Expected Results

There's Always A Book

2012-01-16T18:10:00.001Z

So in my last post I'd got my book list ordered and under control.

Then I went on Twitter and noticed that people were self-publishing some very interesting books using Leanpub

First to catch my eye was The Leprechauns of Software Engineering
How folklore turns into fact and what to do about it.

Downloaded the free preview and was hooked - the book looks closely at some of the “ground truths” of software engineering - such as the “software crisis”, the 10x variability in performance, the cone of uncertainty - and looks at the source and the evidence behind these ideas.
Eagerly awaiting the rest of this book and it's already got me thinking about what testing leprechauns there are...

This was soon followed by Elisabeth Hendrickson( @testobsessed ) tweeting about whether there would be interest in her doing a book. Happily myself and many others said 'yes' so a few days later her book There's Always a Duck was out. ( read how she did it here )

Her blog was one of the first I found when I got into testing so it was a real pleasure to re-read the articles again. Not that it was simply a re-print, she had updated many of the posts. Now I have them readily to hand to dip into whenever I want.

It was also great to see a namecheck for Atomic Object in the article about her accepting the Gordon Pask award in the section of the book on Community

All of which reminded me of Ajay Balamurgadas and the 2 books he had written. Order placed and 2 books of a testers experience and tips available to be read.

Cost of the books ? A few dollars each.
Thoughts and experiences contained within them ? Invaluable

Reviewing the book list

2012-01-04T14:49:00.002Z

There was an interesting post from the prolific TESTHEAD about Reviewing his bookself - spending 15 minutes a day every day going through his library and doing a Reference Review.

Seems like a good idea, small problem at the moment is that currently I'm still in the US and my library is back in the UK. It's definitely a good idea for me to sort through and decide which books I'll need to pack and which I can get rid of.

In the meantime I did a mini-review of my current reading list:

Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman
After reading some great reviews and tweets about this book I ordered it. Currently 1/3 of the way through it and really enjoying it. I can see this leading to some useful blog posts and discussions and thoughts so keeping this close to the front of the queue

Poke the Box by Seth Godin
Free book from a giveway by Matt Heusser. Very small book so should be able to read it in a couple of hours. Should also help with giving 2012 a kickstart so expecting to have read and posted a review in the next week.

Captain James Cook - a biography.
Thought it would be good to read about some real life explorers and see if any lessons could be taken from them for use in testing. It's an interesting book anyway so will be used as my leisure reading.

The Cucumber Book
Now that I'm looking at actual projects that use it I'll be reading this closely over the next month.

Technical Blogging
My blogging was hit-and-miss last year and I'd like it to be more focused. I also now have a company blog that I'd like to write for. Had a quick flick through the book and it seems to have some good ideas. Will dip into this book over the next few weeks.

Build Awesome Command Line Applications in Ruby
Still building up my Ruby knowledge so I'll put this on the back-burner for the moment.

Gamestorming: A Playbook for Innovators, Rulebreakers, and Changemakers
Got this after a great review from Rob Lambert. Seems to have some interesting ideas in it but i think it could be more useful when I've moved to the US and am interacting daily with the rest of the company. Putting to the back of the pile.

The RSpec Book: Behaviour Driven Development with RSpec, Cucumber, and Friends
As with the Cucumber book, now I'm looking at real projects and code I can see the use for this. Will read it along with the Cucumber book

The Leader's Guide to Radical Management: Reinventing the Workplace for the 21st Century - Steve Denning
Halfway through this but as I seem to be working for a company who seem to be already following a lot of the thoughts in it then I'll put it towards the back of the pile.

Myths of Innovation by Scott Berkun
This seems like it will be a great read but not a priority at the moment. Putting it at the back of the pile.

That was easy - dont think sorting out my full library will be as simple...

Halfway through writing this blog though I noticed this discussion on the STC, "Tacit and Explicit Knowledge" by Harry Collins seems like a book I really should be reading...
As does Qualitative Data Analysis A.User-friendly Guide for Social Scientists by Ian Dey which John Stevenson refers to in the comments to that post.
Doh, only January 4 and any resolutions of keeping my Amazon Wish List under control are disapearing...

A functional end

2011-12-30T11:06:00.003Z

This time last year I was enjoying an extended Xmas break and was using the time to learn Selenium and Java. I'd installed Eclipse on my laptop and was enjoying doing some coding again. In fact I was enjoying it so much and hating the commute into work that thoughts of a job change started.

And this is how the year has finished - a new job opportunity and I've just installed the Haskell Platform and I'm reading up on functional programming.

The job may change but the learning doesn't stop - only now I'm not doing it on my own and doing it on sample projects. I'm now working with projects that use all the stuff that I was reading about.

Looking back on the year:

I'm learning how to use Git and Vim.

Read Agile Web Development with Rails and followed the examples so I had a RoR website up and running on my laptop.

Tested my first mobile apps

Learnt about several sectors of industry that I previously knew nothing about.

Attended Tester Gatherings in London, Oxford and Winchester and met Lisa Crispin and Michael Bolton.

Attended 2 Tester Gatherings in Grand Rapids, Michigan and met Pete Walen and Mel Bugai.

Met Matt Heusser and went out for a buffalo burger ( sadly sold out ) and tester chat.

Spent 8 weeks with my finger in a splint after getting Mallet Finger playing Extreme Frisbee with new work colleagues.

Celebrated the landmark figure of 10,000 members of the Software Testing Club.

Terminated numerous STC posts and accounts, some of whom got pissed at me.

Increased my library with numerous books

Doubled the size of my Amazon Wish List

Goals for next year:

Finalise my move to the US - the visa process is slow

Get a deeper understanding of Ruby by looking at real projects

Attend CAST 2012

Finish reading the books I have before starting on my Wish List

Continue growing the STC both in terms of numbers and influence

Be an active member of GR Testers

Whilst writing this post other testers have posted their reflections on the year. I was struck by how two entries also emphasised learning - Anne-Marie Charrett (The Maverick Tester ) and Pete Walen. And I'm fortunate to be working at a place that also emphasises a culture of learning

Another blog post also got my attention, from Timothy Western aka Veretax/Discovered Tester - Reflections on 2011, a year of trial, growth, and questions

My current role on project has me pondering though. I've heard it debated around twitter, about whether you can be both a programmer and a tester. I know I can do either, but at some point do you not need to decide which to specialize in? The reality is there are only so many hours in the day for study and growth, and the opportunity cost of each new learning investment, in effect is at a loss for learning something else. This is a reality that I've now come face to face with in the last two months. I still have the knowledge from what I learned as a tester, but it has been hard to try and keep up on my learning where testing is concerned, especially when my current responsibilities require me to act in a more code-centric role

I'm enjoying poking around in code and even enjoying the headache that looking at Haskell and functional programming is giving me. But I've also started reading Thinking Fast and Slow which is giving me a lot of thoughts about bias in testing.

Which to devote more time to ? How to find the right balance ?
Something I'll have to try and answer in 2012

The Recipe Test

2011-12-06T17:21:00.004Z

I have to admit to getting hooked on a reality TV show - Masterchef Australia ( who knew there were so many ways to cook a kangaroo ? ).

The series is basically about a bunch of amateur cooks who are set a series of challenges and whittled down week after week until there is a winner.
A recent episode made for great blog material.
The challenge was for the four cooks left in the competition to come up with a recipe - and then write it down so that a home cook could follow it and make the dish.

All four finalists were great cooks, had delivered some amazing dishes and thrived under pressure. Putting this skill and talent onto paper proved to be a very difficult task.

The rule of the challenge was that the home cooks had to follow the recipe, they could not use their own initiative. Very simple mistakes caused large problems for the people trying to follow the recipes.

One mistake was that a recipe said to use 'juice' but juice did not appear on the list of ingredients. So what flavour of juice ? How much ? The recipe writer had removed it from the list of ingredients but forgot to remove it from the recipe making instructions.

Another recipe which was for a 3-layered cake came unstuck because although it said to divide the mixture into 3 it also only specified using 2 baking trays and so the home cook ended up with a 2 layer cake.

The contestants found the task difficult, the home cooks found it confusing and the judges found the results inedible...

Being an MP ? Anyone can do it

2011-11-21T22:44:00.005Z

An old friend of mine from uni days has an interesting blog about HR and the workplace. His latest piece was on the grilling of James Murdoch - or rather the lack of it

He pulls out a telling phrase from the main article

The task of questioning was given to MPs with little or no forensic training. As a result, an important moment in political history, but more crucially public accountability, was gone

The article itself has many other good points such as:

But most damning was the lack of focus and incision of the cross-examination

Poor questioning skills.
Vital questions were never asked.
No probing and follow-up.

Sound familiar ?

Reducing the Cost of Testing - Interview with Matthew Heusser

2011-10-18T18:25:00.004+01:00

Next up in my series of interviews with authors of Reducing the Cost of Software Testing is Matthew Heusser

From a Linked In discussion to a book - quite a jump. What triggered the idea that the discussion could be made into a book ?

I have no idea. It was all Govind.

That’s a sort of secret in our industry: You can get shockingly far not inventing stuff, but by listening, paying attention, connecting the dots, and taking action early. Govind came to me with the book idea; all I did was take him seriously and then help him execute.

The book is about Reducing the Cost of Testing - this implies there is a a lot of waste that could be cut ? If so, why is this, why is there so much waste ?

There is waste all over the place in the corporate world. It is ridiculous.

Consider, for example, the telephone game we all played in grammar school. First one person says a sentence to the person next to him, and around the circle we go. By the end, the message is nothing like what it started out as. In many companies, that is the software development process - with a translation process from a human to a spec, and another from spec to design, design to code, code to test, and so on. I just don’t have a better term than ridiculous.

Now take a walk around a modern corporation with a clip-board. For everyone you see doing something that really looks like work, make a check-mark. For the ones that don’t, make a check-mark in a different column. Do it every fifteen minutes for a few hours, and you’ll find more waste than you might expect. Now am I saying that people don’t need breaks now and again? Certainly not. But a lot of people are just plain not working very hard. Often, no one is working very hard -- and that is due to systematic issues that management can do something about.

Chapters from different testers in different parts of the world - how was organising this ? was it like herding cats ?

Oh it was tough. You have to realize that most of the contributors are not professional writers, and that it is incredibly easy to create a fifty-word outline, but, for a non-writer, creating five thousand solid words is, well, hard. When we had to track down the contributors and ask them “when are you going to be done?” or, worse, tell a few we had quality concerns ... wow. That was no fun.

There’s an old saw that, as a publisher, you can have friends, they just won’t be anyone you work with professionally. It’s a joke, but I certainly understand where it came from.

Do you have a favourite chapter ?

Being both immersed in the problem and arguably doing the most research, and more than a little bit human and selfish, I’m a little partial to my own chapter. Michael Larsen’s , Michael Kelly’s and Scott Barber's chapters, along with Catherine Powell’s appendix, also provide some of the most direct/concrete advice in the book.

What was the hardest part of putting the book together ?

Oh wow. Everything. Offhand: Dealing with authors who didn’t deliver, or delivered substandard work. Dealing with the authors who stepped in at the last minute, who wrote a chapter in a weekend -- you have to admire that, but gosh did we have some polishing to do.

Probably the most painful for me personally was the communications problems that came from people genuinely mis-understanding, often because I had failed to make things clear in the first place. Knowing that more than a bit of it was my fault makes it hurt more.

You also did the foreword for "Clean Coder" by Robert "Uncle Bob" Martin and you've had a chapter in "Beautiful Testing" Are books and writing important to you ?

For me, writing is a creative outlet that is just enough like testing to sharpen my mind, and just different enough to be a distraction. That I can do it anywhere on my own schedule, without travel, certainly helps.

When someone tells me that they took one of my ideas and applied them to success, that makes my day. When they are more critical, it makes me think and improve. Either way, I win.

You did this book, had a day job, family, blog and got other articles published - do you only sleep 2 hours a night ?

The rumor seems to be that I have super-powers, but the truth is simply that I have made a conscious choice to make software testing an important part of my life. I also have a wonderful life-partner in my wife, who does many things that allow me to sneak in a few more hours for testing here or there.

It’s not two hours, but yes, you’re right, I do not sleep enough, and that’s a problem.

What's next in the pipeline for you - another book ?

How did you guess? (Laughs) I am currently gathering resources for a book on classic essays in software testing. I am open to recommendations ...

Thanks for the replies Matt - and to show how busy he is, take a look at his profile

Joining the club

2011-10-14T17:45:00.001+01:00

When new members request membership of the Software Testing Club, one of the questions is:

What would you like to get out of the Software Testing Club ?

Pretty straightforward question but I have been amused at some of the answers.

I would not like to get out of the software club but in case you want me to leave this club then simply a mail will do.
- seems The Terminators reputation has spread.

I LIKE SOFTWARE TOO MUCH
- too much to do what ? test it ? and please dont shout

My dream software..its a secret, will let you know later
- I'm still waiting

Its too early...
you only test at night ?

dsdsdd
asdf asdf 123

Nothing
so you wont mind if I dont approve your membership then ?

Reducing the Cost of Testing - Interview with Markus Gärtner

2011-10-07T21:01:00.003+01:00

Next up in my series of interviews with authors of Reducing the Cost of Software Testing is Markus Gärtner

It should be a short book - do less of it and/or hire cheaper testers. Why is there a whole book about it ?

Software Testing is a broad field. A very broad one. It is florished from diverse fields as software testing, programming, software design, psychology, philosophy, epistemology, ..., and management. So, when we ask how to reduce the cost of software testing, one possible answer is to do less testing. But considering the broad field of testing, that answer doesn't help you at all, because that answer does not tell you how to do that, what the liabilities of your approach might be, and what other things you may want to try out.

In the book, Matt Heusser and Govind Kulkarni got together many of the thoughtleaders in the field of software testing to provide a broad collection of answers. In fact, you will find 20 different chapters providing different answers on what software testing actually costs us, what we should do in our projects, and how we should do it.

I'm a tester, I find bugs - why do I need to worry about reducing the cost of testing ?

Testing is our profession. That means that we as software testers are asked about our professional opinions and inputs to the whole software development cycle. Managers make decisions based on our opinions and input to them. That is why we should provide the information of the actual cost of our actions. As professional testers we have the responsibility to inform managers and stakeholders about what we are doing, why we are doing it, and what it will actually cost them, so that they can make the right decisions. If you don't care about the cost of your actions, maybe you are wasting your company's time and money. I call that unprofessional, if you're unaware about it.

Your chapter was about Exploiting the Testing Bottleneck - why did you decide to write about that?

Initially I was considering to use some of the insights I got from the Quality Software Management series by Jerry Weinberg, and write a chapter on how to manage software development projects so that we can actually reduce the cost of testing.

When I started to write my chapter, I found myself on a different track though. Inspired by Elisabeth Hendrickson's talk on Agile Testing practices and principles, I started to explain that benefits you get from working on an Agile team that applies good Agile Development practices like Continuous Integration, TDD, and Exploratory Testing. As I digged deeper, I found more and more pieces, I wanted to incorporate. In the end, I had the difficulty to find a proper name for what I had written down.

As testing is mostly perceived to be a bottleneck on the software projects I had been part of until that time, I found that name quite easily. In Goldratt's The Goal he explains that you should identify bottlenecks in your process, and exploit them, in order to improve your work. The chapter name "Exploiting the Testing Bottleneck" is a deliberate pick on that, because I truly believe that we would test better on any projects, if we seeked to exploit the (perceived) bottleneck in first place, rather than blaming the messengers.

How long did it take you to write ?

