Discovered Tester

Is the Context Driven School of Testing - Dead?

2012-03-01T12:05:00.004-05:00

Earlier this week, Scott Barber pointed out an update to the Context-Driven-Testing page which has served as a starting point for people who want to learn about Context Driven Testing. In this post Kem Caner, one of the 'big four' of the Context Driven School gives an impression that the idea of Context Driven Testing being a 'School' has perhaps reached a point where it no longer exists. He goes on to cite differences in vision among the founders of the movement, and I'll let you read his post above to draw your own conclusions. However, when I was asked this question, I felt that I didn't agree. I've seen places where friends or close colleagues go their separate ways because of a polarizing my way or the high way sort of mentality. I'm not sure that's quite what Kem is referring too.

I debated whether to post my response or thoughts to this here at all as no doubt everyone involved or outside this movement will have their own opinions and beliefs. I decided that for posterity's sake that I would indeed. I have discussed this a bit with some fellow testers in the MiagiDo group, and Michael Larsen another MiagiDo member recently made a post giving his view on things (In Support of Context Driven Testing). It's worth a read, and his thoughts were a bit similar but also slightly different from my own initial response to this question which I gave a bit earlier. What follows was my initial response to this question of whether Context Driven School of Testing is Dead as it was originally shared with others in MiagiDo. The only changes are the addition of Italics, and a few grammatical improvements.

I'll have to quote Monty Python on this one.

"I'm not dead yet!"

I read Scott Barber's post, and I read the information there. I really chaffe a bit and comparing this to the polarization of a few figure heads within the American republican party. Kaner mentions Gingrich, who no doubt is a polarizing figure. If you're an American, you likely either like him, or you hate him, there probably isn't a middle ground for most Americans. However, I think perhaps the 4 Founders have gotten a bit too caught up in their own mystique.

I see the same thing within our American political discourse. People at the so called top seem so polarizing, and the media tries to frame discussions a certain way, and yet most of us at the bottom, outside that top so called 'chosen' echelon are not polarizing, we are not so closed minded or resistant to having honest discussions about things.

I think this is true also for the Context-Driven Community, whether we call it a School or not, to me is irrelevant. The point is we are making a fundamental distinction in where our thinking begins. I see this same problem in the US Education system. A lot of people expect school, especially college to prepare them for everything they need to succeed in a career. The reality is quite opposite, it's a base, a starting point. If you get that strong base, I believe a strong education helps you succeed no matter what you apply your life too. I feel the same here with Context-Driven School of testing.

Listen, so the four founders of the movement disagree. There are four gospels in the New Testament of the Christian Bible, (I use this as an example), and all four a bit different, varied, and share some similarities too. Those guys were alive at the time right? Yet they were not the same as each other, they had differences and disagreements no doubt. So let's be clear the entire point of our School (in my estimation) is to not have Drone or Fake testing right? I believe the point, as I understand it, is to encourage people to use and develop their critical thinking skills, and to not be satisfied with testing that feels lacking in covering the real risks of a project.

Let's look at this another way. James Bach gave a talk (I believe this was at Oredev, see James videos posted at his site at www.satisfice.org if interested) about Renaissance thinking a few years ago. He describes what was fundamentally different about it, and how it wasn't just what was happening In Italy, or Scotland, or wherever else, that there were little movements pretty much elsewhere. Think about the artists themselves, they all approached art a bit differently, yet they don't look like carbon copies even if they've learned some of the same skills and techniques. This is no different than how we each approach testing in the Context Driven School of testing. We are still different then what has come before. We are still different than the more agile-centered testers.

We cannot deny who we are. We've been enlightened, we've grown as a community, a school. It would be impossible for us to try to put the genie back in the bottle now. What's done is done, the shot has been fired and heard around the world now. The question is, in any revolution, what will each of us do because of it.

That's my feelings on it anyways.
Hope that wasn't too preachy,
-Tim Western

So in conclusion, while there may clearly be differences between the founders of the Context Driven moment, its principals and the School of thinking that it began, I must stand up and say, hey I'm still Context Driven, I still belong to that School of testing. Now I do think there is a risk here. There's a risk in perhaps holding too close to the fundamentals of the school. We need to be aware of other ways of doing things, even if we may find that our way is better. As an engineer, a tester, or a scientist I would be looking for ways to prove my own methods wrong, just as so many other scientists have done for centuries. Yet for now, as a Dynamic and not a Static individual, my understanding of testing, and Context Driven Testing will only grow from here out. It isn't a one time thing to learn, but a thing I will continue to learn and grow and mature as a tester as I put the ideas I've encountered into practice, as I test them, and work through the problems I face professionally.

