Hiccupps

When Sneha Bhat asked if I'd present with her at CEWT #5 the talk we produced was Theoreticus Prime vs Praktikertron . In this essay we've tidied up the notes we wrote in preparation and included a few of the sketches we made when we were developing our model. The title comes from the Transformers we gave the participants at CEWT to explore in an attempt to illustrate different kinds of theory being discovered and shared. CEWT #5 asked this question: theory over practice or practice over theory? It's an age-old conundrum, represented in popular culture by memes like these that you would have seen as you avoid both theory and practice by grazing on social media when you should be working: In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. But, in practice, there is. ( Wiki ) Theory is when you know everything but nothing works. Practice is when everything works but no one knows why. In our lab, theory and practice are combined: nothing works and no...

This month's  Lean Coffee  was hosted by Roku . Here's some brief, aggregated comments and questions on topics covered by the group I was in. My favourite context-free test is ... Turn everything up to 11. Put all of the settings on their highest levels and see what happens. Power cycling rapidly and repeatedly. Sympathetic testing. Just getting a view for what the product offers. Simply trying to use the product. Smoke test. Try to do the opposite of what any documentation says. Ask how the users will use it. Ask what the customer wanted. Find someone without prior experience of the product to look at it. How do you enhance your personal development in a busy environment? We are given time for personal development at work, but I end up dong work stuff instead.  The company empowers us but it's on us to use the time. I don't want the others on my team to feel that I am slacking by taking the personal development time. I might come in to work ...

Four lightning talks at the Cambridge Tester meetup at Linguamatics last night, four topics apparently unrelated to one another, four slices through testing. Yet, as I write up my notes this morning I wonder whether there's a common thread ... Samuel Lewis showed us the money. Or, at least, where the money is held before being dispensed through those holes in the wall. He included some fascinating background information about ATMs (and a scary security story) but the thrust of his talk was the risks and corresponding mitigation strategies in a massive project to migrate the ATMs for a big bank to a new application layer and OS (more scariness: many are still running Windows XP). Much of the approach involved audit trails of various kinds, with customer and other stakeholders sharing their road maps and getting a view of the test planning and strategy in return. I enjoyed that the customer themselves was considered a risk (because they had a reputation for changing their mi...

This week the test team at Linguamatics held our first internal conference. There was no topic, but three broad categories could be seen in the talks and workshops that were given: experience reports, tooling, and alternative perspectives on our work. (The latter included the life cycle of a bug, and psychology in testing.) My contribution was an experience report looking at how I explore both inside and outside of testing. I've tidied up some of my notes from the prep for it below. There are testing skills that I use elsewhere in my life. Or perhaps there are skills from my life that I bring to testing. Maybe I'm so far down life's road that it's hard to tell quite what started where? Maybe I'm naturally this way and becoming a tester with an interest in improvement amped things up? Maybe I've so tangled up my work, life, and hobby that deciding where one starts and another ends is problematic? The answers to those questions is, I think, almost certai...

Games that can say something about testing, then. Christmas brought a new one to our house, for my kids, from my Aunty Wendy. It's called Hedbanz and it's a game you probably already know as 20 Questions or Who Am I ? Essentially, each player takes a card and, without looking at its face, places it on a band around their head so that the other players can see it. The player then has a limited time to ask the others yes/no questions about their card, in an attempt to work out what it is. A typical game might go like this: Player: Am I alive? Players: no. Player: Am I manufactured? Players: no. Player: Do you find me in the home? Players: yes. And so on. A skill in the game is asking questions that together partition the space of all things in different ways to narrow down to a specific item. I like playing the game with my kids because it allows me to see their logic at work, and allows me to show them different strategies for getting to an answer. For our an...

At CEWT #5 we used Lean Coffee as a way to reflect on some of the threads we'd discussed during the day . Here's a few brief, aggregated comments and questions that came up. Can we identify testing short cuts? In particular, can we find short cuts without adverse side-effects? Short cuts sometimes have assumptions built into them (e.g. that the side gate you're going to use to get into work at the weekend is open then.) Some of the things you used to hold as axiomatic are no longer relevant so you can short cut your old thinking. Can the shortness be in depth rather than length? ... and you can gain breadth first, as a kind of short cut in testing. You can plan training to isolate particular skills and short cut potential confusion. You can tell someone they'll waste their time trying something, based on your experience. But you might deny them some learning. And you deny them the opportunity to learn to recognise a waste of time. All your learning can...

CEWT is the Cambridge Exploratory Workshop on Testing, and for its fifth meeting , hosted at Linguamatics , a bunch of local testers gathered to consider a question: Theory Over Practice or Practice Over Theory?  A couple of months before CEWT #5 it was posed . For a day during CEWT #5 it was explored . Immediately after CEWT #5 it was .... still mostly undecided. But along the way we did at least have a unicycle, some Transformers, an Alien Dance Party, a selection of retro Nokia phones, and Batman. Oh, and Lean Coffee, and a retrospective, and six talks. First up in the talks Karo Stoltzenburg tested the question. Taking Weinberg and Gause's classic Are Your Lights On? as her guide, she wondered whether there was a problem here and, if so, whose problem it was, how it got to be a problem, and whether or not it was worth solving. Noting the potential for ambiguity in key terms in the question and the Call For Participation , she carefully teased out possible interp...

To celebrate its 25th anniversary, EuroSTAR asked 25 testers who have played a big part in its history for a "top tip or piece of advice" that has returned value to them across their career and compiled the answers into a short (in length and height) publication, The Little Book of Testing Wisdom . Sales from the book raise money for the Saving Linnea campaign. We put the book on our Test team reading group agenda at Linguamatics for this week with the mission to "read all or some, but bring one (or more) articles you liked!" I decided on the strategy of reading the start of every article and continuing only with those that grabbed me immediately. I didn't seek (and haven't sought) to understand why some grabbed me and some not, but I did think about whether there was any commonality to the set of four that I particularly liked by the end and took to the meeting ... For me, advice that will stand the test of time must have inbuilt sensitivity to con...

As testers we'll generate, compile, inspect, manipulate, and synthesise data on a regular basis. We do this because it helps us to understand a system, to hypothesise about its behaviour, and to support conclusions that we might draw about it and report to others. As testers we are in a particular system, the testing profession, and the State of Testing survey is a data gathering and synthesis exercise for it. The  results are shared  and so can be used to help us to understand, to test hypotheses for, and to draw conclusions about the state we are in. Image: EIL

Mike Brearley was a professional cricketer for around 20 years and was England captain for 31 of the 39 test matches that he played.  His book, The Art of Captaincy , was recommended to managers by participants at both of the last couple of CEWT s, so it's been on my reading list for a while. The book is, as you might expect, heavily biased towards the role of the cricket captain and some of the examples given in it require a bit of cricketing knowledge. Despite this, it has a lot to say to anyone with an interest in interpersonal relationships, particularly those in the workplace, particularly about manager-managee interactions. Here, I've collected and grouped a few of the passages that resonated with me. Professionals should not rely only on practice during their day job Compton was a genius and thus a law unto himself. But the general belief was then and continued to be that fitness for cricket was achieved simply by playing the game. (p. 54) ...