Roughly 32 years, but I think that I need to explain that answer. I consider the question "How long did it take you to write your chapter?" similar to the questions "why does testing take us so long?", "how long does it take you to test that?", or "when will be done eating?" I incorporated some portion of my past life into the chapter I wrote. There are nuggets like the insights I got from "The Goal", Lean thinking, systems thinking, and Agile software development in there.

If you consider learning about the stuff I wrote about to be part of the "writing process" of my chapter, I would say roughly 32 years. If you think of the time of writing my chapter as the amount of time I actually worked on the text of my chapter, I would say, roughly one week of work, starting in early May 2010 during my parental leave from work, polishing it up over the summer holidays in August, and finishing "my" first final draft in early October 2010.

Are you happy when you re-read it or would you like to change it ?

For most of my writings I apply a fire-and-forget principle. I write it down, I hit the publish button on my blog, and then I start to forget about it. By forgetting I mean not to revisit it later. This makes a review process very hurtful. So, while I re-read it, I incorporated some of the insights I got from review comments, already. So far, I haven't received a physical copy of the book, so I haven't had the opportunity to re-read it there, but I didn't dare to read the electronical copies we got before the book went to printing. I am probably too scared about that, and I know that it will hunt me down in a few months, maybe.

This does not hold for all of my writing. Sometimes I re-read some of my stuff, and find quite a few shortcomings. I know that I will be hurt to find so many tiny glitches and problems I left in there. So, I prefer to keep the illusion of a good enough chapter for the moment, and deliberately taking the time to re-read in a few weeks or so. Whenever I feel like hurting myself with it. :)

Now that you are a published author, do you have any plans for future books ?

Oh, I was a published author before the book. Few of readers might know that, but I published my diploma thesis back in 2008. It's in German, it's about hand gesture recognition in a human-machine interaction, and I explained the approach to my mother - who is a non-technician - at the time I worked on it. I think, I sold 5 copies of it so far, but publishing the book didn't change anything for me, I think.

That said, I work on a book on ATDD right now. I submitted a first draft to the publisher. I am also in contact with a German publisher through whom I might publish a book on Agile Testing in German in the future, and I also got lots of ideas for maybe a second book in English. Personally I consider my chapter in "How to reduce the cost of testing?" as one milestone on a longer publishing road.

Will your copy of the book be put in a special place ?

I will put it on my book shelf right beneath Beautiful Testing. Since we just moved into a house, I don't have that book shelf filled, yet. So, the special place might actually end up as the first book on my shelf - depends on what reaches me first: my copy of the book, or my energy to unpack my library. :)

Putting you on the spot - what is your favourite chapter in the book ( and why ) ?

Oh, I can't take a single pick there. So, let me give a bunch. I loved reviewing Michael Kelly's "Session-Based Test Management" as well as "Opportunity Cost of Testing" from Catherine Powell. Curtis Stuehrenberg hit a nail for me with "Clean Test: Suggestions for Reducing Costs by Increasing Test Craftsmanship" , but it might be just the mention of craftsmanship in the title.

Michael Kelly explained thoroughly what Session-based test management is about. From his chapter I got the insight that lead me to the idea of inspectional testing - a way to explore the functions of the product in order to inform good test planning. Every tester that claims to do Exploratory Testing has to read this.

Catherine Powell explained the concept of opportunity costs in a way that I could understand, and follow-up on it. It was a real eye-opener.

For Curtis' chapter, I loved the mention of craftsmanship. Having been involved since December 2008 with the Software Craftsmanship community, I actually envied him to use craftsmanship in his title. I was considering to rename my chapter when I saw that, but it would have been obvious who would have spoiled whom about it.

But, I have to admit that I haven't read all of the chapters. I missed to read the one from Michael Bolton and the one from Jon Bach so far, but I am quite sure that I will love these chapters as well, and will incorporate them in my list of favourite chapters.

Until this book came out, what was your favourite testing book ?

This is a hard question. I have read some of the most tedious software testing books, I think. Among the testing books that I loved are Lee Copeland's "A practitioner's approach to software testing design". I also loved reviewing Lisa Crispin's and Janet Gregory's "Agile Testing".
But my favoourite testing book before "How to reduce the cost of testing" is "Lessons Learned in Software Testing" by Cem Kaner, James Bach, and Bret Pettichord, as well as "Perfect Software... and other illusions about testing" from Jerry Weinberg.

( Me - what a great choice, Lessons Learned was one of my very first books and set me off on my testing career )

From acorns to skyscrapers

2011-10-04T20:43:00.001+01:00

Just over 4 years ago I was member number 8 of the Software Testing Club - membership is now over 9500 and rapidly closing in on 10,000

I've posted 506 times to discussions, declined numerous request for memberships from lovely fun girls looking for love, been threatened with having a DOS attack on the site and been threatened with the involvement of lawyers after an argument with a member who thought the biggest thing in testing was going to be copyright laws.

Thanks to Rosie and Rob Lambert and Stephen Hill the site has gone from being just an online site to a site that has offered eBooks, posters and the fabulous newspaper, The Testing Planet.

It has also gone offline as well with STC meetups at London, Birmingham, Oxford, Bristol, Liverpool - and Winchester later this month.

and now it's going trans-Atlantic with the announcement that on November 10 there is a Chicago STC Meetup

From a twinkling in Rosie Sherry's eye to this - WOW.
I'm glad to have been part of it - and who knows what's next....

( well, Rosie and Rob and Stephen probably have lots of ideas for what's next !! )

Reducing the Cost of Testing - Interview with Catherine Powell

2011-10-01T08:35:00.000+01:00

The book How to Reduce the Cost of Software Testing is now out - a great effort by a bunch of testers to put a book together and get it published.

Wanting to know more about how and why they did it, I interviewed some of the authors.
First to respond was Catherine Powell

It should be a short book - do less of it and/or hire cheaper testers. Why is there a whole book about it ?

You're right, it is easy. Except for all the ways in which it's really hard. Our original title for the book was "How to Reduce the Cost of Software Testing Without Mindlessly Shooting Yourself In the Foot". (It was too long.)

The point is that there are consequences of our decisions, and the book is about making informed choices that reduce the cost of testing without unacceptable side effects.

To take one of your simple examples: we could reduce the cost of testing by laying off all the testers. This would absolutely drive the costs of testing down. It would also result in buggy, unpredictable software that your customers don't like. Your development costs go up - fewer features per developer hour - because they're working on bugs. Your revenue goes down because people don't really want to buy buggy or hard to use software. Your cost of hosting goes up, because you don't know how the system scales, and you have to just increase everything. In the end, you're worse off than if you'd kept your testers around.

The book is about placing software test - and the costs of testing software - in context of the entire software development lifecycle. It's about taking a facetious answer ("just do less!") and providing manager, executives, and testers with the tools to make those decisions intelligently.

I'm a tester, I find bugs - why do I need to worry about reducing the cost of testing ?

You're a tester. You do a whole lot more than find bugs. You gather information, you understand systems, you figure out how things work and how they don't. And, if you're like most testers, you worry about your job. Heck, most professionals do. This book is about the value that test brings to an organization, and about realizing that value in a cost-effective way. Those are exactly the skills that you as a tester will need to thrive in the future of software development.

Your chapter was about Opportunity Costs - why did you decide to write about that?

So much of what we do in testing is about making tradeoffs. It's about recognizing that we could test forever but that we don't actually have forever; instead there's a release coming up fast. I wanted to write about that decision making process using a tool that is recognizable to the business: opportunity cost. Opportunity cost is what we give up by not doing something. Because we went to the store, we didn't have time to go to the gym; the opportunity cost of going to the store is the benefit we would have gotten from going to the gym (weight loss! better cardio!). Opportunity cost provides us with a way to expose the risks and costs of not doing something, and not doing something is a choice we frequently face in software testing.

How long did it take you to write ?

That's a tough question. The chapter on opportunity costs took a few days. The first draft came together in about a 6 hour period, but it was (like many first drafts) terrible! Fixing it took rather longer.

The appendix on 25 Tips to Reduce Testing Today was faster. Matt Heusser and I worked on that and Immediate Strategies to Reduce Test Cost together - you'll notice the strategies and the tips align - and it was really about the quick hits and small changes that together make a big difference. I don't know if it actually took less time, but it was certainly fun, and a lot of fun to think about what the most immediate thing could possibly be.

Are you happy when you re-read it or would you like to change it ?

I'm still happy with it. There are some tweaks I would make, but I'm still very excited about bringing together business concepts with testing needs and helping those two worlds work better together.

Now that you are a published author, do you have any plans for future books ?

I haven't really decided! At the moment I'm mostly writing for my blog and shorter articles, but there may be a book waiting to emerge.

Will your copy of the book be put in a special place ?

Does the bookshelf count as a special place?

Putting you on the spot - what is your favourite chapter in the book ( and why ) ?

That's a tough one. The chapters are all helpful in very different ways. This is a book to me that you don't read all the way through and put it away. You read different chapters as you go through various situations, whether it's doing budgeting (and reading Michael Larsen's Trading Money for Time), or building up a test team (and reading Anne-Marie Charrett's Cost of Starting Up a Test Team), or trying to move faster (and reading Petteri Lyttinen's You Can't Waste Money on a Defect That Isn't There).

Until this book came out, what was your favourite testing book ?

I'm into the classics, so my favorite is Hetzel's Complete Guide to Software Testing. I pick it up when I need to be reminded of the fundamentals. Parts of it are a bit dated, but most of it is still solid guidance.

Conferences and Gatherings

2011-09-09T10:43:00.003+01:00

I read a great blog post - Don’t Be This Guy - which was about going to conferences and listening to the tech talks but not connecting with any of the other people at the conference.

You see, since he was the only SQL Server professional at his place of employment, he didn’t have a lot of opportunities to talk shop in person with others. He longed for what they had, but couldn’t find the initiative to start up meaningful conversations with others.

Replace 'SQL Server' with 'testing' and that was me a few years ago - and doubtless applies to many lone gun testers out there.

So reading this reminded me of my first SIGIST conference a few years ago - being surrounded by testers felt good and listening to people talk about testing was great.
Luckily at this conference I did have some courage - at that time Testing Reflections was a very active site and I'd had some encouraging words from Antony Marcano after posting on there. He was doing a talk at SIGIST so I went over to say Hello and he invited me along to the usual after-event drinks. Without that invite I could well have been 'that guy'.

Now, a few years on and there is another SIGIST due - but I'm not going. Partly because it wasn't that well publicised, partly because the line-up doesn't excite me that much - but also because there are more events on now than there used to be

I have a couple of events at Skillsmatter to go to - with the bonus that they are free and in the evening. SIGIST I have to pay for and take a day off work.

Tester Gatherings and STC meetups are happening - next London Tester Gathering is later this month and there are a horde of STC Meetups happening (Winchester, Birmingham and Liverpool in October ) - and those that go to them give them great write-ups

( and a quick shout out to the Grand Rapids Tester Meetups - it will be a few months before I can attend the next one. Sorry )

Twitter, blogging and the Software Testing Club can also help those lone-gun testers make connections. Michael Larsen - TESTHEAD - is a fantastic example of what can be done
Or see this blog post from Pete Walen.

Online or offline though - just dont be That Guy ( or Gal ).
Connect.
Participate.

Random Ruby

2011-09-05T18:27:00.015+01:00

I recently wrote a post on Atomic Spin about how I've been getting back up to speed with Ruby after a (too) long absence from it.

One thing that the resources I've been reading emphasise is practise so I've been looking for ways to try out Ruby.

So thank you Alan Page and his Numberz Challenge. It's a simple windows app that he's using in his blog articles about test design.

This seemed a good exercise so with the help of Scripted GUI Testing with Ruby I had the app automated.

A few more lines of code and I was able to check the data and find that the numbers used were not random ( #3 came out more than it should ) and the calculation of the total was sometimes incorrect.
Alan has now written an update which shows the app was indeed written to favour 3 and to occasionally get the total wrong.

Looking at the source code would have been an easier way to test - though making your source code available to view can lead to problems if you have a poker app. But even if your source code is not available some people will reverse-engineer your app ( the winner of the Numberz challenge did exactly that ! )

So one blog post shows what lengths testers will go to, gives some testers practice in their new language, nicely illustrates the point about recognising when automation can help - and gets Chris McMahon blogging again ( twice ! )

The new adventure

2011-08-24T11:22:00.014+01:00

I've been looking for a new job for sometime - the daily commute was a real grind, waterfall projects where I never met the developers, working with companies who treated testing as a production line with testers as resources that could be swapped in/out, managers obsessed by counts of tests, days where the entire day seemed to be one conference call after another...

Being part of the test community was a great help when I started looking and I had a number of interesting opportunities put my way but then I saw this job ad which Matt Heusser ( thanks Matt ! ) posted to the s/w testing mailing list. I was intrigued and excited by it so went and found out more about the company - Atomic Object - liked what I read about them so sent in an application.

To cut a long story very short ( the long story is likely to be my submission to the next issue of The Testing Planet ) I was made an offer which I've accepted - though I have to wait awhile before I can be a proper employee...

The one big complication is that Atomic are in Grand Rapids, Michigan, USA and I'm in Bracknell Berks, UK...but I have a US wife which helps the visa process somewhat so early next year ( no jinx ) I'll be heading off to the US.

Grand Rapids has a good tester community - Pete Walen and Matt Heusser are there so I already have friends but until then I'm a contractor working from the UK.

It will be a challenge - Elisabeth Hendrickson mentions her visit to Atomic Object in her Exploratory Testing in an Agile Context session that she did at Agile 2011 and how she found it difficult to break the apps. Much better to have this sort of challenge than to be able to quickly rack up 700 defects as I did in my last project.

Working remotely as a contractor is also a challenge but there is Skype, Yammer, IM, email - not ideal but it will do until the visa arrives.

I'm already appreciating the extra spare time I have with no 4 hour commute - halfway through Learn Ruby The Hard Way and back to participating more in the online testing community - which is a good thing as I can return the favours I got from being part of it.

Well Connected - or not

2011-08-14T16:20:00.003+01:00

So the Windows Wireless Network Connection manager got a bit confused

It seemed to think I wasn't connected but also thought I was.
C'mon, it's one of 2 states, how hard is it to get that right and consistent ?

( or this can be an exercise to the readers and they can tell me how really it can be more than 2 states... )

Grandad, what's a VCR ?

2011-07-31T12:15:00.011+01:00

Currently on vacation in the US, I found that a new series of Hells Kitchen had started - worth watching to see if you agree that Ramsey is a great consultant or just a foul mouthed bully...

Having missed the first episodes, we used On Demand to watch them - with the added bonus that we'd be able to skip the commercials that appear every 6 minutes

except...

EXCEPT...

we couldn't.
Hit Fast Forward and the message

" VCR Controls are disabled "

appeared on the screen.
Whaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaat ?
Several Ramsey style expletives later, my tester senses kicked in.

What does "VCR" stand for ? Video Cassette Recorder
I'm not using a Video Cassette Recorder, no tapes are involved in this operation, why is the message referring to an ancient technology ?

And only the fast forward control is disabled, I could still pause and rewind so the message itself is lying to me.

All of which reminded me of the FAILURE mnemonic from Ben Simo.

The message was not Appropriate - I was not using a VCR and I can imagine some users not even knowing what a VCR was.
( how long ago did people stop using VCRs ? )

Impact - the message told me the controls were disabled which was incorrect

UI - should the error message really be using terminology of another technology ?

Emotions - seeing this message certainly made me mad !

