Creative Chaos

RSS Feed Change - Please Read

Matt.Heusser@gmail.com (Matthew Heusser) — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 09:55:03 PDT

While the new blog is populated with old posts, I'm afraid my old RSS reader is not keeping up.

If you use an RSS Reader and would like the latest happenings in Creative Chaos, I'm afraid you'll have to change over to: http://feeds.feedburner.com/stpcollab_matt.

It's a good time to switch; I've got a test challenge up with a cash money prize. Check it out via RSS, on on the web at http://blogs.stpcollaborative.com/matt.

... and thanks for all fish

Matt.Heusser@gmail.com (Matthew Heusser) — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 11:54:55 PDT

Just over three years ago, I was having dinner after the Indianapolis QA Conference with Mike Kelly, and he said "Matt, do you even have a blog?"

Well, er, ha ha ha, I've got an old perl user's blog I haven't updated lately, and before that I had a web page I hand-edited to make journal entries before blogging software was popular.

In other words, no, not really.

And Creative Chaos was born.

It's been a good three years. A few of my favorite posts and ideas:

- I wrote a position on tech debt and (with a lot of help from my friends Steve Poling and Patrick Bailey) went on to start a peer conference on the subject
- A definitional piece on the meaning of a test framework.
- The boutique tester idea was proposed right here, just a few months ago.
- Sean McMillan and I proposed the ideas for the "Balanced Breakfast Approach" at the Google Test automation conference, and yes, I've written a little bit about it here.
- Likewise, Sean suggested the Bowl of Fruit problem to me, and I covered how it applies to testing.
- That original IQAA talk I gave? Well, I recorded the audio and put it up as an early post.

Now, I've never employed a "search engine optimizationist", and I don't use META tags. Yet as of today, the number one Google search result for "The Boutique Tester" is this blog. The number one Google result for "Balanced Breakfast Approach Software" is this website. Search for "Bowl of Fruit Problem Software" and yes, Creative Chaos is first. (The number two result for "What is a test framework?" is this website; the first is an online dictionary. I think I can live with that.)

And it's going away.

Oh, no, I'm not going to stop blogging. That's just crazy talk. My blog is moving to be hosted by the folks at the STPCollaborative, and will become "Testing at the Edge of Chaos".

The RSS feed switched over last week, so subscribers should see now difference.

For those who aren't subscribed to the RSS feed, go ahead, switch over the new blog. I've already put my first blog post up.

See ya around!

KanBan Redux

Matt.Heusser@gmail.com (Matthew Heusser) — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 06:52:28 PDT

Well, Yesterday's post on KanBan generated a little bit more heat than I intended. When I clicked submit, as I writer, I thought I had completed an opinion/editorial piece I would stand behind. Heck, I thought it was good writing.

No, wait. I still stand behind it, and I still think it was good writing.

Then again, it could always be better.

I don't want to white-wash what I wrote yesterday by editing it; that would have the effect of blunting legitimate criticism. So, taking a critical eye at what I wrote yesterday, let me add a few things:

- First, my initial mention of certification had nothing to do with Kanban. The second mention - yes, I do expect some kind of Kanban cert will come, even if it's only a "letter of recommendation" from the leaders in the movement. But that section that talked about ISTQB was only designed to point out that I personally had walked away from a "it's gold baby" idea that I thought lacked merit. I suppose the part where I mention the censure of the term "best practice" accomplished this; If I were to re-write it, I would cut that section.

- For the most part, the essay stood firm with showing over telling. This is an important concept in writing - you don't say the hero is brave, you have him fight the dragon. You don't say he's strong; you have him lift a horse or that his arms are as large as tree-trunks. You let the reader decide if the hero is strong. Then I had to end by referring to some Kanban folks as "Jokers." That was uncalled for, and not even what I meant. If I had to do it over again, I would have used something non-judgmental and objective instead. Perhaps "Coaches."

- The initial article introduced Mr. Anderson as a European. Apparently, he took offense to that, and thought my post was "nationalistic." Well, I certainly don't see a benefit to introducing him as European, so I do cut that single word.

- I believe Northern Europeans are innovative with regard to process and product. I believe we should be studying them for process innovations the way the automotive industry learned to study the Japanese. I am completely serious about that.

- Not every person advocating Kanban is advocating the ideals of Frederick W. Taylor, but I have subscribed to the discussion list for months and that was my personal conclusion. As I tried to say with my white hats/black bandannas comment, I did not intend to color the Kanban movement with too broad a brush.

