editing it into shape. Eventually four broad categories emerged: What even is technical supp...

This month's  Lean Coffee  was hosted by us at  Linguamatics . Here's some brief, aggregated comments and questions on topics covered by the group I was in. Performance testing We have stress tests that take ages to run because they are testing a long time-out ... but we could test that functionality with a debug-only parameter. Should we do it that way, or only with production, user-visible functionality? It depends on the intent of the test, the risk you want to take, the value you want to extract. Do both? Maybe do the long-running one less often? Driving change in a new company When you join a new company and see things you'd like to change, how do you do it without treading on anyone's toes? How about when some of the changes you want to make are in teams you have no access to, on other sites? Should I just get my head down and wait for a couple of years until I understand more? Try to develop face-to-face relationships. Find the key players. ...

If you believe that testing is inherently about information then you might enjoy Edward Tufte's take on that term : Information consists of differences that make a difference. We identify differences by comparison, something that as a working tester you'll be familiar with. I bet you ask a classic testing question of someone, including yourself, on a regular basis: Our competitor's software is fast. Fast ... compared to what? We must export to a good range of image formats. Good ... compared to what? The layout must be clean. Clean ... compared to what? But while comparison as a tool to get clarification by conversation is important, for me, it feels like testing is more fundamentally about comparisons. James Bach has said "all tests must include an oracle of some kind or else you would call it just a tour rather than a test." An oracle is a tool that can help to determine whether something is a problem. And how is the value extracted from an orac...

Hiccupps just turned six years old. Happy birthday to us. And thank you for reading; I hope you're getting something out of it still. Unwittingly I've stumbled into a tradition of reflecting on the previous 12 months and picking out a few posts that I liked above the others for some reason. Here's this year's selection: What We Found Not Looking for Bugs : a headrush conversation with Anders Dinsen on the nature and timing of testing  The Dots : a headrush conversation with myself on the connections between the connected things  Fix Up, Look Sharp : a headrush reading experience from Ron Jeffries' Extreme Programming Adventures in C#  Quality != Quality : a headrush of being picked up by Hacker News, my page views going nuts, and developers debating quality  A (Definition of) Testing Story : a headrush last-minute conference proposal accepted at UKSTAR 2018  And in the meantime my mission to keep my testing mind limber with rule-of-three punning ...

They were chuckling at me when I came back from the kitchen next to the meeting room. They were grinning and smirking at each other because they'd heard me laugh out loud and knew that I was the only person in there. So I felt compelled to explain that I was laughing because I value highly in testers the ability to find more than one way to look at any given situation. Stated drily like that, it  doesn't sound worthy of a solo guffaw does it? But what I actually said went a bit like this ... You know that scene in The Lord Of The Rings where they're trying to get into a mine? There's a clue phrase in Elvish above the door that Gandalf translates as "Speak, friend, and enter" but then he can't remember what the password is. Eventually he sees an alternative interpretation, "Say friend and enter", and they get in. Well , I was in the kitchen looking at the door to the car park and there's a sticker on it which I'm sure I m...

Sometimes a phrase just lights up the room when it's spoken. I encountered one today. One of my team was debriefing us, giving her analysis of our answers to her survey of our experiences of the team pairing experiment that she ran. I say it lit up the room, but really for me it was writ large in fireworks, sounding a fanfare, and flying loop-the-loops. Here it is: Respond to the context. I'll just leave it there for you. And also this . Image:  https://flic.kr/p/UWL4d5

Unfortunately, last night's Cambridge Tester Meetup  talk about database unit testing was cancelled due to speaker illness. No problem! We had Lean Coffee instead. Here's a few aggregated comments and questions from the group discussion. How do you deal with internal conflicts? Give overt, verbal appreciation to the other person and their perspective. Be humble. Leave your ego behind. Conflict is healthier than the alternative.  Conflict betrays a lack of common understanding. I seek conflict. Conflict of personality or of ideas? I want to squeeze out ambiguity and lack of clarity. A stand-up row can be acceptable to achieve that. (Even if it isn't the first thing I'll try.) Some people avoid conflict because they feel they won't win the argument. What is the source of the conflict? That makes a difference. Try to keep discussion to facts; objective not subjective; technical not personal. Try to get to know each other as people. Try to build te...

I'm speaking on the Storytelling track at UKSTAR 2018. In eight minutes I'm going to explain how I arrived at my own definition of testing, why I bothered, and what I do with it now I've got it.  You can find some of the background in these posts: Another Define Mess Testing All the Way Down and Other Directions The Anatomy of a Definition of Testing and I made a kind of sketchnote video thing to promote it too: If you still want to come after all that, get 10% off, on me: See you there I hope.

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 s...