But at least I got a blog post out of it - not that it makes up for commercials every 6 minutes.
Blech

Uninstallers - so square

2011-07-26T16:48:00.003+01:00

I had to uninstall TweetDeck and got the not-very-helpful dialog shown above.

I know it's hard to imagine that users would want to uninstall the amazing life-changing program that you've worked on but always worth checking that if they want to do so, they can

Goodbye 17" seat

2011-07-18T21:02:00.001+01:00

Just one more week of squeezing into a narrow seat* on the train and trying not to get seat rage.

Maybe I shouldn't complain as at least I do get a seat, two stations further on and it's standing room only for the remaining 50 minutes of the journey.

No more parking in side streets close to the station to avoid the rip-off £8 a day parking charge.

No more seeing cash-signs in taxs drivers eyes when trains are cancelled, the promised bus replacements never turn up so the only option is a cab share.

No more reminders to please remember to take my personal belongings with me.

No more dark mutterings when I read that train fares are due to increase by over 10%

No longer will I waste two days a year simply standing looking at departure boards to see what platform the train leaves from before joining the stampeding herd to get on it.

Apologies to all the tourists who's pictures I've ruined by getting in them - but I want to get home and not wait around whilst you take your picture of St Pauls and the City skyline from Embankment bridge.

I wont get to hear how the divorce proceedings of the woman who sat behind me pan out.

No more adding items to my Amazon wish list knowing I'd have no time to read them.

No more telling Rosie and Rob that I dont have time to write an article for the next Testing Planet.

End of an era and start of a new adventure - more details soon
( it's gonna be Grand and it's gonna be rapid )

*BBC has 43cm as being 18in when in fact it is 16.9291339 so 17"

'View from the 17" seat' would have made a great title for a blog on the joys of commuting. Too late now for me to use - any rat race commuters reading this, please feel free to use

left hand meet right hand

2011-07-12T13:09:00.004+01:00

Rob Lambert recently blogged about Checking what other system allow - an online form asked for his Twitter name but wasn't able to process it as it didn't allow the same range of characters that Twitter does.

Maybe it was this post that made me more alert for examples of this as after reading this I found a discrepancy within a system ( never mind between systems ).

An app allows a user to be created and gives some guidance on creating a name and suggests using your email name. Makes sense as user names are system wide so as soon as someone has created 'Bob' then the second Bob has to try Bob1 or BobC and after a few months the ninety ninth bob has to spend several minutes trying to find a Bob that isn't taken.

So far so good.

Then an enhancement is proposed for the app that generates some output files. The files have to be given unique names but ones that are associated with the user. So the spec suggests using the username as part of the file name and gives an example as 'data_Mark.txt'.
Seems almost reasonable until you remember the earlier suggestion of using your email as a username. 'data_mark.specwriter@notthoughtthrough.com.txt' doesn't seem such a good idea...

so thanks to Rob for making me aware of checking the consistency of a system - and shows how testing memes can spread

Rock n Roll Characters

2011-07-11T16:46:00.002+01:00

Google News had problems with the umlauts in Motorhead and Wurzel

But they are in esteemed company, the #AskObama Live Twitter event had a similar problem - great explanation of this can be found here

SpongeBob TestyPants

2011-07-06T16:55:00.003+01:00

Just read a good blog post about Sponge Learning by Alex Rosen who hangs around on Hacker News ( as do I ) and soaks up infomation from the posts and comments there.

Reminded me a lot about my first moves into testing where I lurked on SQA Forums and Testing Reflections ( when I was not reading books )
The soak possibilities have increased the last few years - the awesome Software Testing Club site, blogs galore, podcasts and I suppose it's possible to soak a few drops from Twitter.

Simon Morley recently ranted about being given a headache by some of the questions that get posted on the forums ( and he doesn't get to see a lot of the posts that get Terminated as soon as I notice them )

But, as Darren McMillan points out in his latest blog post An untapped sea of knowledge, once you move on from soaking to interacting and participating in the community there are some great rewards.

If you're reading this then chances are I'm preaching to the converted but I'll try and remember how much I get out of the community and restrain my Twitter rants next time I open up the STC and find a post
"Plz tell me the Best Practices and Tool for naming Sanity Test Cases in an Agile team"

Steve Freeman - Smells

2011-06-03T12:01:00.004+01:00

Went to Skills Matter last night for another of their excellent series of free evening talks. This one was Steve Freeman talking about Fractal TDD: Using tests to drive system design

His premise was that the standard TDD cycle of Write Failing Test -> Make It Pass -> Refactor could be done at a higher level and the benefits of doing so.

He started off by showing a unit test from the wild - pages long, full of references to other classes and mocks, even including a mock God object. This was TDD getting out of hand and someone should have noticed and said "this doesn't feel or look right"
Which led onto the meat of his talk - Test Smells.

If code follows good design principles then it should be easy to test, if there are any test smells then it's likely there are design problems. He suggested adding an extra stage to the TDD loop - "is it hard to write a test" ?

He then went through some of the common Test Smells

Test Duplicates Code - the code of the test seems identical to the code that it is testing
Too Many Assertions
Faking The Wrong Objects - for example dont mock a 3rd party API, test this with integration tests so your TDD tests can concentrate on the design
Test Setup Requires Magic - usual example of this is a clock
Not Testing Logging - if logging is important enough to be part of the production code then it's worth testing

Steve then said that to test a system we need to

Know what the system is doing
Know when it has stopped doing it
Know when it has gone wrong
Details of why it has gone wrong

he then made the connection that the things we need to test the system are also the things that make the system easier to support. So if you do TDD then not only do you get code that's easy to modify but you also get a system that's easy to support.

He made use of the Ports and Adapters concept from Alistair Cockburn which I hadn't come across before but am now busy reading up on. Steve showed how good design means tests dont have to be confined at the edges of these ports but can go in deeper and test the model.

All in all an interesting talk, some new concepts for me to think over and I really really must finish his book

One thing I did think of though ( and only after the event ) was his examples of code that was hard to test.
If TDD was being done right then wouldn't the tests be written first rather than writing the code then finding it was hard to write tests for it ?

The Dog Saw The Risk

2011-05-30T13:43:00.015+01:00

Been awhile since I last posted ( full explanation soon ), one reason was a vacation to the US. To pass the time on the flight I find that a Malcolm Gladwell book usually works and also provides material for a blog post afterwards.

This time was no exception - the book I was reading was What The Dog Saw and from the chapter Blowup I learned about risk homeostasis.

The theory behind this is that under certian circumstances, changes that appear to make a system or an organisation safer, in fact don't. The reason for this is that humans have a tendency to compensate for lower risks in one area by taking greater risks in another.

Gladwell gives some examples of this:

Part of a fleet of taxicabs in Munich were equipped with ABS. Did the group with ABS have fewer accidents ? No, they had more ! They drove faster, made sharper turns, braked harder.
More pedestrians are killed at marked crosswalks than unmarked ones because they compensate for the safe environment of a marked crosswalk by being less vigilant about traffic.

Risk homeostasis also works the opposite way.
In Sweden they changed from driving on the left-hand side to the right-hand side. This did not increase the accident rate, traffic fatalaties dropped by 17% as people compensated for the unfamiliarity with the new driving pattern by driving more carefully.

All of which made me think about whether this could relate to testing and s/w development.

Do devs take more risks if they know there's a testing stage at the end to catch their mistakes ?
If TDD is introduced to an organisation does it cause an increase in defects as devs think they are safer in the same way as the cab drivers did with their ABS ?
Does switching to a new programming language decrease defects because devs are being more careful with their code because it's new to them ?

I was going to look more into this and get the book Target Risk that Gladwell references in his article - but not with a price of £163.95 !!

Cost of a bracket

2011-04-10T16:50:00.004+01:00

Having been slaving away over a hot keyboard ( and smoking bug database ) I was starting to think I'd earned a nice little break.

Off to Lastminute to see what was on offer, found a nice deal, wanted to see the pics of the hotel in more detail.
Nope, not gonna happen. Pesky javascript error, " Expected ')' ", and the large pic didn't show, only the thumbnails.

So off to a site where there aren't such errors - some possible commission lost for Lastminute all because of a missing bracket...

I Was There

2011-03-24T13:43:00.013Z

I Was There !

Well, I almost wasn't as I had to work late to help a dev confirm a bug was fixed so didn't get to SkillsMatter until the event had started.
But I Was There !

Laptop powered up, connected to the wi-fi, Skype started and I was part of it.

Part of what ?

A Weeknight testing session with people attending by Skype video from Germany and San Fransisco joining the attendees in London - with various other people joining on the Skype chat

Mission was to test Firefox 4 using the FCC CUTS VIDS heuristic but that was not the main takeaway from the evening for me.

I've taken part in several weekend testing sessions and one weeknight testing session, always enjoyed them and got something out of them but this session seemed different

Over in San Fransisco Lisa Crispin was there with assorted other US testers - there wasn't the usual 'introduce yourself' start to the session so I didn't get to find out who else was there

In Germany the session was led by Markus Gärtner

In London the session was hosted by Mike Scott and Sharath Byregowda.
In the audience were testing names such as Gojko Adzic ( who I'm sure will want me to mention the Agile Testing UK user group at agiletesters.org.uk ), David Evans. John Stevenson, Tony 'Tester Gathering' Bruce and others

And two esteemed managers of the Software Testing Club - myself and Rob Lambert. Good to meet the Social Tester in person even if he couldn't be social afterwards and had to head off to get a train

The usual suspects joined in on the Skype chat but I'm not sure how well the session worked out for them if they couldn't see the video feeds and hear the audio.

Rob showed he was a Bug Magnet by crashing Firefox, spell checking didn't seem to work for me though this was one of the claimed features but to be honest I wasn't totally involved in the mission.

I was just enjoying the feeling of community - worldwide testers coming together to work on and improve their testing skills.

Thanks to SkillsMatter for the venue and thanks to Mike and Sharath for facilitating

Gaming Entaggle

2011-03-13T20:49:00.012Z

Entaggle is a new peer recognition web site that seems to be taking off fast.

Some people such as Darren McMillan have already blogged about its usability

The site itself has usage guidelines which aim to stop spamming and positivity.

It wasn't too hard to find a way to game the system:

1) Create a positive tag, publicly available that people will want to associate themselves with.

2) Tag people with it - especially some well know names

3) Once you've built up a good number of people with the tag - Edit the tag so it reflects what you want to market

4) Voila, now you have a group of people associated with your scheme.

I created a tag 'Weekend Tester' as a public tag then found there was a private one called the same. Tag deletion is not yet an option so I decided to change the tag I'd created to something else ( no-one else had yet tagged themselves with it ).

This is when I realised that people who had tagged themselves with a tag could find themselves tagged as something completely different if the tag was changed...
maybe "fan of ISEB certification"

Thanks to 007 Unlicensed to Test for helping me illustrate the point. He tagged himself as a Weekend Tester and now finds himself as a fan of this site

Something for the weekend, sir ?

2011-03-09T22:01:00.006Z

On a Death March project where weekend work was being done, a defect was raised during the testing.

Defect:
Change to customer account in account database not being reflected in application.

Defect Comment:
The data flows are turned off over the weekend and restart at 9am Monday morning. If you are testing over a weekend then please let us know and we will enable the flows.

Make sure you check out your test environment before wasting peoples time and spoiling their Sunday morning lie-in.

Guided by tests - 5 years 0 failures

2011-02-27T14:03:00.007Z

Went to Skills Matter last week for a talk by Steve Freeman and Andrew Jackman - Five Years of Change, No Outages.

Very interesting experience report on the experience of implementing a system for an investment bank.

It was the banks 3rd or 4th attempt to try and get a working system - Steve and the team delivered it in 9 months ( Project Manager, 2-3 BA's, 4-5 devs, 1 DBA ) and it has been working ( with changes ) for the last 5 years with a third generation team working on it.

It was implemented by doing XP by the book. Within 2 weeks they had a Walking Skeleton and continued to deliver every 2 weeks.

The team did not sit around debating quality - they just Got On With It.

The PM gave the team great support - no doubt due to the 3 or 4 previous failures. The team used pair programming ( the interview process for the team had a pairing exercise ) and the PM could see the sense of this due to a past experience where a contractor had been moved on and they found his code was unusable and needed a rewrite which cost the project a few months delay.
The team were co-located - again, there seemed to be no arguments from the PM who backed their approach.

FIT tests were used - the devs had experience of using them and knew where the problems were. Initially the BA's were not used to going to the level of detail required for these tests but soon became converts. They even used the FIT tests to explore the system and would bring people down from other teams to show off their tests.

No code was written until they had FIT tests with examples. This took time as the requirements were not clear so it also had the benefit of shaking out the real requirements.

The FIT tests were also used to explain the system to third parties that were using it.

Steve and Andrew showed actual examples of these tests and showed tests from 2005 and 2010 and you could see how sophisticated the tests were.

Steve emphasised that the primary purpose of the tests was communication.

Retrospectives were still being done every 2 weeks, there was 'relentless progress' as there was no stopping to deal with crashes or having to firefight and the regular releases were done on a Friday before the team went off to lunch ( a sign of the confidence in the system )

The devs were on front-line support 24x7 which was a great incentive to them to make sure the system was rock solid

The only drawback seemed to be that once the system was up and running and working then people thought that it must have been an easy problem to fix and forgot the previous failed attempts.

Excellent experience report and afterwards Steve stayed around to answer questions and sign my copy of his Growing Object-Oriented Software Guided by Tests book. It was good to find I wasn't the only person there with the book as there was someone else behind also with a copy.

Steve did remark that my copy seemed new so maybe it's time I read it again and turned a few corners of pages down...

WTA #7 - Down to the river

2011-02-21T21:04:00.006Z

Took part in the WTA #7 ( Weekend Testing American chapter ) hosted by Michael Larsen and Albert Gareev.

Michael has already done a good write-up on his TESTHEAD blog so I'll give some of what I took away from the session.

( if you want to try out the app then try here - or the puzzle can be found here

Basic mission was to see if the program would help find the smartest candidates.

Almost immediately it did seem to find a not-so-smart candidate...

"Clicking the picture only does copying the file to Excel nothing else and I have 20 odds in my downloaded folder"

There was a debate on 'smart' - IQ smart, street smart ?
I went off to Google and found the solution to the puzzle - does that count as smartness ? The Google factor cannnot be discounted - even if a candidate taking this test had no access to Google it's also possible that they would have googled 'interview questions for Company X' beforehand and known that they would be getting a puzzle. Again, does this make them street smart ?

One of the great things about the Weekend Tester Sessions is what when a bunch of testers get together then things can go off on all sorts of tangents that one person alone might not have thought of.

If illegal combinations were put on the raft then there would be a bubble showing it was wrong - example is shown at the top of this post.
Now the Japanese with their anime culture might see nothing wrong - but as Justin Byers pointed out

"A father punching his daughter... even though it is cartoon violence, is this the kind of program you want to associate with your business? "

The app itself wasn't really tested but we did find holes in the puzzle.
There did not seem to be a rule about the prisoner being alone - in fact to solve the puzzle he was left on his own so why wouldn't he run away ?

If we were being brought in to test to see if the app was a good test of smartness then shouldn't we first be tested to see if we were smart ?

We found a way to get in a dig about certifications.

"Also, the customer can simply see if there's a "Family Raft Crossing Certification" on the CV/Resume. No need to use the app!"

The basic premise behind the mission was challenged rather than finding bugs in the app. This was a good thing and summed up in this great phrase ( that I think I'll be re-using )

"Like finding that the logo on one side of the sinking Titanic is the wrong color."

The session itself did seem to indicate that giving this entire mission to a tester ( rather than just the app ) might make a good audition for someone hiring a tester.