Now, some of the benefits of KanBan:

- The idea of limiting work in progress is one I find fundamentally sound. After all, if the testers are stuck on iteration 1, developers are on iteration 2, and the business analysts are working on iteration 7, something is wrong. The Analysts will create excess inventory ('analyzed' work-to-be-done), it won't be fresh, the business may change it's mind - when the team could take those analysts, cross-training, and otherwise brainstorming ways to change responsibilities around to get iteration 1 done faster. This would decrease overall time-to-market and get more software done in less time.

- Ditto, and very similarly, the idea of achieving pull appeals to me.

- Limiting Work In Progress will have the side effect of limiting multi-tasking; multi-tasking being a well-documented time/effort sink.

- I think it's good to have teams talking about process and debating merits of various ideas. Kanban is stirring the mix; that's good.

- I have to agree that, while a rose by any other name may still smell as sweet, there are some managers and executives who may be strongly opposed to something called "Agile" or confused by the term "Scrum", yet, referred to as "lean", they may be receptive. To some extent, I'm happy to change my terminology in order to better impact and communicate with the rest of our business.

So yes, I'm worried about Kanban. I think it has it's merits, and it also has some risks. If anyone is interested in a spirited debate where we both have potential to learn, please, drop me a line.

Have you heard of KanBan?

Matt.Heusser@gmail.com (Matthew Heusser) — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 13:10:23 PDT

My writing colleague, Chris McMahon, has made an attempt to be public and clear about his stance on Kanban. It's been inspiring, and I, too, would like to put my stake in the ground.

In Japan, a kanban is a little card that is used as a signal device. The idea, in manufacturing, is that teams downstream "pull" new work, instead of having work "pushed" to them, which creates bottlenecks.

A gentleman named David Anderson took the idea and applied it to software to create Kanban Development, a surprisingly popular movement, to the point that it has it's own user groups and conferences.

How did David do it? Well, first he was a Theory of Constraints, CMMI, and Agile-Management Guy. He went to Microsoft and worked with an internal development team, where he wrote: "From Worst to Best in 9 Months - Implementing Drum-Buffer-Rope in Microsoft's IT Department." It's interesting. You can read it for yourself, and I'll try to summarize below.

That's right folks; without any specific skills training, any people interaction, or changing of the office environment, Microsoft saw something like a 150% increase in the number of tickets the team could handle in a month. How did they do that?

- Eliminate the time the team spends planning and estimating. Not reduce; eliminate.
- Technical staff took stories that makes sense that they were actually capable of doing (rewards well-written, well-conceived change requests)
- They moved from a push system to a pull system
- They made the process transparent
- They stopped batching up User Acceptance Test and Deployed a ticket at a time
- He got the team out of meetings

Now, the idea of Kanban for software - where we make the work visible by having a board, limit the work in progress, achieve pull, have no fixed iterations but (possibly) continuously deploy, arguably came out of this case study.

Personally, I have a different interpertation: That if you take a team doing CMMI 5 and PSP/TSP and /stop doing/ a lot of required practices, moving your team from 20 hours of meetings a week to three of four, throughput will go up. Further, by working on a story at a time, you'll have technical staff actually talking to each other instead of throwing work over the wall via electronic tools. This will work wonders for eliminating the "hot potato" game.

Finally, and most importantly, if you live in an environment where the customers can make as many ill-conceived change requests as they want, and you have to constantly estimate, evaluate, and shuffle the deck, then take all that away, yes, productivity will go up.

So, I agree, what Mr. Anderson did at Microsoft can work for certain kinds of projects - namely, a maintenance team working on legacy applications that are small, separate, and distinct. That way, you can test one entire 'system' at a time and deploy continuously. (This is pretty much exactly what we did with the small projects team at Priority Health, about the same time, with good results.)

Now, labeling it, calling it Capital-K "Kanban" and giving it out to everyone as a silver bullet to improve the process ... I am not really excited about that.

First of all, it's universalism. "This process worked for me one time so it should work for everyone all the time." Just like labeling "that thing that worked well for us that time" a "best practice", it is a rookie mistake.

But now we have the Kanban discussion list, which I have tried to be involved with. I see a lot of smart people with good ideas, but there are things about it ... something I can't put my finger on just yet. Here's what I'm struggling with:

1) There's something odd about the way this community talks. I mean, I have a master's in CIS, I study software (and manufacturing) process, one of my writing/speaking partners is a Six Sigma black-belt and process engineer, and there's something ... odd there. Why call it a "Value Stream Mapping"? Why not just call it "How we get from concept to cash?" Why is it that skills, training, experience, and expertise just never come up in discussions with these groups? Why is it that instead of talking about development or testing, we call it "workflow" or "process mapping?" I have an inkling on why, and I'll come back to that in number 4, but also ...