So what about you? What do you think is the Context Driven School of Testing really dead?

Note: Since I set this post up for posting Scott Barber has added a part II on his thinking With the Context-Driven School "closed" what's next? He brings up a very good point about the need for testers to focus on the value they need to provide within their contexts, which I can totally agree with as I am driven to do whatever I can to provide value on a project.

Also I will note that James Bach has also put up a response (which I just now read) If you want to know James Bach's side, I suggest you read Context Driven Testing at a Crossroads.

Edit:

Since posting this, I've found Markus Gärtner blog about this at Lessons Learned from Context-driven testing And note that Cem Kaner has given his comments on this as well. It's definitely worth a read.

Additionally, Cem Kaner has added another response (blog) entry at http://context-driven-testing.com/?p=23 that I encourage everyone to read. This certainly sheds some light on some of the issues that Cem is concerned about, and feels a bit clearer to me about what the issue as he saw it is.

Stepping in the shadow of a monument of process, or standing up?

2012-02-17T17:32:00.004-05:00

Somewhere in an old and run down railroad boom town, stands a hundred churches. Most of the churches were built nearly a century before the Americans with Disabilities Act was even contemplated on the floors of the US Congress. Some have been updated with ramps or elevators, but most like this one old red brick church have only concrete stairs that lead up and into the hall where the people meet each Sunday morning. Every Sunday a hundred people or more, women, men, children, and elderly walk up those old concrete steps before that service begins and then, retreats back down those stairs again after the service has concluded.

On this particular Sunday morning, many feet trod up and down those stairs. Each pair of feet appear only conscious of their forward motion, an attempt to keep things moving forward, progress, a process. So one step after another and soon they reach the destination on another iteration of that Sunday morning hour or more of fellowship and learning. These little feet may be blissfully unaware, or perhaps they know all too well that the church is a hundred years old, and has stood tall for longer than those feet have been able to move. Furthermore, it might seem to those feet, as the creep up those stairs in the shadow of that hundred year old steeple that those feet will continue to visit the same pattern of stairs until the trip can no longer be made.

Of course, then there will be other feet will take its place, and as many feet will continue this pattern to mark up and down those stairs, with their purpose focused on the zenith where the door opens into the terrace of worship. So common and repetitive might this routine become that these feet may pay little attention to anything except to each footfall after footfall. While the conditions of the stairway may sometimes be traveled in the dry, the wet, or perhaps with salt or kitty litter spread about to enhance traction when snow or ice threaten the weekly ascent, but always these feet work their way upward, looking towards the doorway at the top, and yet despite the variety caused by the cycle of seasons, still these feet remain oblivious, giving less and less attention to the grind, the steps each foot falls upon as the habit of the process over takes the analysis and observation that once, during those first few trips up and down those stairs, where the mind noticed the grade, the hardness, and sound of those foot falls on their ascent.

Yet then one Sunday Morning, a half hour before the celebration of this years Scout Sunday a lone boy finds his way up these stairs. He has walked these stairs before, but it has been months since he last made that climb. While others around him may feel this is nothing but a normal routine, he takes in the moment, the smell of the cold snowy air, the feel of the chill wind against his cheeks, and the sound of each footfall as he climbs step by step, turning at its half way point to the side, and then up one more step to the doorway. That's when his senses detect it. A sound altogether different from the sounds of all the previous steps he has heard ring out.

The sound catches his attention, and he lingers for a moment on that step, noting that it is different, but not so sure about it, he opens the door and enters the old church. Others behind walk up the same step, and not one notices, or comments on the sound he heard as he stands back from the doorway and ponders, waiting for the latest bunch of congregational attendants to finish their ascent. This boy doesn't attend this church regularly, he goes to another church nearby and across town. He was only visiting on this occasion in support of the church that had graciously helped support his Cub Scout unit. Yet a question forms in his mind, unlike all the other habitual comers and goers, going through the usual and traditional process of that weeks iteration that raises his curiosity.