"For me, if I were the hiring manager, I think I would be more impressed if they were to have asked some of these questions during their session."

Great session, cannot recommend these sessions highly enough.

Thanks Albert and Michael !!

TWIST and Shout

2011-02-20T17:49:00.003Z

Decided to make more of my commuting time on the train and download some testing podcasts. The TESTHEAD blog always has a good source of them so off I went.

The podcasts are actually on the STP site, having downloaded a few of the recent ones I noticed there were others such as Cem Kaner or Mark Crowther.

However, clicking the 'download podcast' link gave me the page shown at the top of this post.

Your Membership Level: Basic
Membership Level Required: Basic

Seems to match - where's my download ??

The smallprint on TESTHEAD's blog made it clear.

Each TWiST podcast is free for 30 days, but you have to be a basic member to access it. After 30 days, you have to have a Pro Membership to access it.

so there's the problem, the error message doesn't tell me that the required membership level is Pro.

Well, that was one problem...

On the list of podcasts if you choose one of the older links - eg Twist #16 Catherine Powell or Twist #15 Michael Larsen then you go straight to an error page that does correctly say that the membership level required is Pro.
However, that correctness is spoiled by there being another error message.

You must be logged in. Please log in or register for an complimentary or annual subsciption package.

Top right of the page shows my name and profile details so it knows I'm logged in.
Whoops.

That's one of the risks of running a website for testers, they're going to be all over any mistake they spot...

WT53 - What am I bid for this tester ?

2011-02-13T20:37:00.007Z

Saturday morning and I fired up my laptop whilst watching Soccer AM and noticed a tweet from @weekendtesting that WT53 was about to start with @jbtestpilot aka Jon Bach.

Couldn't turn down the chance for some testing with the QA director of Ebay so I joined the session and had a blast.

Jon had set the session up to be 4 mini-missions all of which involved using the Ebay site.

First mission I attempted was to find the search term that gave the greatest number of results. First thought was to try wildcards but no, the site insisted on a couple of characters before any wildcards. So what letters would start or be used in the most words. Maybe 'mo' to match 'mobiles', 'motors', 'mothers'...

I started to learn how the site worked, typing one letter and the dropdown would start to offer suggestions so I tried different letters and tried to work out if the categories offered might lead to lots of hits.

'ca*' gave me 18 million results which for a while was one of the top results, 'co*' gave 21 million. With more time maybe a quick automated script to loop round valid 2 char combinations...

Second mission was to find the most expensive item. Could have been very simple if the search by price option didn't insist on having a category. Other people in the session had heard of a yacht being sold by Roman Abramovich for 168 million. This was no longer on there so did not count.

How to find the most expensive item currently on there ? I thought of items that are usually expensive - diamonds, yachts, cars. Some of these led to items on sale for 21 million and also a surprise. I was thinking of physical items but there were domain names for sale for 21 million. That was a good testing lesson.

Then I thought about houses and real estate, sure enough there were some on there, firstly a villa in Spain for 28 million and then a 5 star hotel on Sicily for 38 million.

One mission I did not attempt was to find the most bizarre item for sale. I didn't attempt it for 2 reasons:

1) One mans perversion is another mans pleasure so what I might consider bizarre might seem mainstream to another

2) Once I started looking then I knew I'd get sucked in and be there all day

Fourth mission was to do a Ebay whack and find a search term that only returned 1 result. Initially I thought this was easy - find an item and type in it's entire description. Jon told me that it had to be 2 words only. It still wasn't too difficult, find a search term that didn't return many results and use the results from that.

For example when searching for hotels doing my 'most expensive' search there were results returned for hotel souvenirs. So using a search such as "69 sheraton" gave me 1 result back and an Ebay whack.

Afterwards it was the debrief. Jon explained that the theory behind this and it was Open Book Testing and he was using it to get new testers up to speed quickly. Shrini and I both thought it would also be a useful addition to tester interviews.

As you can tell by reading this blog, it really is a useful guide into the thinking process that is going on when someone is trying to run some tests.

More details of the Open Book Testing approach can be found in this paper by Jon here

It was a fun session, I now seem to be getting a small addiction to surfing Ebay to find what is on there and it was yet another success for Weekend Testing

The Glaze Heuristic

2011-02-04T15:46:00.004Z

Wish I could take credit for this one but I found it when reading this blog post from Dan North ( which in itself is worth reading ).

As an aside, this raises some interesting questions. What if you are writing scenarios in a domain that no-one seems to care about? (You can tell by watching their eyes glaze when you talk about it.) A lot of what we traditionally call non-functional requirements can fall into this category. For instance, most non-technical people aren’t interested in networking terms like latency, throughput or packet loss, but they might perk up when you start talk about sluggish response times or requests going missing. You can use the glaze test as a heuristic to know if you are talking to the wrong person – or using the wrong language

Looking forward to using this one at the next meeting...

lpr build this

2011-02-03T16:56:00.006Z

More reading through Beautiful Teams gave me another good story.

This one was from Mike Cohn when he was asked what practices a team could do to improve the quality of the code.
Mike says that the first thing he would want a team to do is a continuous integration approach.

There's now a plethora of tools out there - Bamboo, CruiseControl, Hudson ( pardon me - Jenkins ), Team City, TFS, yadda yadda yadda.

This hasn't always been the case and Mike relates the tale from 1992 and how they utilised a Novell print queue to do the builds for them.

We actually wrote a build server that monitored a Novell print queue. Novell print queues were wonderful. They could hold anything. We put compile jobs into the Novell print queue, and we had a build server that would just monitor it and kick off compiles whenever it noticed anything getting inserted in there.

It was a completely cheesy, crappy way to do this network communication, but just on that application it had tremendous benefits

You might argue with Mike about whether CI is the #1 item on the list but you couldn't argue with that teams commitment to quality !

Roman QC

2011-01-31T17:42:00.007Z

Reading through Beautiful Teams ( review coming soon ), one of the contributors had a story about engineers building arches and how in ancient times the builder stood underneath the arch as the support was removed.

Trying to find more on this, I found a quote that seemed to be quite well known

"The ancient Romans had a tradition: whenever one of their engineers constructed an arch, as the capstone was hoisted into place, the engineer assumed accountability for his work in the most profound way possible: he stood under the arch.”
- Michael Armstrong of AT&T

I also found that I'm in esteemed company at using this quote in a blog as even Grady Booch has used it...

My searches for more background also turned up the Code of Hammurabi from 1700 BC

Law 229: If a builder has built a house for a man, and has not made his work sound, and the house he built has fallen, and caused the death of its owner, that builder shall be put to death.

Law 232: If he has caused the loss of goods, he shall render back whatever he has destroyed. Moreover, because he did not make sound the house he built, and it fell, at his own cost he shall rebuild the house that fell.

Law 235: If a boatman has built a boat for a man, and has not made his work sound, and in that same year that boat is sent on a voyage and suffers damage, the boatman shall rebuild that boat, and, at his own expense, shall make it strong, or shall give a strong boat to the owner.

I'm sure QA Hates You would still like these laws to apply...

Review - Selenium Simplified

2011-01-15T15:30:00.010Z

A few months ago I thought it was time to learn more about Selenium and as I was a subscriber to the Evil Testers blog I noticed he had an ebook out – Selenium Simplified.

I paid and signed up, got my copy and had a quick read through but was too busy to look into it in any great detail. Then along comes Xmas and the best present from Santa – time to catch up on a lot of things that were on the back burner and first on the list was working through Selenium Simplified.

The book has 38 chapters and took me around 7 days ( full days ) to get through.
It’s written in a very informative, friendly style, full of tips and information.

Starts off easily with loading your machine up with the necessary bits – Java, Junit, Eclipse ( the book is very java centric ) and of course Selenium IDE and RC and guides you through starting off with Selenium – using the IDE and then running Selenium RC

Which is where I ran into my first problem

“Selenium is already running on port 4444. Or some other service is.”

A quick Google and I found an answer and learned how to use netstat

With that problem solved it was onwards and upwards and with the not evil at at all Evil Tester guiding me I was soon writing my own tests in Eclipse. Having written some basic tests the guide then took you through refactoring the code – not something I’d ever done in my programming days so that gave me a real sense of satisfaction.

This was something I really liked about the book – started off with simple tasks, guided you through them very well and then took you onto the next steps and gave you a sense of achievement and confidence.

The guide also gives you useful minor tips – in all my years of programming I never knew that you could give the Command window a title. A small tip but a very useful one when you have several windows open

The book also does not stick to Selenium but also gives a guide to the basics of Junit, refactoring ( as mentioned above ), Xpath and Css theory etc etc

Basic tests written and refactored, Xpath and Css and HTML forms and Javascript tried out the next step was to use Ant and Hudson. Having read about Ant but never used it in anger it was yet another useful exercise to see and understand how this works.

Just this would have been a good introduction to Selenium but the guide then goes on and takes you through setting up a Selenium Manager Class, using Page Objects, Data Driven tests, running the tests on multiple browsers, cookies and Ajax.

The book comes with source code which is useful when you’ve got carried away and think you know it all and find you have a null pointer exception ! This incidentally was another good learning exercise – a reminder of how easy it is to introduce defects

The penultimate chapter works through all the previous learnings and shows what a ‘production ready’ version would look like. Not only is this chapter useful in itself but it really brings home how much you’ve learnt by the time you reach this part.

Indeed, by this point I had a laptop with a lot of new tools to play with, confidence in having learned and achieved something and found that although it had been an intensive time it was enjoyable. So I looked at the recommended reading section of the book and ordered myself Agile Java…

In summary I found the book to be really useful, and nicely paced.
Recommended

High Quality Defect - Do Not Fix

2011-01-05T16:18:00.011Z

Jon Bach recently blogged about his experiences with High School students and how he used the infamous bug in Notepad to get their attention

If you type "this app can break" save and close the file, then reopen it, it comes back as rectangles.

"Where's my data?" I demanded, role playing an irate user.

He could also have typed in "Bush hid the facts" or any number of phrases

The defect goes back a long way - Jon mentions it in a 2007 newsletter, Shrini Kulkarni was so impressed when he read an interview where Jon mentioned in that he had to write a blog post on it - and here I am doing the same.

Not just testers that know about it - even bodybuilders were talking about it.

If you haven't heard of this defect then here is one of the many sites that explains it

Now if we were to take the famous Weinberg quote - "Quality is value to some person" then this is a high quality defect ! It provides training material, opportunities for the MS bashers to vent and something for bodybuilders to talk about after they finished their iron pumping.

Has it become a feature and not a bug ?

Use the source, Luke

2011-01-03T17:30:00.001Z

Raise your quality standards as high as you can live with, avoid wasting your time on routine problems, and always try to work as closely as possible at the boundary of your abilities. Do this, because it is the only way of discovering how that boundary should be moved forward.
- Edsger Dijkstra

Found the quote above in this article about Malcolm Gladwell and the 10,000 hour rule.

Also came across the 'lots of learning' required in the blog post Agile Programming: Lesson One (Part One) by Patrick Wilson Welsh

The Bad News: Lots of Learning
Agile Programming with object-oriented programming languages takes a good long while to learn to do “well enough.” You must master the technical practices, principles, and patterns involved, in the context of “breakable toy” codebases, and then in real enterprise codebases. Even if you are an experienced programmer, expect it to take thousands of hours to master Agile Programming well enough that you can be reliably productive on a mature, healthy agile team in the real world

I've covered this topic before but revisited it after a Xmas break learning some Cucumber ( see last post ). The Secret Ninja Cucumber Scrolls came complete with source code so it was easy to look and learn and see how things were done.

Is it easier to learn coding than testing ? Get yourself some computer theory books and then go off and put it into practice: write your TDD tests, write the code, run and rewrite the code until all tests pass, refactor and voila, done.
Then go off and find some source code and find how the experts ( with their 10,000 hours of practice ) do it. Easy
( gross oversimplification I know )

Want to see a web server written in Postscript ? Here's the source code

Cool javascript apps written in 1k - large selection here all with source code and comments.

Want your code reviewed ? Go here

etc etc etc

So what's available for a tester ?
Having read the theory books ( or maybe not, most testers haven't read a testing book ) then how to practice it ?

For example you can be pro-active in your learning, subscribe to some testing blogs, read the series of posts from IM Testy on Combinatorial Testing and think it's great - but if you want to go and off and practice it to see if you really understood it ?

Even Harry Potter knows that theory isn't enough

Dolores Umbridge:
It is the view of the Ministry that a theoretical knowledge will be sufficient to get you through your examinations, which after all, is what school is all about.

Harry Potter:
And how is theory supposed to prepare us for what's out there?

Matt Heusser posts the occasional testing challenge

The Weekend - and Weeknight - testing sessions are getting more popular and those that take part seem to get a lot from them

Markus Gartner is blazing the way - his latest blog post is on testing challenges and he's set up a Testing Dojos site and it will be interesting to see how this takes off.

( I've volunteered to help out and I'm sure Markus would appreciate more input )

A recent interview with Michael Bolton indicates that just studying 'testing' is not enough

Study testing, but note that the great ideas are likely to come from outside the field—at least the narrow vision of the field that the process enthusiasts and “certificationists” present. Testing is a marvelously interdisciplinary craft. One implication is that whatever you bring to the table from your life and your experience and your education can inform new ideas about testing

I've started a discussion on the STC site about what you would practice if you spent 2 hours a week for a year - how would you spend 100 hours a year on ? Feel free to comment there or on this blog

Automatic Blogs

2010-12-28T16:23:00.001Z

First in a series of blogs that are written using web automation tools

Well that's the New Year challenge I've set myself...

This first one was written using Watir
I've used it before and already had it installed so a no-brainer to choose it.
Time taken to get it up and running - 30 minutes
( once I remembered the append method for text boxes)

No tests around it though, shame on me.

Maybe that should be Pt II...

Ninjas, gherkins, cukes - and dont forget Chuck

2010-12-27T10:21:00.013Z

A few days off work, snowbound Britain meant going anywhere was impossible and also not wanting to be part of the after-Xmas Sales frenzy meant a few days to work on some of the things I've never got around to so far.

One of those things was to learn some more about ATDD/BDD and learn something about these funnily named new tools such as Cucumber.
Posts such as A day in the life of an acceptance tester are good but not the same as trying it out yourself.

A cool way to start seemed to be with the crazily named Secret Ninja Cucumber Scrolls - " a step-by-step guide for Cucumber, a tool that is quickly becoming the weapon of choice for many agile teams "

The guide offered options for Ruby, .Net and Java and as I was also wanting to get back into Ruby and was halfway through Design Patterns in Ruby book I chose the Ruby option.

I already had Ruby installed on my machine so a couple of gem installs and I was all set ( OK, it was more than a couple as I got the wrong versions a couple of times )

An hour later and I'd run the first set of examples and had some Ninjas that were aware that they should run as fast as possible from Chuck Norris. The guide does not take itself seriously and tries to inject some humour and the examples it uses are for training up Ninjas. Certainly makes a change from the dreaded bank account example with deposits and withdrawals. Yawn.

Some mixed emotions when doing this though.

On the one hand a few years ago I'd become stale as a programmer ( hence the move to testing ) so dealing with incompatible versions and syntax errors and missing header files was a brief nasty flashback to the bad old days.

On the other hand the reason I originally became a programmer was because I was interested in all this stuff and it was a reminder of why I liked it - DOS boxes, IDE's, typing commands and making all sorts of stuff happen with a few keystrokes.

So I've got the programming bug again and now I'm off to find some more serious uses for this stuff other than running from Chuck Norris...
( though that is a good thing to do )

I recommend the guide as a good intro to the topic and a quick way to get up and running.