2) It seems to me this community uses a lot of 20th century worship words. Productivity. Throughput. Optimize. Lead Time. Cycle Time. Flow. Leveling. There's nothing wrong with these words (although, if you can measure productivity at all is a different discussion.) I see these terms thrown around in a naive, cavalier way. Like "New and Improved", "Hyper-Productive" and "Best in Class", they almost guarantee attention and receptivity for an audience - management and executives.

But does that make them right? Certification is another worship word. And, the day I first heard of ISQTB, at the STAREast conference in 2004, an ISTQB trainer told me literally "You can charge twice as much for training if you give away a certificate at the end of it."

Is that right?

In fact, the Cavalier way those terms are thrown around (compared with, say, the way you'll see metrics talked about on this blog), tells me that there are a number of possibilities, ranging from over-optimism to universalism to genuine deception. I'm not excited about any of them.

3) Kanban works best if you start out slow and stupid. As Dave Nicolette pointed out recently, if hyper-productive means a 10x or so improvement, then the companies likely to see that kind of improvement are traveling at a snail's pace to start with. In other words, if you team is already dragged down, spending 20-40% of it's time planning, estimating, and writing stories for work, that are 6+ months out, then yes, you can see improvements with Kanban. Or, if, say, you batching up work to be release only once or twice a year then do heavy-weight trade offs through an electronic system, instead of having people talk to each other. But in those cases, systems thinking can lead to improvement directly, without using a label or brand.

4) What about people and skills? I don't see any of this in the Kanban literature. It's as if people are cogs that can be interchanged in some sort of machine that is stable, predictable, and repeatable. Hey - wait a minute - I've heard that before! Yesterday I read a Kanban history post that claimed that Toyota had adapted the ideas of Frederick W. Taylor, and Kanban came out of that.

That is factually inaccurate. The Toyota Production system did not come from Taylor, it came from a number of consultants, most notably W. Edwards Deming, as an explicit rejection of the work of Taylor.

I don't have time to get into Taylor and his philosophies, but suffice to say, Taylor was an elitist who believed in separating the worker from the work - having a class of scientific managers tell the workers how to do it - and Deming believed in engaging the worker in the work.

If Kanban comes out from the philosophy of Taylor, then having your process designed by "experts" who don't want to deal with the fiddly-bits of requirements, development, and testing, but instead design a meta-process that turns software development into an assembly-line makes perfect sense. In that world, you might not call it "development" at all, but instead, something like "Workflow" or "Work Products." (Notice issue number one, above.)

If, however, software development is actually knowledge work, which requires the whole person to be engaged, and can be done better or worse -- well, then, hopefully, we'll use the work Taylor as either a door-stop or a cautionary tale.

5) The Kanban movement just isn't interested in discussing testing. I've brought the issue up several times on this list, and get a number of non-answers. That could be because the list members haven't really done much development. Or it could be that they are working on internal applications, where if you type in an invalid entry, the VP of Finance can say "use Internet Explorer Seven ONLY" or "if you want your reimbursement check, ignore the bizarre error, click the back button, and enter it correctly!" Or they could be working on very small, non-connected systems where the testing burden just isn't very high.

But on a real project - a large software project - not something a pair of developers can bang out in three or six months. A project where you want end-users to pay out of pocket, fall in love, and recommend it to friend? Well, a big part of what I do is risk management, and I see continuous deployment with a simple CI suite as naive, perhaps even reckless.

So I see Kanban/deploy per feature moving from limited environments where it can work to general acceptance, and in that, I see serious risk.

Note: In North America, we like our westerns - with Good Guys in white hats and bad guys with bandannas. It would be all too easy to paint the entire Kanban for SW community as "bad." In reality, the ideas are a mixed bag that can be helpful in some environments. Some members of this community are strong system thinkers that have good ideas, and can separate when an idea might work from when it might not, taking in actual feedback and adjusting. Sadly, in general, due to over-hype, I have a final concern ...

6) Some people will actually listen to these jokers. We'll see a lot of hype about Kanban, there will be Kanban certifications, a Kanban alliance, and "Kanban conversions." There will be Kanban instructors, tutorials and lots and lots of books.