The young boy makes his way back down the steps, and this time he takes a slightly different path on the other side of the stairway. As he steps down the stairs, he notes that this time it sounded a bit different. He begins to question as he continues his way back down to the bottom of the stairway. Had he misheard? Did he really hear it wrong? Or had he stepped a bit different on that step and just didn't notice? Had he perceived a discrepancy where none existed? In that moment the boy considers whether it had all been in his mind, after all a hundred others had come and gone on these steps already that morning, surely at least one other person would have noticed something amiss. He begins to be skeptical of his own observation, thinking that because he is new here that maybe it has always sounded that way, or perhaps there was another sound at the moment which he had confused with his own footfall.

That explanation could be the truth, yet he still feels that calm voice inside saying, "Hey, I did hear something, so what was it?" At this point he thinks about the difference between ascent and descent on the stairway and ponders whether the step may sound different depending upon which direction he traveled on the stairway. That alone could be sufficient answer to why the sound had been different, but how do you prove it?

The young boy considers the time on his watch and then shrugs his shoulders. Then he begins to ascend the steps again. Step by step, they all sound the same, with each footfall, each sound just like the other he begins to think that maybe it was nothing after all. He smiles as his mind begins to drift from this curiosity to focus on the other tasks that morning. He turns and steps again on that last step, to hear a hollow 'thunk' sound. There it was again! That sound was the same as before. He had reproduced the effect, and now was confident it wasn't just something he had imagined.

To prove the point, the boy begins stepping up and down off that single step repeating the sound over and over again. There can be no doubt to him now, that it does sound different than all of the other steps. Then another question comes to his mind: What had he heard when he came down though? He quickly realizes that he had ascended the stairway on its right side, but upon descending he had been on the left (his right side on the way down). Would it make the same sound he made on the right side if he stepped further to his left? So he formulates another experiment, slides to the left and he tries it, and as he suspected, sure enough the step doesn't make this sound on that side. He repeats this test over and over, then moves back to the right to confirm the sound is different there still.

Now he has reproduced the defect, and shown a bit about its scope, and he has drawn the attention of one of the church's leadership, who are wondering, what this crazy boy is doing. The boy smiles politely, and then begins to explain his discovery. A hundred people before had passed that same step, perhaps for weeks, and not one of them had noted this problem. Yet this outsider, this newcomer of a boy had noticed it even though it really wasn't something that would necessarily be expected to concern this boy.

Have you ever joined a software team that had been around for a long time? Sometimes teams get so entrenched into the ebb and flow of their processes that the processes themselves create blind spots. A latent defect or bug could be present in the product and go undetected for a long time, simply because no focus, thought, or imagination had brought it to anyone's attention before. Even with a large team, a small, perhaps tiny defect could be dismissed each in turn, yet that defect could be a sign of something about to go wrong with the system being produced.

I've been in that situation, several times, and it can be a bit of a daunting task. If you are the new guy on the block, and are still learning the ropes of the teams process, learning how they interact and accomplish their daily tasks it can be such a trial to ask, and yet as a newbie that's part of your Job. You have to know how and why things work the way they are. Now imagine this had happened on a Software project. You as a tester or developer ask a more experienced development guy about it, and get a response. How do you respond?

How would you respond if they say it has always been that way? Do you ignore it and flag it as just an annoyance that everyone knows about? Do you speak up and say hey this could be dangerous, and then articulate your feelings as to why it is a problem? What if noone had noticed it before, yet because you are still in your first month with the team, they discount what you say, perhaps fail to believe you? What do you do then? Would you have courage to confirm your observations, and then try to prove it to the team? Would you have the passion to see that the problem gets addressed, even if the people around you look at you like you've gone crazy?

These are questions I've had to answer in the past. As a tester, a developer, a leader, a parent, at some point in your life you will find something that is out of place, something that is against the norm, and maybe you are so weary from the travel down life's path that your mind wants to simply dismiss it. If you do, does your mind realize the risks? The risks that threaten your Team, your project, your family or community, do you see them and just ignore them?

It is too easy at times to fall into ruts of habit, running here and there all the while wearing out the same patch of carpet beneath our feet. How do we combat this apathetic attitude? How do we combat life's fire when just keeping it burning is all we want?