Scrooge The Tester

2010-12-27T10:19:00.010Z

December 23rd and I found another defect in the system - various combinations of ( and \ in an input box would give an unmatched regular expression and a server error. I posted a tweet about this to which Markus Gärtner replied that I was a bit mean doing this one day before Xmas.

All of which led me to think of Scrooge and his visitations from the ghosts of Christmases past, present and future. What if I was visited by the Ghosts of Releases past, present and future ?

Past Releases:

Make the release, send it out to the customers and then schedule in 'bug blitzes' to deal with the problems they found. No unit testing - nor any other proper testing phases either as there was no tester, only the programmers trying to test their own work. That was my first introduction in how to write and release software.

Plenty of other ghosts of releases past - the release that was rock-solid ( that was when I first got the testing bug and started to test the system, I even had 5 Macs running overnight tests) but had no input from customers and when they tried it they didn't like it so we ended up with 1000 copies of unsold nicely boxed software with a great logo sitting on the shelves.

The release that didn't accept credit card payments. A bit of a flaw in a system used by telesales people. This was the release that was the straw that broke the camels back for management and they finally decided to do something about the quality of the programs and revamped the development lifecycle and wanted to do some serious testing. For which they needed someone who knew about testing and the pile of books on my desk was a big clue. That was when my move to testing really started.

Current Releases:

The Ghost of Current Releases doesn't seem that different from the last set of ghosts. Programmers that don't seem to know how to test their own work followed by testers who don't seem to know how to test it either. Means easy pickings for me and finding defects is like taking candy from a baby ( or should that be taking humbugs from a child if I'm sticking with the Scrooge theme ? ).

Requirements are vague and inconsistent with masses of documentation hiding the fact that one part of the system allows lower case input to be mandatory whilst another part of the system insists that all lower case is converted to upper case.

Project managers get a blank expression if the phrase 'exploratory testing' is used and the concept of a defect being found without a script is like Scrooge having an expense account, the concept is totally alien to them.

Just me being unlucky ? Seems The Daily WTF can go on and on and on with plenty of stories like this ( and worse )

Releases Yet To Come:

Specification by Example, Beautiful Testing II ( the long awaited follow up ) and How to Reduce the Cost of Software Testing have been best-sellers and stakeholders and suppliers are working closely together.

Programmers understand how to test and are delivering software that works and does what the customer wants.
Experienced testers are brought on board to use their skill and experience to shake the last few defects out of the system.

Project managers finally understand Brooks's law and don't bring in new resources and ask them to work late nights and weekends to try and catch up - because no catching up is needed as working s/w is being delivered right from the start.

" I will live in the Past, the Present, and the Future. The Spirits of all Three shall strive within me. I will not shut out the lessons that they teach. "
- A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens

Not Springer. Not Maguire. Not Lee Lewis. THE Jerry

2010-12-22T15:24:00.005Z

Mr Testhead recently blogged ( amongst other things, how does he find the time ? ) about finally getting some Jerry Weinberg books. Looking forward to reading about what Mr Larsen thinks of those and I cant believe he hasn't read any yet.

Over on the Test Eye blog there was a recent review of Exploring Requirements: Quality Before Design

This year I've been re-re-reading my now very dog-eared copy of
Becoming a Technical Leader - once I'd manage to prise it back from the hands of a colleague.

Does The Law Of Raspberry Jam still apply to the man that came up with it ?

The Apprentice - You're Fired (Up)

2010-12-17T19:11:00.014Z

Part 2 of the thoughts I got from reading A Tester is for Life

Reading all the entries for how to improve the testing craft made me think about putting together a list of what I try and do to improve/maintain my skills

As mentioned in my last post, moderating and being involved with the Software Testing Club teaches me a lot

Blogs – I haven’t posted to this as much as I would have liked to and have only been skimming other testers blogs but they are a good source of learning

Miagi-Do school of s/w testing – honorary member of this but still not got around to earning a belt. A Must Do for 2011 especially as it is now getting more well known

Books – currently reading Design Patterns in Ruby and have Beautiful Teams after that. On my Amazon wish list is Agile Samurai and Management 3.0.
Though given my current progress through the Ruby book of a couple of pages a day ( not because it’s a bad book but because of time ) then I might be finished reading this little collection by 2020...

Ruby – as I’m reading the book I want to try putting some into practice

One way to put Ruby into practice was to learn more about The Secret Ninja Cucumber Scrolls and other ATDD tools

I try to attend evening sessions at SkillsMatter and the monthly London Tester Gatherings

Taken part in several Weekend Testing Sessions

Member of the Writing about Testing mailgroup. Mostly lurking though being part of it helped me get a front cover on Test magazine

Having put this list together, it reminded me a recent blog post from John Stevenson Sorting the Chaff from the wheat where he said

"My other concern is that we are becoming a society of 24x7 learners, we never switch off"

It can be a tough balancing act but I suppose the question to ask yourself is:

"Am I enjoying this ?"

Having read two recent excellent blog posts about learning - Software Testing Apprentices by Markus Gartner and the blog post of the year from Michael Larsen, aka the TESTHEAD, where he details his learning through the year, I am enthused again and all set for 2011

A moderate success

2010-12-14T12:44:00.006Z

One of the perks of being a moderator for the Software Testing Club is getting early looks at some of the outputs from there.

The latest one is the ebook that has just been released - A tester is for life, not just for Christmas
It's a great read and triggered off a lot of thoughts of which this is part one.

One of the common themes in the responses to 'how to improve the testing craft' was to be involved with the testing community with the STC being one of the main sites for this
( well I suppose the responses were somewhat biased as they were responding to an STC post ( duh ! ) but a number of blogs have given the STC a tip of the hat and acknowledged it's influence and reputation )

Very satisfying to read and so I did some digging in the archives.

July 2008 and we were celebrating our 1000th member - current membership is approaching 7500.

End of July 2008 and I was volunteering to help moderate - one of the best decisions I've made as I have learnt so much from doing this.

57 discussions started, 325 replies to discussions, XX posts about where to get ISEB past papers deleted, numerous Jenny/Melissa/Candy from New York with hotmail888 addresses declined memberships and only a couple of bannings.
Oh, and one threat of lawyers because we didnt really think that copyright testing was one of the biggest issues facing the test industry...

Rob Lambert came on board and the site has gone from strength to strength, kudos to him and Rosie Sherry for the work they've done - and still do.

I had another dig in the archives and from February 2010 here is Rob talking about how the STC re-ignited his passion.
He's certainly been on fire since then.

More thoughts in the next post but as this is tradtionally the time of year for looking back I thought it appropriate to do so

testers for life

2010-11-09T21:49:00.002Z

I've filled in the form for the upcoming eBook from the Software Testing Club.

There's some interesting questions to answer, the book is sure to be an interesting read to find out what the other responses were - and it's all for a good cause, Oxfam.

So off you go and take part

follow the leader

2010-11-05T10:56:00.003Z

I seem to be on a roll at the moment for finding problems.

Found someone new to follow on Twitter and then Twitter suggested that I might also want to follow myself.
Dont know why I'd want to do that as I tweet a lot of rubbish

Bordering on the ridiculous

2010-11-02T13:44:00.012Z

I had to use one of the UK government websites and maybe I was foolish to expect something good that is representing my country.
And that my tax money was spent on.

It might be a security measure not to include the login name in the mail but if so, don't include it, please don't put NULL NULL

The two links dont work - look at the tooltip and you can see the link is missing an 'h' in the starting http

The second link also doesn't read correctly

I want understand more about the application process before making my booking

I want to understand how this email ever got past any sort of testing

All that is left is to say I'm right

2010-10-31T20:36:00.003Z

The Agile Evangelists seems to be a good place to keep up with agile events, I just hope that they are so busy evangelising that they dont care about left and right...

I'm sure it will be fixed in the next iteration

Free education

2010-10-29T12:56:00.002+01:00

Self education for testers seems to be a hot topic at the moment - see the recent presentation by Markus Gartner at Agile Testing Days and a recent post on the STC.

For those of us working or living in London, Skillsmatter has a great selection of free evening sessions to help anyone get up to speed on the latest topics.

Just signed up for Painless Product demos with Jason Huggins, Lean and Kanban in the enterprise and, to make this post circular, About Learning with Janet Gregory

Sadly having to miss Kanban vs The Mafia as it clashes with Tottenham v Milan...

above and below

2010-10-19T17:36:00.004+01:00

I took The Kanban Quiz ( yay me, got 100% ) and found one of the questions had a minor defect.

To make the questions a bit harder the order of the answers is changed every time - which doesn't quite work when one of the answers is 'all of the above' which should always be the final answer in the list and not the top one...

u and i can cause problems

2010-10-11T14:28:00.003+01:00

No blog posts for weeks and then the best I can come up with is an infantile mistake like the one above ?

Easy mistake to make, the characters are next to each other on the keyboard and we all know that shut happens

Shows that a spellchecker will not catch all your mistakes and as the website is aimed at newbies then you really do want to be particularly careful about checking the advice you are giving them.

Posts with more substance to follow...

Downtime

2010-08-30T22:07:00.002+01:00

So, been a long time since my last blog post. Not been hiding from the paparazzi after my magazine cover appearance, been stupidly busy at work.

Which all happened just after I got a book on Kanban after a recommendation on Gojko's blog. It was a good book, cant go wrong with a book that recommends the use of professional testers.
There was also an emphasis on creating slack and since reading that I've had a good lesson in how useful slack can be. Or to be more accurate, how bad not having slack time can be

The first issue of The Testing Planet was published - great work from Rosie and Rob Lambert to put it together but a tinge of regret that I was unable to help out.

This weekend I managed to catch up on some blog reading and one of the first I read was Selena Delesie on supporting the testing community which gave me more guilt feelings. I still manage to keep an eye on and moderate the STC site but been a while since I started or joined in the discussions

And more guilt when I read the latest blog from Alan Page - Will we survive the future of software? as he tries to figure out the future of testing. Hard to figure out a better way when you're knee deep in the same old brown stuff

Light at the end of the tunnel though and the thriving test community out there is a big help. Here's hoping I can get back to more involvement in it, I've missed it a lot.

Thats me covered

2010-07-01T21:41:00.002+01:00

or to be more precise, that's me on the cover of TEST magazine

Thanks to Jason Gorman's original blog post for the inspiration and the people on the writing-about-testing group for valuable feedback

Same old same old same old

2010-05-17T21:15:00.003+01:00

Sadly my daily commute does not look like the above pic :(

Park the car near the train station and see the guy who has his morning jog in his driveway.

Get out of the car, walk to the station and get overtaken by the guy who is always running to catch his train.

Into London and walk past the Big Issue seller, then past the guy doing juggling, then another Big Issue seller and then one more Big Issue seller with her dog fetching a tennis ball.

Through the park in the square and the man with his leafblower just starting to blow them away

Into work and test the app in the same way, enter the same data in the same order and press the same buttons...

Or take a different walk and see if I can find a new elephant

Look around as I walk and notice that the Green Man and French Horn pub I've walked past the last 6 months actually has a Green Man sign

A reminder to myself to take different routes in my testing and to keep looking around

The Growing Community

2010-05-16T15:27:00.005+01:00

The recent London Tester Gathering once again resulted in the basement room of the LVPO Bar being packed out. Only 3 months ago there were a few of us watching the barman holding a candle up the TV as people tried to connect cables, now we have 3 speakers and not enough room.

Microsoft have been along to gather feedback from the testing community and this time it was the turn of Red Gate to tell us how testers worked at their place, how good a place it was to work and to offer an iPad to anyone who was interviewed for a test engineer role. A video of people in the company saying how great it was to work there was a bit too corny and overlong - even if it is true.

Stuart Taylor of Trader Media gave a great talk on how his workplace has transitioned from Waterfail to Agile.

As the next speaker, Michael Bolton, said - it was a great experience report. Michael's talk introduced the audience to the CBC radio series How to Think About Science and the book Leviathan and the Air-Pump - so yeh, not your standard testing talk ( which I was not expecting from Mr Bolton and he did not disappoint )

Afterwards it was networking time and I got to meet Anna Baik and Jodie Parker at last and left them excitedly discussing Weekend Testing.

Looking round the room I counted 12 people I'd only known online but had finally got around to putting faces to and another 5 or so people that seem to be regulars at these events that I'm getting to recognise.

And with the Software Testing Club growing by around 10 people per day the online and offline testing community is growing and no need for testers to feel isolated.

Why oh Why oh Why oh Why oh Why ?

2010-05-05T12:20:00.005+01:00

Why oh Why oh Why oh Why oh Why do I have a picture of Wallace and Grommit at the start of this post ?
Well, if you had been at the Root Cause Analysis event at Skills Matter last night you would understand why.

Douglas Squirrel, CTO at youDevise gave a very entertaining talk on Root Cause Analysis which in his view is one of the most important but often neglected part of agile.

He and his company are still learning to do it - following the Shu Ha Ri approach he classified themselves as getting into the Ha phase.
( a small gratifying moment for me as he asked how many knew about this and as I had blogged about it a while ago I was able to put my hand up. )

He then went on to describe the 9 important points of doing a RCA and how to do the 5 Why's

Target a specific event

Everyone affected attends

No Blame

Poll to identify problems

Write a lot

Move down, then across

Doesn't hurt ? You're not doing it right

Proportionate tasks

All tasks done in a week

Having described them, it was time to put them into action. he divided the room into 2 teams and then showed a Wallace and Grommit video. One team was assigned to be Wallace, the other Grommit and then we conducted an RCA session to find out the root cause of what went wrong.

The final outcome was that Wallace and Grommit needed to go to a Cheese and Biscuit therapy session to learn how to communicate with each other better.

Lots of questions afterwards - the sign of a good session - then off to the pub

What have testers ever done for us ?

2010-05-03T09:57:00.006+01:00

Rob Lamberts recent blog Don't Be A Follower made me think of Life of Brian ( James Bach isn't the Messiah, he's a very naughty boy )

Which in turn reminded me of the What have the Romans done for us scene

Xerxes: The aqueduct.

Reg: Oh yeah, yeah they gave us that. Yeah. That's true.

Masked Activist: And the sanitation!

Stan: Oh yes... sanitation, Reg, you remember what the city used to be like.

Reg: All right, I'll grant you that the aqueduct and the sanitation are two things that the Romans have done...

Matthias: And the roads...

Reg: (sharply) Well yes obviously the roads... the roads go without saying. But apart from the aqueduct, the sanitation and the roads...

Stan: And it's safe to walk in the streets at night now.

Francis: Yes, they certainly know how to keep order... (general nodding)... let's face it, they're the only ones who could in a place like this.

Reg: All right... all right... but apart from better sanitation and medicine and education and irrigation and public health and roads and a freshwater system and baths and public order... what have the Romans done for us?

Now re-work this with testers as the Romans...

Reg: What has testing done for us ?

Xerxes: Well, they found those showstopper bugs before we went live...

Reg: Yeh, yeh, I suppose that would have given our customers some trouble

Masked Activist: They went through the specs before we started development and found all those inconsistencies and ambiguities

Stan: And they helped the devs write those acceptance tests before they started coding so they knew when they were done

Reg: All right all right - but apart from finding the showstoppers and making the requirements testable and making sure the devs knew what they were coding...

Stan: The Continuous Integration - remember how scared we were to change the code and how long it took to manually retest it all ?

What else has testing done for us ?

System Crashes. Also needs ellipsis

2010-04-25T12:20:00.002+01:00

A recent post on the STC from Tony Simms asking for Real Examples of Bad Bug reports got me thinking.