And, two years from now, or perhaps five or ten, I expect that a lot of companies will have experienced some critical failures and have a code mess all over the floor. Meanwhile, the consultants will have moved on, embracing and selling a new process - perhaps 5s, or Kaizen. It may not be Japanese at all; it may come from Northern Europe.

Let us all honestly hope that I am wrong.

Why is QA Always the Bottleneck?

Matt.Heusser@gmail.com (Matthew Heusser) — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 05:50:08 PDT

"Why is QA always the bottleneck?" is the second in a series on how to deal with unfair test questions; it is up this week on SearchSoftwareQuality.com. (Free registration required.)

The next in the series will probably be "how long will testing take?", but i'm curious what you think. What questions do you struggle with, and what interesting answers do you know?

Life is short - live well

Matt.Heusser@gmail.com (Matthew Heusser) — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 08:59:30 PDT

I was reading The Secrets of Closing Sales yesterday and was struck by this line:

Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence.
Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent.
Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb.
Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts.
Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent.

I could nitpick some of the words of the quote - but the spirit - that consistency and dedication will win in the long run - is something that resounds with my experience.

Then, later, Jason Huggins pointed me to this blog post by the creator of wordpad. In it, Matt points to this blog post by Tim Ferris that is a gentle introduction to the writing of Seneca.

It's one of the most inspirational things I have read this year.

Go ahead, invest thirty minutes in Senaca. Breathe it in. I believe you'll find it time well spent.

What am I saying when you cross the initial quote with Seneca's commentary? Well, yes, persistence matters. Yes, if you try again and again, you may succeed where others will fail. Just be careful that you don't climb the ladder of success, only to find that it was leaning on the
wrong wall.

Test Management Tools

Matt.Heusser@gmail.com (Matthew Heusser) — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 10:15:20 PDT

Allright folks, I'll admit it.

I'm not excited about test management tools.

Oh, you could argue that I should be. After all, Test Management tools are purchased by test managers and executives. Test managers and executives have money; they control the budget and decide who goes to what training when. Finding someone's pain point - and taking the pain away - is a perfectly legitimate business strategy. (If they have money to spend, why, that's even better, right?)

Yet I'm still not excited. Why?

Well, let's take a frank look at the thinking behind a test management tool, by which I mean something specific: A keeper of 'test cases', and a tracker of which test cases have been run against which codebase.

It starts with this thinking:

(A) We can define all our 'test cases' up front,
(B) When those test cases pass, our codebase is 'good' (Or, alternatively, when some fail but some decision maker desices to ship anyway),
(C) /Recording/ which test cases have run, and which are yet to run, in precise detail, has some value in and of itself

I reject the premise behind all of these arguments.

Here's an alternative, that we use at Socialtext:

1) Create a single wiki (version, editable web page) page for a release
2) Mark down each type of testing you want to do in every significant combination
3) For example, break the app by major piece of functionality, then further by browser type
4) Add all the automated suites or unit-test results if those matter
5) Have the technical staff 'sign up' for which pieces they will test
6) When testing on a component is completed, the tester writes 'ok' and the bug numbers he found, or, perhaps 'skipped' and the reason why.

For what it's worth, we've been doing this at Socialtext for nearly two years, since before I was hired. We are constantly tweaking the process.

This one-page overview is a higher-level view than a test management tool might provide. It shows you what matters - the failures - not 5,000 "ok" results. It assumes that the test ideas are located somewhere else that the test can find if needed. It assumes the tester actually did the testing and leaves open the possibility that the tester can explore the functionality. It leaves the tester responsible for what 'ok' means, instead of a spreadsheet or document.

This isn't a brand new idea; James Bach recommended something similar in 1999, called a "low tech testing dashboard", only he suggested it be done on a whiteboard. Other people have suggested using a spreadsheet, but that has version and read/write problems.

A wiki is just one more step forward; it provides version control, transparency, and creates a permanent artifact that could be audited. In my mind, this provides some of the benefits of test management tools with much less time investment.

So no, I'm not excited about most test management tools on the market. In many cases, I am suggesting they swat a fly with a sledgehammer. Yet I recognize that test managers and executives have legitimate problems. So let's not rush off to build something to get money; let's come up with real solutions and see if the money flows from there.

Who's with me?

Best New Software Test Writing

Matt.Heusser@gmail.com (Matthew Heusser) — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 09:46:09 PDT

Over the summer, I've noticed a trend that bothers me just a little.

