Hiccupps

It was Father's Day recently and one of my daughters made me a card which I love for all sorts of reasons, not least because it says she sees me practising "dad philosophy": See a need, fill a need Sadly this particular gem is not mine, it belongs to Bigweld , a character in Robots . We watched that film loads when my kids were little and I quoted it to encourage them to contribute to the chores, not ignore a mess, and look for opportunities to help each other out.  So I can't claim credit but, hat tip to Bigweld, it is a mindset I use for myself at home and take with me to work. Image: Robots Wiki

For over a year the roadworks near our house have been a riot of signage, inspiring me and my daughter to make silly songs using their words for lyrics as we walked to school.  Then she got the idea that we should make a "proper" song. So I downloaded n-Track and we hacked together a techno instrumental over a few evenings. Unfortunately, recording decent quality vocals at home without much equipment is non-trvial and then real life intervened anyway so the project stopped. A few months later I came aross Suno , an AI song generator, and had a lightbulb moment. Suno exposes a prompt for musical style and a prompt for lyrics so we had it make a song, When Red Light Shows , based on the signs. I think it was my daughter that suggested we should make a video too, so we did, with a non-AI tool, CapCut . The lyrics came from signs, the music came from AI, and we made the images yet I feel that we were creative across all of those areas. Reflecting on our experience, ...

The Association for Software Testing is crowd-sourcing a book,  Navigating the World as a Context-Driven Tester , which aims to provide  responses to common questions and statements about testing from a  context-driven perspective . It's being edited by  Lee Hawkins  who is  posing questions on  Twitter ,   LinkedIn , Mastodon , Slack , and the AST  mailing list  and then collating the replies, focusing on practice over theory. I've decided to  contribute  by answering briefly, and without a lot of editing or crafting, by imagining that I'm speaking to someone in software development who's acting in good faith, cares about their work and mine, but doesn't have much visibility of what testing can be. Perhaps you'd like to join me?   --00-- "How can I possibly test 'all the stuff' every iteration?" Whoa! There's a lot to unpack there, so let me break it down a little: who is suggesting that "al...

I was talking with a colleague the other week and we got onto the topic of framing our work. This is one of my suggestions: I want to help whoever I'm working with build the best version of their thing, whatever 'best' means for them, given the constraints they have. That's it. Chef's kiss. I like it because it packs in, for example: exploration of ideas, software, process, business choices, and legal considerations conversations about budget, scope, resources, dreams, and priorities communicating findings, hypotheses, and suggestions helping to break down the work, organise the work, and facilitate the work making connections, pulling information from outside, and sharing information from inside It doesn't mean that I have no core expertise to bring, no scope for judgement, no agency, and no way to be creative or express myself, and it specifically does not mean that I'm going to pick up all the crap that no-one else wants to do.  Of course, I might pick up...

Questions are a powerful testing tool and, like any tool, can be used in different ways in different scenarios with different motivations and different results. A significant part of my role is generating questions and I will generally have a lot of them. I will rarely ask them all, though, and I've put a lot of time and effort into learning to be comfortable with that. A couple of examples: I was in a meeting this week where the technical conversation was too deep for me to give a perspective from a position of knowledge. I could have disengaged, but I didn't. Instead, I asked occasional questions, not wanting to derail the discussion or disrupt the flow. Some were detail questions, to help grow my understanding. Some were scoping questions, to help understand motivations. The one that really landed, however, was about the focus of the meeting. Although I couldn't contribute at a low level, I understood enough to suspect that we were not discussing the key problem tha...

The Association for Software Testing is crowd-sourcing a book,  Navigating the World as a Context-Driven Tester , which aims to provide  responses to common questions and statements about testing from a  context-driven perspective . It's being edited by  Lee Hawkins  who is  posing questions on  Twitter ,   LinkedIn , Mastodon , Slack , and the AST  mailing list  and then collating the replies, focusing on practice over theory. I've decided to  contribute  by answering briefly, and without a lot of editing or crafting, by imagining that I'm speaking to someone in software development who's acting in good faith, cares about their work and mine, but doesn't have much visibility of what testing can be. Perhaps you'd like to join me?   --00--  "Why don’t we replace the testers with AI?" We have a good relationship so I feel safe telling you that my instinctive reaction, as a member of the T...

Yesterday I was listening to an episode of Arts and Ideas hosted by Matthew Sweet. The topic was pranks and the first request he made of his guests was for a typology of the terms prank, hoax, stunt, and practical joke. No one was prepared to give one but, through the course of the programme, they clearly preferred one term over the others in specific instances or tried to bypass the distinctions by claiming that what mattered was whether there was a laugh. This is no great surprise. Categories invariably have fuzzy boundaries although, famously, we like to think that we can know where something belongs " when we see it ." My thoughts turned to work, and the problem of stakeholders using sets of overlapping terms when discussing what they want with no time for conversations about the meanings ("don't give me all that semantics!"). So I thought, on 1st April, I would take the fool's errand of trying to imagine working on a project where those concepts were ...

  One of my chores takes me outside early in the morning and, if I time it right, I get to hear a charming chorus of birdsong from the trees in the gardens down our road, a relaxing layered soundscape of tuneful calls, chatter, and chirrupping. Interestingly, although I can tell from the number and variety of trills that there must be a large number of birds around, they are tricky to spot. I have found that by staring loosely at something, such as the silhouette of a tree's crown against the slowly brightening sky, I see more birds out of the corner of my eye than if I scan to look for them. The reason seems to be that my peripheral vision picks up movement against the wider background that direct inspection can miss. An optometrist I am not, but I do find myself staring at data a great deal, seeking relationships, patterns, or gaps. I idly wondered whether, if I filled my visual field with data, I might be able to exploit my peripheral vision in that quest. I have a wide monito...

In Obliquity , John Kay argues that success may be best achieved indirectly. When the goal is non-trivial, the environment unpredictable, and the system in which we are operating is complex, then top-down working, planned to completion, is fragile. He recommends that we instead proceed obliquely , taking small steps, making choices opportunistically, and accepting that we do not have all the information or all of the control we might feel we want. Kay presents numerous examples of people and organisations that have done well with the oblique approach and some that have suffered when their indirect strategy straightened up. That's not to say the direct approach can't work or that it is a mistake to apply it to some situations, just that the set of real-world scenarios where directness is a good first choice is pretty constrained. It doesn't take much imagination to see the strong parallel between obliquity and agile software development. Likewi...

The Association for Software Testing is crowd-sourcing a book,  Navigating the World as a Context-Driven Tester , which aims to provide  responses to common questions and statements about testing from a  context-driven perspective . It's being edited by  Lee Hawkins  who is  posing questions on  Twitter ,   LinkedIn , Mastodon , Slack , and the AST  mailing list  and then collating the replies, focusing on practice over theory. I've decided to  contribute  by answering briefly, and without a lot of editing or crafting, by imagining that I'm speaking to someone in software development who's acting in good faith, cares about their work and mine, but doesn't have much visibility of what testing can be. Perhaps you'd like to join me?   --00-- "What's the best format for a test plan?" I'll side-step the conversation about what a test plan is and just say that the format you should use is one th...