Sadly, I could have supplied him with a page full of examples.

Going back to my days as a dev, the company I was working for had one 'tester' and he had the most aggravating bug reports.

"Selecting foo from the menu bar crashes the system. Also foo needs to end with an ellipsis"

So I'd fix the crash, forget to add the ellipsis to the menu item and the bug fix would get rejected. I had some petty revenge when I was put in charge of testing and would reject bugs that had more than one defect reported.

This was several years ago but I still come across poorly reported bugs ( including ones similar to the above where two defects are reported in one report )

One solution seems to be to use the approach that MS outlined in their demo to the London Tester Gathering of VS 2010. All the tester has to do is click a button and the defect and its environment are sent to the developer.

Or the testers can learn Bug Advocacy. Check the date on this famous paper - 2002 and still relevant today ( and still unread by a lot of testers I've worked with )

Maybe it's part of the dumbing down of testers - give them a tool to use rather than teach them how to report bugs.

Eric Jacobson recently posted about The Joy Of Cracking Repro Steps - another skill that some testers don't seem to have. Find a bug, log the bug - no effort to find the simplest way to reproduce the defect or exactly what causes it. My recent example of a Campfire Bug is a case in point - I got a great buzz out of narrowing it down to having spaces in the mobile phone number field and it meant that when the dev had to fix the defect all the information required was there.

but if you are only measured on how many tests you run and how many defects you find, what incentive is there to narrow down a bug and report it effectively ?

London TesterGathering April

2010-04-18T21:42:00.002+01:00

After too long a break it was good to be going to another London Tester Gathering

Lots of people there - was it the charisma of Tony Bruce, an interest in MS Visual Studio 2010 or the chance of free drinks courtesy of MS ?
Either way it was a good evening, a chance to chat to the Evil Tester, put some faces to names of people I follow on Twitter and meet some new people.

Stephen Allot kicked things off with a talk on the online testing community, sadly he did not give the Software Testing Club a big a plug as he should have done but I'll forgive him as he was doing an auction for a good cause.

MS then gave a talk and brief demo on Visual Studio 2010 and how it was useful for testers. Seemed to have some cool features and could be worth a more in-depth look. They kept stressing how it would be easy to report bugs so the dev would always believe the tester as the evidence would be right there, is this old dev-tester at war still really an issue ?

Free MS screwdrivers were given out as well as some MS silly putty and then it was networking time. I made sure the MS marketer was aware of the STC and then sadly had to go

Next session is provisionally May 12 and Michael Bolton might be a special guest - dependent on volcanic activity I suppose....

Zap Those Nulls

2010-04-16T22:28:00.003+01:00

I usually leave finding bugs in websites and shopping receipts to QA Hates You but a fault in a website for testers and promoting quality is a target not to be resisted.

So sorry Zappers but when your main site has one of the dreaded 'null' defects on it then you're gonna get called on it.

I signed up for the London event though it seems I dont even have to leave my sofa to find a defect

What are Amazon smoking ?

2010-04-07T22:17:00.003+01:00

Thanks to the 'Amazon recommends' feature I got to know about the book I've been waiting a long time for. Because I'd purchased Testing SAP Solutions Amazon thought I'd be interested in a book that would teach me the secrets of smoke testing
"Smoke testing of sanitary sewer systems is primarily used to find places where ground water and storm runoff can enter the sanitary sewer system"

Seems a tad pricy though - £31 for 80 pages of a book of "High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles"

Still, newbies on the testing forums always seem to be asking about smoke testing so maybe I could recommend this book and get affiliate fees

Thanks Amazon - but no thanks

Substitute

2010-04-05T19:20:00.004+01:00

Those of you who follow football (soccer) will know that England has been in a panic recently with the injury to Wayne Rooney and will he / wont he be fit for the World Cup in June.

I dont really see the problem myself - Wayne's hands and vocal chords aren't injured so he could simply write down or tell a subsititute striker how to play and score goals.

Or is it not as simple as following a script and you need some talent and experience as well ?

So this is progress ?

2010-03-15T12:20:00.002Z

Another day and another Farmville bug. For those of you not been hooked into this game it's on Facebook and has 75 million players a month ( more than the population of France). As a social gaming phenomenon it's worth looking at just to see how and why it has become so huge ( that's my excuse anyway )

Anyway, for those non-Farmville players, the game has a facility where you visit neighbours farms and 'fertilise' their crops. As you do so a progress bar appears that indicated the percentage of fertilisation done - it usually happens so fast that you dont notice it. However, as I have the tester DNA I got the progress bar to go way over the 100% limit as you can see from the extended green bar in the screenshot above.

Nothing too remarkable about this defect. However it brought back memories for me of my programming days and a function I wrote 20 years ago. It was for a book pagination program and needed a status bar to show how much each area on a page had been adjusted. The adjustment range went from 0-100% and my function popped up a little bar coloured red if more than 50% had been adjusted, green if less than 50%. It involved a nasty little hack into some Mac assembler code but I got it working. Until that is some of the other programmers on the team ( no devoted test team in those days ) tried it out and found places where the bar would zoom way past 100% and extend to the edge of the screen

Twenty years on and still progammers are struggling to get a progress bar to stop at 100%....
( and at least MY defect was caught before the program went live )

Not that safe a filter

2010-03-12T15:36:00.003Z

Thanks to a Friday afternoon fun discussion on the STC, I ended up doing the Google Search you can see in the above image.

With safe filter on, The Goog filtered out the bad word and gave me lots of results for 'pig in a poke' and 'pigs in blankets' instead.

Well, apart from the News Search results halfway down the page which seemed to use the bad word but still gave me pig in a poke results....

Bug ? Or not ?

Campfire Bug

2010-03-07T12:22:00.007Z

Found a showstopper bug fairly late in the process which has got me wondering about how it could have been caught earlier

The defect description :

The app has an address book - one of the fields in the address book is for a mobile (cell for any US readers) phone number. Put a number in there with spaces in - some people like their numbers formatted that way.

From the order screen of the app, find this address and select it for use in the order. The order can have extras where you can include the mobile phone number so the customer is notified about the stages of their order. However, do not select this extra option - so the phone number is not needed and does not appear on the screen. Only the mailing address is used.

Process the order - the screen hangs.
Go to the address book and remove the space from the phone number in the address book, save the address, find the address from the order screen - order processes.
Go to the address book again, put the space in, press the 'use this address' button that is on the address book screen, process the order, all works fine.
From the order screen search for the address, find it, process. Hangs

So what testing technique ( apart from persistence and some luck ) would have caught this ?
Not having access to the code I don't know if a code review would have - the code seems to behave differently when called from 2 places and somehow the fact that there is a space causes the hang ( maybe there is some exception being thrown that is displayed to the user if the phone number is actually being used )

Would a detailed script have caught this ? It would have to be a detailed scenario - I can imagine scripts which check saving values to an address book and scripts that check that an entry can be used to populate an order - but a script that will check an order that uses an entry in the address book with spaces in it that is not actually used in the order ??

So it will go into my memory banks and be one of those tales told when testers gather to tell tales about bugs found. I'll pass the defect details onto the other testers on the team to see how they might have caught it. But in the end it will be another bit of local tester folklore - how can this be passed onto newbie testers ?

Set Phases To Stun

2010-02-28T22:29:00.001Z

A rigid waterfall style project can still present a tester with opportunities for mischief. Or a chance to educate people about other ways.

A good opportunity is when you find defects away from running scripts. Even better is when you find them when the official testing phase is over ( maybe not better for the project but better for the education opportunity )

Tester: Hey, boss, I found a couple of defects
Boss: How could you do that, we've run all the test scripts
Tester: I wasn't using following a script, I was exploring the system and found a coupla problems
Boss: < silence as he tries to get to grips and understand how it is possible to do this >

So this is Opportunity #1 to do some education about testing. You could always wave a copy of "Perfect Software" and say "as Jerry says in this book..."
Probably not the best idea, though, to ask The Boss if his illusion has been shattered

Now, having found a defect it has to be logged

Tester: So, boss, what test phase should I log this under ? System test ?
Boss: System test is over, we've run all the tests and had it signed off as complete
Tester: But it's the same code base. How about UAT phase ?
Boss: Well that doesn't start til next week
Tester: ( to himself ) Right, the daily reports would look strange with no tests run and 2 defects found

Opportunity #2 - an explanation of exploratory testing and might it be a good idea to schedule some at the end of scripted testing.

All done ? Not quite, one more opportunity whilst the boss is feeling vulnerable as he's just realised the security guard in the red shirt has just been bumped off

Tester: So, boss, if I log these 2 defects then wont our defect count be over the entrance criteria for UAT ?
Boss: ( checks the figures ) yes it will
Tester: Remember that conversation we had at the start of the project where you asked if there was an industry standard for the number of defects and how the test plan had to have a specific number...

Opportunity #3 - an explanation of how a simple defect count does not really provide the information you need to make decisions

Redheads cant count

2010-02-23T22:31:00.004Z

Went to Testy Redheads blog to read her article about Learning Python, checked the archive to see if there were other posts and found her blog couldn't count

The archive for February indicates there are 3 articles but only lists 2

The archive for January indicates there are 7 articles but lists 8

Blue Moon Over Soho

2010-02-18T10:24:00.004Z

Last night was the second meetup of London Testers and the first one I'd been able to get to ( having a venue 5 minutes from where I was working made it easy !)

David Evans and Mike Scott of SQS were to give a presentation on their Testify tool but the first 15 minutes were spent trying to hook the laptop up to the TV screen. So yes, it was that rare sighting of testers trying to get something to work...

Fortunately there were no Health and Safety officials around to protest at the bar employee holding a candle underneath the TV so that people could see the connections.

Connection finally made, the presentation started. Testify seems a neat idea, it allows a fully running project to be created with a set of trivial unit and acceptance tests that serve as examples for your tests, batch files to build the project and run all tests in the suite. A number of common test tools are supported -Fitnesse, Junit and easyb has just been added. It's all open source and available here

Seems like a really easy way to get up and started with BDD so if I have any spare time I'll be giving it a spin. Been a while since I've looked at a build file churning through all it's files

After the presentation it was networking time and we moved upstairs and got to feel like VIP's as part of the bar was roped off for our private use.

Didn't network as much as I would have liked to do as I got chatting to Steve Green from Test Partners and heard about he got into testing, some hair-raising tales of projects he's done and the problems of testing websites that involve elephants - and then had to head off for the train home

Excellent evening, looking forward to the next one

Make your mind up - cute or techy ?

2010-02-15T14:44:00.003Z

Error messages like the one above annoy me. Firstly they try to hide the fact that they have messed up by being cutesy and use a word like 'Whoops'

Then they compound that by giving a techy explanation that most people will not understand. I asked a representative sample of one ( the wife sitting next to me ) it they knew what XML was - answer was no

and the compounded error is compounded even more by the techy explanation "The XML appears to be incorrect". 'appears to be' - well it either is or isn't, dont you know ?

Or maybe I was just grouchy afer getting such a pathetic score

Testers and Devs grooving together ? easy

2010-02-12T13:02:00.003Z

Off to Skills Matter again for another in their series of free events on Agile Testing. This time the event was Acceptance-Test Driven Development - Bring Developers and Testers Together with John Smart of Wakaleo Consulting

Not as many people as the previous weeks session and a different mix of audience - more developers than testers

I'm starting to get a bit of a headache with the acronyms - this was a talk about ATDD, there was a show of hands to see who did TDD, who did BDD and then the introductory slide has a bullet point BDD style Acceptance tests. Hmmm, so were we going to hear about ATDD or BDDAT ?

John did make the excellent point that one of the main aspecs of acceptance tests is that they are a communication tool and focus on the the what rather than the how

The talk focused on a tool called easyb. Seems similar to Cucumber that I saw last week, supports stories and specifications, based on Groovy has a 'before' feature to allow setup before the tests are run.

The examples used were the usual noddy ones - this time it was the bank account one, taking money out of a current account and putting it into a savings account. This is one problem I have, trying to make the jump to the projects I am working on and how the tool could be used. More real-life examples and stories would be useful - though of course if there is only a 30 minute talk it cant all get crammed in

or maybe the examples are real-life and this explains the financial crisis of recent years
Given a customer with $1 in their pocket
When they ask for a mortgage to buy a huge McMansion
Then approve their loan

As a big banker
I want to get a yearly bonus
So that I can keep my houses and cars going

Interesting talk though that made me want to dig out my Ruby book and play around with it again and try out some of the BDD tools. Only reservation I would have about the talk was that it was very much about easyb and very little on how to Bring Developers and Testers Together

Talk over and off to the pub for networking. Initial chat was about the range of tools our there and how to choose. Once again, back to the tools...

Thanks to Nathan Bain for organising it

A fruitful evening

2010-02-06T14:03:00.004Z

Thursday evening was another in the series of free Agile Testing events at SkillsMatter and a chance to listen to Gojko Adzic talk about BDD with Cucumber

My first visit to the new venue for SkillsMatter and it was pleasing to see the event packed out with people having to sit at the side and stand at the back.

The talk itself was interesting, especially as I knew very little about Cucumber and BDD. The list of tools that Cucumber integrates with was large ( WebRat, Steam, Watir, Selenium etc etc - some tools I had heard of, others were new to me and a reminder that this is a fast moving field which means it is easy to get left behind - another good reason to go to events like this )

Someone had their Twitter account open and was posting to it as well as keeping notes - wish they had a quieter keyboard and I hate to think what it would be like if everyone in the audience had their laptops open during presentations !

A slight glitch in Gojko's talk when the example he had up on his slide couldn't be read by the audience but a dimming of the lights helped. The examples were the usual noddy 'Hello World' ones but gave enough flavour for me to want to dust off my Ruby book and try some of this out for myself

Talk was fairly short which meant there was plenty of time for networking at the pub afterwards. Nice to meet up with Nathan Bain, organiser of the Agile Testing (London ) meetup group and also meet up again with Antony Marcano and his pairing partner Andy Palmer and hear about their new venture, RiverGlide

Next session is already set up - ATDD - Bring Developers And Testers Together Feb 11th. Sessions are free, the pub afterwards is close by so no reason for testers in London not to be keeping up with developments in agile testing.

Final word goes to Gojko with this warning about using Cucumber

"It's a tool, so like a sharp knife, if you cut yourself then it's your own fault"

Yup, those cucumbers can be dangerous - so use with care.

( according to Wikipedia cucumbers are fruits although perceived, prepared and eaten as vegetables. So there )

A Saturday Afternoon At The Opera

2010-01-24T10:30:00.003Z

Another weekend and another session of the European Chapter of Weekend Testers

Our mission this week - write some scenarios for Soap Opera testing of Bing Maps.

An interesting challenge which shows why the Weekend Testing movement is such a great resource for a tester. I've read about soap opera testing but never had the chance to put it to work and a session like this was a chance to get a taste for it.
But it was only a taste - by the time the mission was explained, some thoughts about the problem, some interruptions from the Skype icon flashing ( must learn to ignore this ) and then reminders from Markus that we had to send our reports in and the time was gone.

I also lost time as I deviated from the mission and went off and tried out a couple of my scenarios and lost more time as I found a 'script running slowly' error which meant a reload of the app and attempts to reproduce the problem.

Managed to write 2 scenarios and found that writing good ones requires a lot of thought. The good thing about doing this with other testers is that I can now go off and look and see what they came up with and learn from them

Time-up and it was the second-half of the session which is just as valuable ( maybe more so ) than the first which is where the session is discussed and the discussions fly off on all sorts of tangents.