Cem Kaner hasn't blogged in months; James Bach hasn't blogged in weeks. Michael Bolton is blogging sporadically; Elisabeth Hendrickson is blogging very occasionally. Ben Simo hasn't blogged since February.

Of the people on my blogroll, only Adam Goucher is consistently writing new blog material.

Now, there may be good reason for this. The people on my blog roll are mostly independent consultants; perhaps the economy is picking up, and they are so busy, that blogging is the first thing to go. Perhaps they are focusing on twitter - or focusing writing on a book. I don't know.

What I do know is that when I click through my blogroll, I'm not seeing a lot that is new.

So I went and asked the Writing-about-testing Yahoo group for some recommendations, are a few we came up with:

Michelle Smith
Pradeep
Catherine Powell
Marlena Compton
Lanette Creamer
Geordie Keitt

Yes, getting to the point where you are known by first name only is a compliment, and yes, that's the same Lanette Creamer who's paper "Testing for the User Experience", won the best paper award at PNSQC 2008. (For those who live near Portland or need and excuse to make the trip: Lanette and Marlena are both speaking at PNSQC this year.)

In addition, all of the students of the Miagi-Do School of testing happen to have a blog. That is no accident. These are people that I personally vouch for as having an interest in, and passion for, software test excellence. While some have English as a second language and are learning to communicate better (as we all are, right?) - they sharpen those skills through blogging. Check them out, please:

Justin Rohrman
Ajay Balamurugadas
Markus Gaertner
Jeroen Rosink

Update: I've also been told that David Christiansen is blogging again. I went and checked and his recent posts have been very tester-centric. Yay!

September Software Test&Performance

Matt.Heusser@gmail.com (Matthew Heusser) — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 13:24:03 PDT

I just got my copy of the September Issue of Software Test and Performance in the mail yesterday.

Yes, I got a September Magazine on September first. Not August 15th. Not October 5th. The timing is actually right. Amazing.

The theme is on outsourced testing, and yes, Chris McMahon and I have a column on page 8. (And yes, we listed The Boutique Tester as one model of test outsourcing.)

If you register, you can download the PDF - or you can read the article directly on the web.

The new, re-tooled STPMag.com has a comments feature, so please, feel free to put comments up here or on the website.

We're working on a column on coverage right now; if you send us your thoughts early, you could help make a better column ...

BONUS: This week's informationweek had a back-page editorial on outsourcing; I thought you might like to compare and contrast to what Chris and I did for ST&P.

Music to test by

Matt.Heusser@gmail.com (Matthew Heusser) — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 08:18:24 PDT

About a year ago, Danny Faught and I team-authored an article on Music to test by for the Association for Software Testing's magazine. Sadly, they had a change in editorship, well ... from having one to not having one. (It is a volunteer position)

So the article was never published. I just got an iTunes Gift card and find myself listening for music to test by.

So instead of listening to me pontificate, I am curious: Do you listen to music while you test or code? (Or do you have any music playing in the background while you pair or collaborate?)

I've found that movie soundtracks often work well because they are /designed/ to be on in the background. But I'm curious what you think ...

Scholarship to Software Testing Club!

Matt.Heusser@gmail.com (Matthew Heusser) — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 06:25:06 PDT

Do all those paid membership sites get you down?

Do you have a compelling reason that $50 USD per year is too much to pay?

I've provided a scholarship for Software Testing Club. You can tell them why you are worthy and try to get the scholarship yourself.

Good luck. And don't say I never gave you nothin'.

:-)

Test Challenge - Free -

Matt.Heusser@gmail.com (Matthew Heusser) — Sun, 30 Aug 2009 17:49:16 PDT

Would you like some test training absolutely free?

Free like water, free like air?

Often, the best way to get it is to help someone else develop training material. To test the training material, so to speak.

Well ...

I'm developing a test challenge that requires certain physical equipment. Before I order the equipment, I'd like to try it virtually, over email, or, more likely, chat programs.

I expect it would take 15 minutes to one hour of your time - it all depends on how deep you'd like to go. If you are interested, drop me an email - matt dot heusser @ gmail dot com.

If you have questions about it you think many people might have, please feel free to leave a comment.

UPDATE: At this time I have closed the challenge. (The early bird, as they say, gets the worm.) However, I will be doing it live, in person, with real equipment at The Software Test&Performance Conference 2009 - October in Boston. Drop by one of my sessions or shoot me an email.

