Hiccupps

For a while now I've been collecting  fieldstones  on the topic of  heuristics for working . Some of these are things that I've said to others, some of them are things that I've thought about when considering some aspect of myself or how I work, and others have come from books I've read, talks I've attended, and workshops I've participated in. I've made a handful of rough categorisations and I'll put each set in a post under the tag  Heuristics for Working . But what do even I mean by heuristics for working? Good question. I mean rules of thumb for situations that arise in the workplace. They are bits of advice that can be useful to consider but don't offer any guarantees and will not always apply. The collection is surely idiosyncratic, context-sensitive and perhaps too specific and too general in turn. Welcome to my head. I haven't sat down and tried to elaborate or enumerate more, or to try to fill the gaps. Everything here has arisen...

For a while now I've been collecting  fieldstones  on the topic of  heuristics for working . Some of these are things that I've said to others, some of them are things that I've thought about when considering some aspect of myself or how I work, and others have come from books I've read, talks I've attended, and workshops I've participated in. I've made a handful of rough categorisations and I'll put each set in a post under the tag  Heuristics for Working . But what do even I mean by heuristics for working? Good question. I mean rules of thumb for situations that arise in the workplace. They are bits of advice that can be useful to consider but don't offer any guarantees and will not always apply. The collection is surely idiosyncratic, context-sensitive and perhaps too specific and too general in turn. Welcome to my head. I haven't sat down and tried to elaborate or enumerate more, or to try to fill the gaps. Everything here has arisen...

For a while now I've been collecting fieldstones on the topic of heuristics for working . Some of these are things that I've said to others, some of them are things that I've thought about when considering some aspect of myself or how I work, and others have come from books I've read, talks I've attended, and workshops I've participated in. I've made a handful of rough categorisations and I'll put each set in a post under the tag Heuristics for Working . But what do even I mean by heuristics for working? Good question. I mean rules of thumb for situations that arise in the workplace. They are bits of advice that can be useful to consider but don't offer any guarantees and will not always apply. The collection is surely idiosyncratic, context-sensitive and perhaps too specific and too general in turn. Welcome to my head. I haven't sat down and tried to elaborate or enumerate more, or to try to fill the gaps. Everything here has arisen an...

At this week's Cambridge Tester Meetup we played Questions for Testers , a card game created by James Lyndsay which is intended to "trigger conversations and build connections." The deck consists of cards containing questions or statements with three responses. We took it in turns to read out a question or statement and the others quizzed us to help them decide which response they thought we'd give. Eventually they'd guess at our response, and we'd reveal it, and then talk about why we'd chosen as we did. Stefan 's choice was the one at the top:  Bugs and testers are like ... A. Ants and aardvarks B. Bees and beekeepers C. Cars and Cops Questions, did you say? Boom! Head explosion. Are we mapping bugs and testers to one of the entities in each response?  Does the order of the entities matter? Do they each map to just one? Could they each map to both? What relationships might motivate that mapping?  Does it need to be the same mappin...

It reminded me once more of Harnessed Tester  asking whether he could switch his testing off .  I mean, I never intended to start testing when I began reviewing those abstracts. All I wanted to do was think about a strategy for reviewing conference submissions, implement it, and reflect on it. That's all. Honestly. But here I was, testing. Again. I'd been asked to review submissions for a conference. On the one hand it was a tiny bit flattering to be asked, I was certainly interested to see what goes on behind the scenes, and I thought I might learn something about submitting proposals of my own in future. On the other hand, I'm not naive enough to think that I was being asked because of who I am rather than because they needed eyeballs, a large number of reviews were being asked for, and the deadline was just four days away. But I decided to go for it, on the basis that it was a novel experience for me. Limited time, a new task, little context: not unusual paramet...

I spoke at UKSTAR 2018 this week, an eight-minute talk in a Storytelling track. This post is a prettied-up version of the notes I made for it along with some of the slides. The full slide deck is in the Media page . My story is called The Anatomy of a Definition of Testing. It's not a suspense story though, so I'll give you the definition right up front: Testing is the pursuit of relevant incongruity. That is, for me, testing is the pursuit of relevant incongruity. But how did I get there? Well, the journey started with Explore It! by Elisabeth Hendrickson, a great book about exploratory testing which has, near the beginning, this definition: Tested = Checked + Explored It's finessed a little by Neither checking nor exploring is sufficient on its own and the idea that testing is to ... interact with the software or system, observe its actual behavior, and compare that to your expectations. Interestingly, the definition doesn't really play a sig...

The latest in my occasional series of experiments in sketchnoting , this time from UKSTAR 2018 . The sketchnote/video thing I did as a promo for my own storytelling talk is still available here . 

I2E, the flagship product at Linguamatics , is a text mining engine and so sits in the broad space of search tools such as grep , Ctrl-F , and even Google. In that world, evaluating "how good" or "how relevant", or the "correctness" of a set of search results is interesting for a number of reasons, including: it may be hard to define what those terms mean, in general cases. it may be possible to calculate some kind of metric on well-understood, small, data sets but less so at scale.  it may be possible to calculate some kind of metric for simple searches, but less so for complex ones. on different occasions the person searching may have different intent and needs from the same search. But today we'll concentrate on two standard metrics that can be easily defined and which have agreed definitions: precision (roughly "how useful the search results are")  and recall (roughly "how complete the results are"). Imagine we wan...

What is testing? In one of the sessions at the Cambridge Software Testing Clinic  the other night, the whole group collaborated on a mind map on that very question. I find it interesting how the mind can latch on to one small aspect of a thing. I attend these kinds of events to find something new, perhaps a new idea, a different perspective on something I already know, or something about the way I act. In this case, under a node labelled mindset , one of the participants proposed risk-averse . I challenged that, and counter-proposed risk-aware . You can see them both on the map on this page, centre-left, near the bottom. And that's the thing I've been coming back to since: accepting that there is a testing mindset (with all the sociological and semantic challenges that might have) is it reasonable to say that it includes risk aversion or risk awareness? Let's start here: why did I challenge? I challenged because the interpretation that I took in the moment was tha...

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...