One discussion was the fact that some of us went 'off mission' and actually used the app and got distracted by that. Guilty as charged but in my defence, your honour, I spend all week with people insisting i keep to my mission so their metrics look good so I relish my freedom at the weekend...

We disussed what to do about this as a test manager. Do you want to know if your testers are going off mission, do you encourage it ( maybe you should build in a 20% time a la Google to let testers follow their instincts and maybe you should have some metrics to see if more problems are found when testers go off mission than when they are on it ( sorry, suffering from metric overload on my current project ))

Another tangent was whether I was a SuperHero or not... Being a good tester I've got to know the app I'm working on backwards. I know the business side, the techy side and almost know every word in every requirement doc and tech spec. So when testers new to the project write their tests or think they have found defects they are run by me first to see if they make sense. Does this make me a Hero ? I think not - but does mean the project is suffering from The Bus factor in that there would be a problem if I was to be hit by one

A discussion on conferences and the shortsightedness of companies unwilling to send their tester there. A topical topic as Matt Heusser posted a guide to Conferences On The Cheap - or organise your own as Tony Bruce did ( Tony was on the session and good to have him on board )

So I am totally sold on the Weekend Testing concept
Great way to try out and learn new approaches ( anyone recommend any books/blogs on soap opera testing ? ) and great discussions with fellow testers

weekend testing

2010-01-17T12:09:00.004Z

What is weekend testing ? Testing to see how long the coffee stays hot in the coffee machine ? Whether the toast stays the same slice after slice ? How many Sunday supplements can the paper boy deliver ? Those are all good options

Or you can spend the weekend taking part in the first session of the European chapter of Weekend Testing, a chance for testers to test an app and interact with fellow testers and discuss their findings

Thanks to Anna Baik and Markus Gärtner for setting up and to Ajay Balamurugadas for being an excellent facilitator for the session.

We had an image processing program to test and an hour to do it. Not a long time especially as I have a competetive nature and found myself wanting to find some showstopping or cool bugs to show the other testers. I also found myself distracted by moving pencils - the session was held over a Skype chat and people were asking Ajay questions and whenever they did the Skype window would show pencils frantically moving away

After an hour there was an hours discussion on our findings - well it was meant to be an hour but after an hour and 20 minutes Ajay had to try and call a halt to proceedings as I'm sure we could have gone on for a few hours more.

Even though I didn't find any showstopping bugs it was an enjoyable and thought provoking exercise. Having domain knowledge would have helped for certain areas - how do you tell if a posterizing filter has worked correctly ??? asking questions beforehand was useful ( some of the participants were excellent at that ) - good timing as I had just been listening to the Bach brothers podcast about The trap of not asking questions

Overall though it was simply a lot of fun to be interacting with other testers and finding out how they had approached the tasks and their thoughts on it afterwards

More sessions are planned - only slight drawback is the name of the group - 'weekend testing' - I do like my lazy weekends away from work at the moment...

Farmerror Giles

2010-01-13T19:03:00.002Z

Farmville is the latest craze on Facebook and has 350 million users

The game itself is a fertile ground for bugs - see the above image for the latest.
Often the game is updated and there are problems, can be slow to load, infuriates people - and yet read those numbers again
200 billion page views a month. 350 million users clock in 200 billion page views.

why bother going for zero defects when you have this many users ?

now pardon me, I have some tomatoes to harvest...

Leonardo ( not the teenage mutant ninja turtle )

2010-01-03T11:57:00.003Z

My local library had an IT maintenance weekend so no-one was able to take books out but they were selling old books off very cheaply so I got myself a copy of 'How to think like Leonardo Da Vinci' for the bargain price of 50 pence.

The book has seven Da Vincian principles to follow, all of which seem to be the same principles a great tester would have

Curiosita - an insatiably curious approach to life and an unrelenting quest for learning

Dimonstrazione - a commitment to test knowleldge through experience, persistence and a willingness to learn from mistakes

Sensazione - the continual refinement of the senses, especially sight, as the means to enliven experience

Sfumato ( literally 'going up in smoke' ) - a willingness to embrace ambiguity, paradox and uncertainty

Arte/Scienza - the development of the balance between science and art, logic and imagination. "Whole-brain thinking"

Corporalita - the cultivation of grace, ambidexteriy, fitness and poise

Connessione - a recognition of and appreciation for the interconnectedness of all things and phenomena. Systems thinking

Leonardo also seemed to have something to say on the certification debate.
He described himself as uomo senza lettere ( "man without letters" ) and discipello della esprienza ( "disciple of experience" )...

A Xmas Tour

2009-12-20T19:43:00.002Z

On the first 2 weeks of Xmas the test manager gave to me a test strat-e-geeeee

On the third and fourth weeks of Xmas the test manager gave to me a test plan
( that seemed identical to the test strat-e-geeeee )

On the fifth and sixth weeks of Xmas the testers started to write their test scripts

On the seventh and eight weeks of Xmas the testers used the app to write their test scripts in minute detail

On the ninth and tenth weeks of Xmas the testers ran their test scripts - and found no bugs

on the tenth week plus one day of Xmas I ran some exploratory tests and found a sackful of bugs and spoilt the Xmas par-teee

497 to read

2009-12-12T11:13:00.002Z

After a long absence from blogging due to work being totally manic, I find that I have 497 feeds on my blog reader to be read

so another absence from blogging as I catch up with reading them all

and catching up with the work I'm meant to be doing for the upcoming STC magazine

Lots of lessons learned the last few weeks - roll on the long Xmas break when I can blog about them

It's a beautiful thing

2009-11-15T11:07:00.004Z

My copy of Beautiful Testing arrived at last.

Managing to read a couple of chapters a day on the commute to work and it's proving to be a good read

Worth buying just for the opening chapter, Linda Wilkinson on "Was It Good For You ?" which was a great reminder to me about why I moved into the testing industry and why I like being a tester

The chapter should be recommended reading for all test and project managers...

Hope the rest of the book follows this high standard, stay tuned for more chapter reviews

Testing Is Overrated

2009-11-08T19:27:00.005Z

Current reading is "Talent is Overrated" ( hence the provocative blog title, wonder if I get more hits when I have a negative headline... ) which is about the "nature v nurture" debate.

Is there a 'tester DNA' that people have or is there something more to those testers that seem to have the magic touch and break an app merely by their presence ?

I was thinking about this as a program was delivered to test and within a couple of days I'd broken it so badly that no-one was able to use it's main functionality.No-one else testing the app had found that particular defect. Luck ? maybe - but I do it consistently so there must be more to it than that

The "Talent Is Overrated" book explains how people who are considered gifted have actually been practising hard for years. Tiger Woods is the usual example trotted out - coached from a very early age by his father, Earl. Malcolm Gladwell explored the same area in his book Outliers: The Story of Success

So with 20 years of writing and fixing bugs as a programmer followed by a few years of deliberately trying to find the bugs then is really a surprise that I can find defects more easily than the average tester ?

The book also explains the concept of "deliberate practice" and by coincidence I found a recent blog where Mary Poppendieck had been explaining the concept.
Mary has the following four key components that are required for a person to be using deliberate practice:

Mentor - a high skills expert to review, critique, and highlight flaws

Challenge - tasks that require greater skill than we currently possess

Feedback - review and analysis of results used to improve future attempts

Dedication - hard work, time and energy applied diligently

Geoff Colvin, the author of Talent Is Overrated, has the following components

It's designed specifically to improve performance - Tiger Woods would drop balls into a sand trap and then step on them and then practice hitting shots to get them out

It can be repeated a lot

Feedback on results is continuously available

It's highly demanding mentally

It isn't much fun

Interesting to look at those components and see how many could be used to deliberately practice testing. Any of these in your practices ?

STC Magazine

2009-10-29T12:23:00.003Z

In case you haven't already noticed the post on the Software Testing Club website, the Club has decided to start branching out and the first step we have decided to take is to publish a magazine

Here is the official blurb

If you are interested in writing about software testing then why not contribute an article to the Software Testing Club's (STC) new magazine due to be published in January 2010.

The STC are inviting anyone in the software testing community to submit articles for review on any testing subject you want to write about. The STC are accepting articles from anyone working in the testing industry with a testing story to tell. Experienced writers are welcome just as junior testers are. So if you have something to say, post it to the following address: rob@softwaretestingclub.com.

Visit here for more detailed information regarding your submission.

Exciting times for the STC which has grown rapidly over the last couple of years to become one of THE sites a tester should have in their bookmarks.

Even if I say so myself

The New Bill Gates ?

2009-10-22T17:24:00.002+01:00

On the commute home the other night one of the free London papers had an article about Mark Zuckerberg with the title Facebook’s Boy Wonder: the new Bill Gates?

Maybe he is - carrying on with my research into social media and Web 2.0 I got the error message shown above on Facebook.
A quick Google on the error message led me to the Facebook Developers Forum and a thread all about a similar bug. First reported on 2008-09-05
Later in the thread is a plaintive request "Any chance of getting this bug fixed?" , later on "Any progress on this?" and "Any chance that this well ever be fixed? I see this about a third of the time when I post a new comment."

Later on that evening I found a bizarre bug where searching for "fish" returned an error page, searching for "fosh", "fishy", "fash" and "fush" all returned search pages. Worked fine on the wife's computer and on other peoples computers ( I posted a request on Facebook for other people to try a search for "fish" )

So, to summarise
Bugs that are not fixed for months and months
Random BSOF - Blank Search Of Fish

Maybe the headline had a point...

Black is black

2009-10-17T09:56:00.002+01:00

While investigating the latest in social media applications ( aka wasting time playing games on Facebook ) I got the error message above

Seems that 'hide' is doing such a good job at hiding that is undefined but the message below that saying that 'null' is null is a classic.

Now back to my social media investigations....

The keys are under the mat

2009-10-03T20:49:00.004+01:00

I just checked out the latest on LinkedIn and saw a question on one of the many testing groups from someone wanting advice on how to write a test plan on security testing.

Nothing really new about this, as one of the moderators of The Software Testing Club and regular reader of SQA forums I'm used to people asking the most basic testing questions ( the 'remove post' function can get some heavy use ).

Wonder what will happen to the person asking the question ? He'll probably get told to use Google, he'll find some basic security plans there, incorporate them into his test plan, send them off to the CEO, CIO, CFO, Old Macdonald and the mild mannered janitor, gets it signed off and yet another app with security flaws hits the market.

A test plan for security testing should be very simple.
Find out how important security is to the stakeholders.
If it's important, get a security expert in.

Is that a cop-out ? Should all testers be able to do security testing ? Do you do security testing on top of the other testing activities you do - if so, how confident are you that have done it well enough ?

Taking Up The Challenge From Matt

2009-10-02T15:32:00.003+01:00

Matt Heusser has posted a great " How would you test this ? " challenge. It's a great idea and gives a real world problem to solve

Here is my answer:

Day 1: Find company template for Test Strategy and write strategy

Day 2: Send draft test strategy out for review to CEO, CIO, CFO, D0BEDO, Support Team Manager, Training Team Manager, Documentation Lead, Old McDonald and The Janitor ( a mild-mannered one )

Day 3-5: Spend time explaining difference between test scope and test types to various people. Change font of document after feedback from CEO. Receive Out of Office reply from CFO. Add diagrams to document at request of Old McDonald

Day 6: Send out Final Test Strategy for official sign-off.
Receive Out of Office reply from CFO

Day 7: Find company template for Test Plan and write plan

Day 8: Send draft test plan out for review to CEO, CIO, CFO, D0BEDO, Support Team Manager, Training Team Manager, Documentation Lead, Old McDonald and The Janitor ( a mild-mannered one )
Receive Out of Office reply from CFO

Day 9-12: Spend time explaining difference between unit, system, integration and UAT testing to various people. Change font of document after feedback from CEO. Receive Out of Office reply from CFO. Add diagrams to document at request of Old McDonald

Day 13: Send out Final Test Plan for official sign-off.
Receive Out of Office reply from CFO

Day 14: Fill out form HBR-786-ABC-911-999-FOR to request access to test environment

Day 15: Fill out form RRR-987-ASDF-ASDF-GHJ to request testing resource

Day 16: Form HBR-786-ABC-911-999-FOR returned as I hadn't filled in section 16.5.4

Day 17: Form RRR-987-ASDF-ASDF-GHJ as I hadn't filled in section 14.5.9

Oh dear, just re-read Matt's blog

"Keep in mind, this is an agile shop that delivers working software every two weeks"

FAIL

Another New Voice

2009-09-29T14:55:00.000+01:00

When I first started to get interested in testing a quick search took me to SQA Forums and TestingReflections. I lurked at these sites for a long time, trying to soak up the knowledge and finally found the courage to join in with a discussion and add a comment to a post.

A while later and I actually started a discussion and the world didn't end and in fact I got a very friendly welcome.

Then it was time to start blogging and it was with a gulp that I first pressed the Publish button to unleash my views on the world. The rational viewpoint should have been that no-one knew I had a blog so even if I wrote rubbish no-one would read it. And even if they did read it and found it was rubbish they didn't know me so what was the big deal ? Still didnt stop me feeling nervous.

I was reminded of this when a friend finally took the plunge and started blogging - you can find it here

Make sure to mention bX-uu1rwa

2009-09-27T19:56:00.002+01:00

While working on my previous post, Blogger had a little hiccup and gave me the error screen shown above.
Really, it's 2009 do applications still show obscure error codes only known to programmers mining the murky depths ?
Not surprisingly, a search of Blogger Help as suggested in the error screen did not find anyone else suffering from the curse of bX-uu1rwa.

But I have followed the last part of the advice and am making sure I mention bX-uu1rwa to all of my readers.
If any of you meet it, say hello from me.

wake up and smell the coffee

2009-09-27T19:30:00.001+01:00

Currently reading The Principles of Product Development Flow: Second Generation Lean Product Development I came across this passage :

For many years, Hewlett-Packard had morning and afternoon coffee breaks. Engineers would emerge from their cubicles at the same time every day as a coffee cart rolled through the development lab. This enabled informal information exchange between teams. If an engineer was working on a tough power-supply design issue immediately before the break, and he saw another engineer that was an expert on power supplies, the conversation would turn to power supplies. The coffee break cross-pollinated knowledge across teams.

Sadly, as Hewlett-Packard became "professionalized", this coffee break disappeared. To save the cost of a coffee cart attendant, they put coffee stations as the end of the floors. Finally, they stopped giving free coffee and made it available in the cafeteria. These changes made the coffee break asynchronous, eliminating their predictable cadence. This is an interesting case where the heirs of a brilliantly designed system failed to understand the underlying logic of the system. What HP was doing was much less important than why they were doing it.

I'm sure the coffee cart attendant are never a resource on the project plan.
Nor are coffee breaks on a GANNT chart.
But don't underestimate their importance

7 Influential Books

2009-09-20T09:40:00.003+01:00

As mentioned in my last post, I've written an article for T.E.S.T magazine which should be published later this week.

For those of you that don't get my magazine, here is a short version.

The article was inspired by a blog post by Michael Lopp ( aka Rands in Repose ) 'The Book Stalker' where he admitted to having seven precious books.