Interlude

Matt.Heusser@gmail.com (Matthew Heusser) — Sat, 29 Aug 2009 17:46:43 PDT

Taken from UrbanjungleComic.com, which has some funny stuff. In my version of firefox, only 4 panels - the left most two panes, top and bottom, display. Ironically, I think the joke works just fine ...

How do we see ourselves?

Matt.Heusser@gmail.com (Matthew Heusser) — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 05:18:33 PDT

And actual post to a forum I saw yesterday:

Hi
I am new to software testing and want help with learning QTP. I am based in (city) and looking for mentor.

Thanks
(name)

Now, I'm not trying to insult anyone. But imagine, for a moment, this appeared on a Carpentry forum:

Hi
I am new to carpentry and want help with learning The Hammer. I am based in Detroit and looking for mentor.

Thanks
Bob The Builder

Or perhaps plumbing:

Hi
I am new to plumbing and want help with learning The Wrench. I am based in Chicago and am looking mentor.

Thanks
Joe the Plumber

Now, I can forgive the poor English. The author probably doesn't write English as a first language, and is actually working hard to translate each word. I have to respect that.

But will learning QTP teach you to test?

Why are we so reluctant to say, as a community, that we want to get good at testing, that we want to understand and predict failure modes, that we want to get good at risk analysis and triage?

Is it because recruiters scan for buzzwords? Because 'testing' alone doesn't get us in the door, we 'need' to know Quick Test Pro, or Java, or SQL, or C#, or Fitnesse?

Don't get me wrong. Tools are important, but they are secondary. We need to change the debate.

I'm open to new and interesting ideas on how to change the debate. What do you think?

The testing renaissance

Matt.Heusser@gmail.com (Matthew Heusser) — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 05:42:34 PDT

I just posted this in the Software-Testing Yahoo Group; I thought it also applies to Creative Chaos:

--- In agile-testing@yahoogroups.com, "woynam" wrote:
>
>
> It never ceases to amaze me the tremendous contribution
>that Smalltalk, and the Smalltalk community, has provided
>to our field, especially considering the small penetration
>that the language achieved.
>

Indeed. This reminds me of an old Paul Graham essay where he pointed out that the renaissance basically started in Florence, Italy.

What was it about Florence, that it generated more than it's fair share of genius's per capital? Was it something in the water? Probably not, because Florence in 1,000 AD and Florence in 1,900 AD did not have that level of success.

What was it then?

Something about the culture of collaboration and sponsorship, I think. The Florentine middle-class who were allowed to make big piles of money and keep it in the 1,200's (from silk, IIRC), went on to become upper-class a few hundred years later and sponsor artists, and, eventually, the knowledge workers, the Da Vinci's, had the opportunity to pursue a life of innovation and creation.

If you want a similar story, look into Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), that invented the Ethernet, the Windowed Operating System, Personal Computing, and Object Oriented Programming - ideas picked up by Apple and the SmallTalk folks.

We may be reaching a similar place in software development and testing. Better yet, it can be led by practitioners who also do. My greatest concern, at this point, is this idea of Dogma and Belief, EG Agile-Testing is or is not this specific thing - without any feedback or evaluation of if that thing works for what environments and how it could be done better.

We may be getting past that. And I think that is a good day, indeed.

Regards,

--matt heusser

Last Agile 2009 Interview - Mary and Tom Poppendieck

Matt.Heusser@gmail.com (Matthew Heusser) — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 07:52:53 PDT

And InformIT just published the last interview in the series, with Tom and Mary Poppendieck on lean thinking.

For a list of all my InformIT articles, you can refer to my Bio Page on Informit.com.

Who is the kid in that picture, anyway? Oh, it's me. Gosh that's old, and I haven't been active in Civil Air Patrol for years. Perhaps it's time for me to revise that old bio ...

Why I /like/ Behavior Driven Development

Matt.Heusser@gmail.com (Matthew Heusser) — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 07:57:07 PDT

Long-time readers of Creative Chaos will know that I'm not a big fan of X-drive-Y processes. Sure, Test-Driven Development was great, but now we've got so many abbreviations poured on top that things are getting a bit silly. (For the record, I think X-driven-Y jumped the shark at Bacon Driven Coding, but that's just me talkin')

But, after some time of opposing Behavior Driven Development as a "bunch of nothing'", I have to admit, I do believe I was wrong. Let me explain.

Several years ago, around 2005-2006, I noticed a disturbing trend of super-isolated unit tests that weren't actually testing the return results of functions - they were instead testing what the function was doing. So your function would call int() once and printf() three times - that would be the test. According to the unit testing zealots, actually having real objects, connecting to a real database, etc - well, that was "not a unit test."