For me, I do this by testing myself, by testing things around me, and trying things that at times will throw people off. My kids think it's just their father being goofy when I ask them questions about seemingly obvious things. They may even think I'm getting on their case as I ask them to observe something I've noticed. What I'm gauging is their reaction to their surroundings. How do they process things, and how would I respond if I was in their shoes? It isn't easy to be the squeaky wheel. Standing alone when the crowd is seated and content with things to be as they are.

Yet, I'm not convinced that being silent is the answer. There are times when you may have to table an issue because of priority, or it could be this is not the right venue or time to raise it. It may even be that the thing you've noticed is far more complex than even you might imagine in your mind. What happens after you've raised the issue is something you and the team will have to manage, but do you have the courage to stand out and speak out when you see something that seems to be wrong? For me, as an Eagle Scout, and a member of the Association for Software Testing, and a person who believes integrity is very important for professionals, I would do my best to make the issue known. It might not be something that can be solved over night, and there might be intermediary steps that need to be crossed before it can happen, but I know I would certainly put myself out there to say what I had seen. Even if there's a small chance I might be wrong, that in and of itself is an opportunity for growth and learning. Can you say the same? So as you test your life around you, what kernels in the corner are you ignoring? What patterns have you fallen into that could be obscuring something that's a serious problem, and once you've identified them, what will you do to try to correct them?

Weekend Testers Americas #24 - Black Box Software Testing: Practice 3

2012-02-08T10:41:00.002-05:00

Today I participated in Weekend Testers Americas Session #24. The mission for this session was fairly open ended.

Mission:
* In today's mission we would like you to frame your exploration on your
own.
* We are about to give you a 'black box machine'.
* You will have 60 minutes.
* At the end of the timebox present your notes (no more than page long) to the group chat.
* What to report and in what format - we leave it up to your decision.
* We hope everybody will bring a unique bit of experience we all can learn from.

Ultimately it boiled down to an exploratory testing session on a practice flash applet. Because of the way the mission was framed, each individual tester, or testing pair defined the mission for themselves. Since the general feel of the mission was so open, and my instincts were to work the practice as an exploratory session, I felt there was a lot of room to try things, perhaps things I wouldn't normally have done.   While some of the testers paired, I elected to go it alone this time though.

Before I get into my synopsis of the exercise and my conclusions of how that session went, I'd like to give credit to James Lyndsay who I am told is the one who produced this particular practice over at his site http://www.workroom-productions.com/. There are a number of practice exercises that could be used for some general and basic practice of exploratory testing skills. From what I've read he also has some more in depth training as well, which could be a useful if exploratory testing is an area you feel could help you in your testing efforts. I'll leave it to my readers to decide that for themselves.    Now, if you'd like to try the exercise before reading my report, head on over to http://www.workroom-productions.com/papers/puzzle_03.swf and explore it to your hearts content for up to an hour. Otherwise, what follows would be considered a 'Spoiler'. So when you are ready to continue reading, please click 'Read More' below.

Before I begin my observations, I'm going to take a moment to be a bit critical of my attempt at this session. Admittedly, it's been a while since I've done focused exploratory testing. I have done some exploratory testing in the past, but my current tasks does not have exploration as a key component as I see it. So there is no established 'routine' for exploration that I might normally have fell back into using. This could have been a plus or a minus. Additionally, in some ways I was less than prepared. While I did use Shmuel Gershon's RapidReporter for note taking, at one point in, I realized I didn't have a notepad and pen handy, (something that normally I always have handy, but for some reason didn't think to grab before this session.) Since I didn't want to lose time to go hunt for a notepad in my other room, I proceeded with out it. In hindsight, if I were doing this again, I think I could have perhaps better organized my effort if I had taken time to use a notepad to organize my thoughts after the first few minutes of the session.

What follows is my report as submitted to the session, plus later, notes as recorded into rapid reporter.

Page: http://www.workroom-productions.com/papers/puzzle_03.swf

Mission: Explore functionality.

Page Load testing:

Chrome: First Try Failed to Load - about:blank;  Second Try: spun out but never loaded.
Firefox: Inconclusive, wasn't setup for flash (odd thought it was) (and tried to download the swf)
IE 9: Loads no problems. Will use IE 9 for testing

Box is Win 7 64 Bit.