My list of 7 is

1. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M Pirsig

A story about a quest for Quality - how could this not be on a testers list ?
I think there should be the equivalent of Godwins Law - call it Pirsigs Law in that a discussion of Quality is over when someone drags out a quote from this book

2. In Search of Excellence - Lessons from America's Best-Run Companies - Tom Peters and Robert Waterman

An interesting read now to see how many of these companies have survived but still a good read about companies striving to be excellent and what they do to try and achieve it

3. Testing Computer Software, 2nd Edition - Cem Kaner, Jack Falk, and Hung Q. Nguyen

The first testing book I read when I was thinking of moving from writing bugs to finding them and a jaw dropping read as I realised that what we called testing was nothing like what it should be. The book I usually loan out to newbie testers

4. Everyday Scripting with Ruby: for Teams, Testers, and You by Brian Marick

Great example of how a language like Ruby can be an invaluable tool to a tester

5 Lean Software Development: An Agile Toolkit - Mary Poppendieck, Tom Poppendieck

Got me thinking about Agile and how wasteful some projects I had worked on had been, led to me learning about Scrum, Toyota, Theory of Constraints, XP etc etc

6 The Secrets of Consulting - Jerry Weinberg

No list of test/QA books could be complete without a Weinberg book. All seven of my selections could have been his books and the man himself is a fine example. I settled for this one as I was moving into the consulting field and so needed to know about the Law of Raspberry Jam, the Orange Juice Test, Prescott's Pickle Principle and The Jiggler Role. As you might be able to tell from that list, the book is not a checklist of actions to be done - it makes you think about yourself, interactions with people and the role of a consultant

7 Bridging the Communication Gap by Gojko Adzic

I got chatting to Gojko at a Skillsmatter agile event and this meeting led to me being one of the early reviewers of this book. Not only is it a great read but it's given me the idea of writing articles and maybe eventually a book

What books have influenced you ?

I'm also hoping to 'tag' some other bloggers to see what their books list looks like

Infamy, infamy they've all got it infamy

2009-09-14T13:09:00.002+01:00

Not content with writing a blog ( even if it has been a bit quiet of late ) and starting discussions on the Software Testing Club I now have an online article in T.E.S.T. magazine with a separate article in the print version out later this month

I think I need to keep Weinbergs Law of Raspberry Jam in mind...

Why Did The Tester Cross The Road ?

2009-08-31T09:52:00.002+01:00

Currently working in London, I walk from the mainline train station rather than cram into the hot stuffy sardine tins called The Tube. Only problem with this is the pavements are crammed with tourists taking pictures, studying maps and buying tacky souvenirs.

The way round them is to walk in the road, hopping back onto the pavement when I see a homicidal black taxi steering towards me.

Works fine apart from at the main pedestrian crossing points. The road has big white LOOK RIGHT instructions so the pedestrians dutidully do that - and dont notice the commuter barelling down from the left wanting to get home.

Well, some pedestrians do notice - they are the ones with the tester mentality who know to expect the unexpected and not to blindly follow the manual.

I didn't come up with a punchline to the title of this post - any good suggestions then let me know.

What I did find and I dont know whether to be amused or scared by it is that the TSA ask and answer the question about chickens crossing roads and come up with the answer "because it's a terrorist plot"...

Thar Be Dragons

2009-08-10T11:57:00.001+01:00

Waiting for a gate on the runway at Heathrow gave me a chance to look through the American Airlines Sky Mall catalogue.

Is there really a market for people who want a replica of King Tutankhamen's Egyptian Throne Chair ???

The Bacon Genie did get my attention - but sadly I think it would only work with American style bacon and not British back bacon

It was the garden sculptures section that got my real interest

The Zombie of Montclaire Moors is pictured at the top of this post - suitable for garden, office or family room...

The Big Foot Garden Sculpture is somewhat disappointing as it is only 2 feet high - how big a foot can something that size have ? It's the same size as the The Meerkat Gang

Then I got to the Dragon of Falkenburg Castle Moat Lawn Statue

Your neighbors will steer clear when they see this intricately sculpted, more than two-foot-long dragon stretched out in your flower bed. This lifelike sculpture is complete with scales, wings and a treacherous tail.

As testers, we don't just test the programs, we should also make sure that claims made in marketing and advertising can be substantiated.

Anyone seen a real dragon so that they can test that this sculpture is truly 'lifelike' ?

Another Visa Problem

2009-08-04T14:52:00.003+01:00

Writing this blog entry from the Webb University Center of Old Dominion University in Virginia but I nearly didn't make it here...

The recent problems of VISA charging people 23 quadrillion dollars have been well documented

I had a problem with a different sort of visa - the one you have to fill in to enter the good old US of A.
The form has been updated and has caught up with the 21st century and there is now an entry for your email address

Except there is only room for 19 characters
I have 3 different email addresses - all of them more than that

So I put as much as I could on the form and hoped it wasn't checked too thoroughly and of course it wasn't.

But how many millions of people have to fill in that form and find the same problem

Now back to my vacation....

A professional malpractice after 1995

2009-07-28T14:57:00.003+01:00

Reading through Assessment and Control of Software Risks by Capers Jones from 1994 is giving me a few chuckles

"The US software industry is now reaching the end of the start-up phase where consumers will buy almost anything because it is new, different and exciting. In the next mature phase the software industry will be dealing with sophisticated and educated clients who are going to demand high quality, low costs and full support after delivery. "

"Improving customer support, improving HELP function, and improving user documentation are also beneficial, but not easy to accomplish. However, software products such as some Windows applications that require 20 megabytes of hard-disk storage and 8 megabytes of memory to execute are forging new kinds of dissatisfaction"

There was some learning for me as well - I learnt that not only do Brits and Americans differ on how to spell humour, what football is and how to cook a steak but also on how to count Function Points.
A little Googling of this and I found a site that told me all about IPFUG, Mk II Function Points and a new kid on the block, Boeing and their 3D function points.

The site also told me that the first three letters in function points are FUN.
"People who enjoy function point counting and can justify it on that basis should do so"
People who enjoy function point counting need to get out more

But then onto the serious stuff and this quote from the book

"Usage of innacurate metrics is the most serious risk of all, since mistakes derived from this problem can slow productivity and quality progress to a standstill. The usage of inaccurate and paradoxical metrics such as "lines of code" has been a major obstacle to software engineering since the industry began.

This problem is so common and so severe that until it can be overcome, it is unlikely that the phrase "software engineering" will be anything other than an oxymoron. A strong case can be made that the usage of "lines of code" metric should be declared to be a professional malpractice after 1995"

Strong words.
And what has been one of the current buzzes in the blogsphere at the moment ?
Coding Horror and his latest post - Software Engineering: Dead? after reading the latest article from Tom DeMarco Software Engineering:An Idea Whose Time Has Come and Gone? with the quote
"Do I still believe that metrics are a must for any successful software development effort? My answers are no, no, and no."

Matthew Heusser has been done a 3 part series about Metrics, schmetrics, Michael Bolton also recently blogged about Three Kinds of Measurement and Two Ways to Use Them ( and also noticed the DeMarco article ) and even Linda Wilkinson was thinking about a Metric of the Month

So 15 years on from the Capers Jones book the metric argument still rages.

But at least we've solved the problem of high quality applications for sophisticated clients and no longer have Windows applications that require 20 megabytes of hard-disk storage and 8 megabytes of memory to execute...

But you told me to go there

2009-07-27T17:40:00.003+01:00

Having recently moved house there is the usual hassle of notifying banks, insurance and utility companies.
And the chance to put said companies to the test...

which some fail badly on

The utility company wanted a reading of my gas and electric usage - sent me a nice little card to fill in the details but they realise it's the 21st century so they provide a web address as well. The letter that came with the card also drew my attention to the website as well

You know where this story is heading, don't you ?
Yup, to an Error 404: NOT FOUND!
How many cards and letters is that address found on ?

Went to the homepage of the site and found the right page
Not very user friendly, asterisks next to the text boxes labelled Full Name, 10 Digit Account No. and email address
No explanation as to what the asterisks were ( of course we all know by now that they are the required fields, don't we ? )

Fill in the fields, press Submit
Blank screen
No 'Thank You', no confirmation that my details had been input

Hope their supply of power is better than their testing

Beautiful Pirates

2009-07-22T16:35:00.005+01:00

I've had some books on pre-order for a while but recently with their publishing dates getting closer more details have been coming out which makes me want the postman to be walking up the path to deliver them

Adam Goucher blogged about the contents of Beautiful Testing, Matthew Heusser has blogged about his chapter as has Karen Johnson

Having ordered it from Amazon their suggestion ( I fall for it every time ) led me to Beautiful Teams which then made it onto my Wish List

Another of the books I am waiting for is James Bach's Secrets of a Buccaneer-Scholar . Although he made it available as a free download for a limited time period I'm waiting for the hardcopy. It recently got a rave review from Linda Wilkinson ( who also happens to be one of the contributors to Beautiful Testing ). It got me thinking about how I learn stuff which led me to Pragmatic Thinking and Learning: Refactor Your Wetware - onto the Wish List it goes

Third book on pre-order is Exploratory Software Testing: Tips, Tricks, Tours, and Techniques to Guide Manual Testers by James Whittaker. His blogs are always entertaining and thought provoking and I have all his "How To Break..." series so this had to be added. Will also help me avoid catching The Plague of Boredom

Whilst waiting for those to arrive I kept reading good reviews for The Principles of Product Development Flow: Second Generation Lean Product Development. Might have time to read it before the others arrive

As for Testing Object Oriented Systems: Models, Patterns and Tools I'd better not order that - firstly it will kill the postman and secondly where will I find the time to read 1248 pages ?

I guess I'm trying to make up for the 80% of testers that haven't read a testing book.

Whats on your pre-order and/or wish list ?

Simple Simon

2009-07-15T15:27:00.007+01:00

Rob Lambert sent out a tweet at the weekend alerting people about an iPhone giveaway competition. Having had good luck in competitions ( ask me about my £10K holiday to the Seychelles ) I thought I'd give it a go, clicked and got the image above

Anyone see a 'Tweet this' button ? Not me
Tried it in another browser, tried going to different pages but still no 'Tweet this' button appeared

But what really REALLY annoyed me and made me think '**** this' was the word 'Simply'
Made me think I was a moron because I couldn't find the 'Tweet this' button to SIMPLY hit and EASILY enter.
Didn't want an iPhone anyway...

Google Aids Fishing Scam

2009-07-13T13:42:00.002+01:00

And I really do mean 'fishing' and not 'phishing'

Thieves in Hull are thought to be using Google Earth to help them steal sought after fish from people's gardens.

Up to 12 cases of fish going missing have been reported during a three-week period, with many of those missing Koi carp, worth several hundred pounds each.

Police believe the online technology is being used as it would otherwise be impossible to locate gardens with fish and ponds in.

( story found here )

Wonder if anyone at Google Testing came up with that scenario when testing Google Earth....

Farewell, Colosseum

2009-07-10T15:49:00.003+01:00

A sad day today when I recieved an email from Yahoo
Important notice: GeoCities is closing

Dear Yahoo! GeoCities customer,

We're writing to let you know that Yahoo! GeoCities, our free web site building service and community, is closing on October 26, 2009.

On October 26, 2009, your GeoCities site will no longer appear on the Web, and you will no longer be able to access your GeoCities account and files.

For those who don't know, GeoCities was one of the first websites where users could build their own pages as part of a community. I was in one called Colosseum and it was where I learned all about HTML - and community building, lessons that were to be put to good use when I became a community manager of the Software Testing Club

So the Internet must really be getting old as I can now get nostalgic for the days of "This Site Under Construction" gifs, hit counters and the marquee tag...

Automating Poets Day

2009-07-02T17:11:00.002+01:00

"With an automated test script, correct execution does not present a challenge and a completely reliable test of test objectives is ensures. This also applies to situations where people tend to be negligent, for example on Monday mornings or Friday afternoons, when repeating a test for the nth time within a short period, or when the workload is extremely heavy. Automated testing ensures a greater degree of reliability than manual testing."

I recently read this as one of the benefits of Test Automation

Ignoring all the other aspects of it ( 'does not present a challenge', 'completely reliable' ), it was the 'negligent testers' part that made me chuckle.

Why stop at Friday afternoons and Monday mornings though ?

What if your testers are tennis fans - Wimbledon is on at the moment so they will have one eye on the matches and might be negligent

After that it's the Ashes - any cricket fans wont want to miss that just so they can check a few test results

The day after the office party wouldn't be a good day to run manual tests either

As for next year when the World Cup starts.... better make sure you have a months worth of automated testing you can do then

Oh yeh, make sure you dont write these automated tests on a Friday afternoon or a Monday morning when you are feeling negligent

( for those that dont know about POETS Day - the BBC explain it here except that it's not really 'Push' but another word... )

Certification Deja Vu

2009-07-01T10:59:00.002+01:00

" Get ready for certification. It will improve quality and that's profitable for everyone concerned "

No, not the ISEB/ISTQB marketing machine in full flow.

Carrying on from my last blog post, I'm learning the world of SAP and found that they are also having an ongoing debate about certifications and the value ( or not ) of having them

The quote at the top of this page came from here
( you might find a problem where the site wants you to choose a digital certificate but doesn't offer any in the list )

I found this page after reading What Was Your View of the Latest SAP Certification Debate?
The arguments there had a very familiar ring to them

I’ve been a long time advocate of field experience over SAP certification in my writing, but that’s mostly because all the aspiring SAP folks reading my stuff tend to get roped into this idea that certification will lead them into the promised land of a highly paid SAP career without much effort on their part.

....

I placed hundreds of SAP folks in the 90s and I can tell you that certification was almost never a good indication of consulting talent. Believe me, when I placed someone who was certified in SAP but who didn’t live up to expectations in other ways, I heard all about it.

....

In my view, the biggest weakness of the traditional SAP consultant is that the technical folks tended to lack "big picture" business skills and awareness, and the functional folks tended to work in "configuration silos" without a broader view of the business process or a deeper technical know-how

....

Also, I will be more and more of a fan of the SAP certifications as more field experience is incorporated into them somehow, as you suggest. I’m not saying this will be an easy task. But I think there must be ways of making the certification more real world accountable

....

I have mixed feelings about SAP emphasizing the importance of certification to customers at this point, only because most folks are still only certified at the Associate level. I worry that hiring becomes overly simplistic when certification is the central point of emphasis

Replace 'SAP Consultant' with tester and 'SAP certification' with ISEB/ISTQB and you have a replay of the often repeated tester certification argument

"plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose"
as Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr would say

( or as Rush sang in Circumstances )

Not the best effort - more practice required

2009-06-29T15:20:00.002+01:00

Time for me to learn about SAP

So what better place than the main SAP site itself and some white papers and brochures
Especially one about "SAP best business practices for customer relationship management"

Click on the 'read the brochure' link

An error has occurred

We were unable to complete your download request

This File is currently not available in the system

slight hint of irony that a best business practice file is not available...

Finding the time

2009-06-25T11:05:00.006+01:00

Read an interesing blog post about 50% time - 40 hours of work and 20 hours of self-improvement.
Very topical to me at the moment as I've just had a change of assigment and it made me wonder about how many hours a week I spend on self-improvement

Currently joining in with the rat race commuter crowd and spending 2 hours on trains each day plus two 25 minute walks. This means I am losing two things - weight and surfing time.

I'm making up for this by catching up on my big pile of books to be read - fairly easy on the morning ride in, can be a struggle on the way home. Podcasts are a possibility that I should investigate

I've cut down on the blogs I read and find that I'm only scanning the mailing lists I subscribe to. Haven't started a discussion for a while on the Software Testing Club site nor really joined in with the ongoing discussions
( still find the time to deal with spammy users though )

To counter this, the latest assigment is a challenging one and one I'm learning a lot from - you have to put the theory into practice at some point ! And the walks are a good time for reflection - except when you find your path blocked by tourists and free newspaper sellers

That work-life-improve yourself balance thing can be really tricky