I found this resulted in real gains in /design/ of the software, but the regression test suite it produced - not so much. The suite was brittle and not good at catching bugs. I found ways to inject bugs a suite would not catch, or refactor the code so that it worked but the suite would trip an error. (For example, change from three print()s to instead build up a combined string, then just print() once. Code still works, regression test suite registers a 'failure'.)

My colleague, Sean McMillan, and I developed a few cautionary tales on this form of ultra-low-level "testing and presented it at the Google Test Automation Conference in 2007:

Our conclusion? This is interesting stuff, but we wouldn't call it "testing" - perhaps "isolation-based design" would be more accurate.

So this intersects nicely with Behavior Driven Development, specifically, the falvor of BDD that gave rise to a /behavior/ framework called RSPEC.

You see, under RSpec, you don't call it a test. You talk about the /behavior/ of the software at a low level, replacing words like "test" and "assert" with "should" and "ensure." BDD is about design and doesn't claim to be about testing.

Sound familiar?

So, I think this is huge. Some of the the BDD people took the same observations I did about low-level testing and design and did something positive about it. David Astels, I salute you.

Now, there is a different flavor of BDD, one that is higher-level, where the requirements are expressed as a specification of the form "Given ... When ... Then." If the team has objects with concrete nouns ("The customer", "A membership packet") and verbs ("Requests"), it's relatively easy to automate those tests expressed in near-English.

From what I can tell, the jury is still out on BDD at the customer level. A few people I respect (Including Chris McMahon) are doing it. I'm cautiously optimistic, in that I suspect the process will have some value, but I'm not exactly sure what.

But, hey, as you can tell from above, I've been wrong before.

So - is anyone here using BDD at the higher levels? What do you think of it? And how long have you been doing it? I'm curious who has used it for more that a couple of years in a row, and what tweaks are required in the process as it gets older.

Still More Agile-2009 Preview

Matt.Heusser@gmail.com (Matthew Heusser) — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 05:23:06 PDT

Yet another article - this one an interview with Mike Cohn of MountainGoat software on user stories, Scrum, and succeeding with Agile.

Here's the interview.

So far, these interviews have been comissioned, themed around Agile 2009. But that brings up an interesting question - if I could interview anyone of note in the world of software technology (or general IT if you want to go broad), who would you like me to interview? And what would you like me to ask?

If there's enough interest, I can put a surprisingly large amount of energy into landing an interview. Just sayin' ...

... and another Agile 2009 Interview - Scott Ambler

Matt.Heusser@gmail.com (Matthew Heusser) — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 09:36:27 PDT

The interview series about Agile2009 continues. Next, I interview Scott Ambler, asking him about his Agile Maturity Proposal, Agile Methods at IBM, the slow death of technology magazines, and more.

You can even read the complete article without any registration. Now that's refreshing!

Unfair test questions

Matt.Heusser@gmail.com (Matthew Heusser) — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 07:15:54 PDT

Have you ever seen the cop shows where the good guy asks the criminal "what were you thinking?" The best answer I have ever seen is typically "Well, I wasn't thinking."

The thing is, it wasn't really a question at all - it was a statement, something like "There is no good reason for you to have done this. What is your reason? Huh? Don't I have one? I thought so."

And, while you can understand the motivation of the police officer or prosecutor for asking, I have to admit, I always feel like it's a cheap shot.

We have these questions in software testing ("Why is QA always the bottleneck?") - and I've been getting them for years. So often, in fact, that I have a few stock answers.

After discussing this with my friends at SearchSoftwareQuality.com, they asked me to write an article to cover those impossible test questions - and just published it today:

How to answer unfair test questions

(Free registration required.)

I hope you find it helpful. If you are interested in more, please consider leaving a rating on the site; it could lead to a short series.

Two Laws and a new article

Matt.Heusser@gmail.com (Matthew Heusser) — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 07:06:42 PDT

I put this out in a private correspondence yesterday and thought it was worth repeating here:

Heusser's first rule of ethics: When someone ends a proposal with the statement "... and it's all legal!" they are saying that because it probably /should/ be illegal. Don't work with them.

Heusser's first law of guru-ness: To be a guru you don't actually need to be smart, insightful, or even be able to write very well. All you need is to work in a field that has high turnover and a general inferiority complex, work on a sticky meme, be single, and willing to devote your nights and weekends to self-promotion.

Let add: This doesn't mean that all people who talk about software testing or development are charlatans, crooks, liars, or not very bright. Far from it. I just mean to say that we can't sit back and suck in ideas uncritically. We'll have to actually examine the arguments about our field, hold them up to the light of day, challenge them and see if they stick. To put it differently: We have to test the ideas in software testing. I wouldn't have it any other way; would you?

Hey, speaking of gurus, Informit.com continues to publish interviews I had with speakers at the Agile2009 conference. This next one is from Gerard Meszaros, author of "xUnit Test Patterns". In it, I ask about developer-facing tests, how they relate to customer-facing tests, and the future of Agile-Testing. You can read the interview here.

My colleague, Markus Gaetner, continues to be of great help in creating and reviewing these documents. In this one, he contributed a large section of the introductory paragraph. Markus is a student of mine in the Miagi-Do School of Software Testing - which is not a paradigm but an actual School. I run Miagi-do free, non-profit and non-commerical. I have no statistics on how Miagi-Do increases job prospects or gives out raises. Instead, my students are actually /like/ to do testing and want to get better at it. More about that some other time.

Becoming a software testing expert

Matt.Heusser@gmail.com (Matthew Heusser) — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 08:24:28 PDT

SoftwareTestingClub.com ($50 USD/year paid registration) has been having a discussion on "Becoming a testing expert" in it's forum lately. A number of the comments were very insightful and interesting. I did put out a short follow-up reply out that I thought might be helpful to Creative Chaos readers:

I've heard it said that you can tell a newbie because they want to be told what to do. You bring them in to remodel your kitchen or write your software (or maybe test it), and they ask for a spec or maybe a test plan. When this is kinda vague, they get mad at you. This is a 'contractual' worldview.

A different worldview is that you are discovering the requirements together. The craftsman doesn't ask for a spec; instead, he asks a bunch of questions, and eventually makes a protoype "is this what you want?"

The first prototype is not a solution, instead, it's designed to provoke a reaction "no, but now that I see that, I know what i really want" and the game continues until the prototype is close enough to the desired functionality for work to continue.

That's how I like to approach testing - as a collaborative risk management exercise. Does that make me an expert? Not alone, and that's really for you to decide in your own mind, anyway. But what I can tell you is the people whining about the requirements are too vague, or they should have been involved up front, or they need a test plan ... well, you can probably guess what my initial response is to that kind of rhetoric.

But that's just me talking. YMMV.

This ideal lines up with my concept of the Boutique Tester in that you have the contributor taking 'the bull' of the test process by the horns and shaping a test strategy for each engagement. It is far from complete. What do you think?

Clearing the backlog

Matt.Heusser@gmail.com (Matthew Heusser) — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 09:36:45 PDT

The good news is that Informit.com has just started publishing a backlog of articles from me, including "A Chat with Alistair Cockburn."

Gosh that's an old picture of me.

Swamp-Ed

Matt.Heusser@gmail.com (Matthew Heusser) — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 06:39:26 PDT

I'm afraid we've got a serious push at work, and my brain isn't getting the breathing room it needs to generate blog statements. (Not that I would have time to write them.)

In the little spare time I have, I still do a little bit of writing to relax, and I'm working on a piece about impossible questions - things like "Are we ready to ship yet?" (which you can't know, because you couldn't have completely tested the system) or "why is QA always the bottleneck?"

If you'd like to review my work before it's published, drop me an email: matt.heusser at gmail dot com, or leave a comment below with your email address.

More to come ... but probably not this week.

Let's overflow the stack - II

Matt.Heusser@gmail.com (Matthew Heusser) — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 08:54:43 PDT

Last week I suggested the readers call into the stack overflow podcast and ask testing questions.

And Joel and Jeff answered them - or, at least, they answered Adam Goucher's question.

Adam's question was about hiring for testers. As an answer, Jeff and Joel mostly talked about test philosophy - what kind of person makes a good tester vs. what kind of person makes a good developer. (If you want to jump to the question, just move the time slider to 30:10.)

After answering the tester question, Jeff and Joe answer a question about when to standardize. They suggest waiting for healthy competition in the marketplace and a clear 'winner' from people actually doing it. The direct application to the ISQTB is an exercise for the reader.

For what it's worth, I don't have a problem with ISQTB or CMMI competing in the free marketplace of ideas; I object to the suggestion that the debate is /over/ and ISQTB and CMMI are "the way" to do testing or process improvement.

But seriously, check out the podcast. It's good.