First thought was what areas did the mouse change, or appear clickable. The screen has four buttons in blue and yellow in a 2x4 pattern on the left, a dial gauge that is circular, with a needle, green until like the last twenty percent. A label in the lower left hand corner that says Puzzle 3. A red and green LED below the dial, and a pinkish red image that I'll call a spool in the bottom right. It appears the 4 blue and 4 yellow buttons are clickable, as well as the red spool and ? mark in the bottom right.

Hovering over the Spool also revealed the Test "work room productions; Test Strategy quality assurance' text. The spool surprised me a bit, because it pops up a message from the swf's creator, but only as long as you hold the mouse button down. Same with the ? mark which gives some hints. Oops noone told me it would give me hints, Spoilers!

Observations, the text has a transparent background for the spool, and is a bit difficult to read due to this (for me anyways) It's not entirely illegible but someone with poorer eyesight might not be able to read it.

Next try clicking buttons, initialy thought was to do a zig zag pattern from Blue 1 down. (wondering if order matters Permutations vs Combinations that is.) Tried a sequence going from left to right then down the left to right then down the left to see what happens when all buttons pressed. Noticed that at 7 or 6 buttons the red light may come on, but not sure again if order matters here or not. I tried a number of different combinations here, and then thought if trying some key combinations. A drag of finger across keyboard revealed that the buttons would get 'inset' if a key was pressed, seems that's the U key that causes it. IS this cosmetic or does it affect behavior would require a more detailed plan I think to figure out.

Stepping back, noting to self that I forgot to have a notebook handy to write things on quickly between clicks. Would really like to to do a truth table for this thing if I had more time I would do so.

Ooo Pressing S and T seems to cause a target to show up, and I notice that it seems to be clickable with data entered into it. (only numerics though) Interesting.

Eventually I got the needle to move, stop, decrease, increase, halt with no lights on, green light on, both green and red, etc. So I wonder what the lights acutally indicate since they don't indicate which direction it's moving, which would have been my thought.

Conclusion: If I had a note pad handy, a truth table would have been better to get what combinations of buttons did what. Thus more testing would be needed if it were just me to obtain that.)

That's the short synopsis of the testing we did for about sixty minutes. You can see the reports of other testers at http://weekendtesting.com/archives/2393 It is always interesting to look at the approaches others took, and what they discovered. In some cases, testers focused on that combination, and what combinations caused the needle to move, or the lights to come on. Some tried to visualize it as a control system for some system. While my report didn't reflect it, I was imagining it as an air gauge, or a switching system with a Volt or Amp Gauge where the possibility could be that going to far into the red would cause something 'bad' to happen. Nothing seemed to happen when we got there that I noticed though.

Some of the testers tried to define what the states might mean for the buttons. Is a button up, considered on or off? I didn't really spend much time wondering what those buttons met. If I had access to the customer, which another tester did note, I'd probably have asked for some background for the control system, and that likely would have had a profound impact on how I viewed and proceeded with my testing. One tester, Pradeep Soundararajan, thought he'd seen the exercise before, and rather than just testing the device, spent time devising the possible repercussions of testing it. He spent time identifying useful heuristics that could be needed to properly test something like this. I actually found this refreshing, as he identified some potential biases, and problems you might have to answer when testing something like this.

I'll let my readers go to the Experience Report over at http://weekendtesting.com/archives/2393 to draw their own conclusions, but I definitely benefited from seeing how people in different backgrounds saw testing of this kind. Before I close this blog, I'd like to post my notes from rapid reporter, so you can see my thought process as I went about the testing.

Session Report | Powered by Rapid Reporter

Show autogenerated rows

Time	Reporter	Type	Content
2/4/2012 1:01:14 PM	Tim Western	(Rapid Reporter version)	1.12.01.06
2/4/2012 1:01:14 PM	Tim Western	Session Reporter	Tim Western
2/4/2012 1:01:14 PM	Tim Western	Session Charter	Weekend Testing Americas #24 Mission: TBD
2/4/2012 1:01:21 PM	Tim Western	Setup	Join Skype Converation
2/4/2012 1:01:26 PM	Tim Western	Setup	Say Hi and Check in.
2/4/2012 1:03:26 PM	Tim Western	Setup	Introductions
2/4/2012 1:11:36 PM	Tim Western	Setup	Mission statement:
2/4/2012 1:11:53 PM	Tim Western	Setup	In today's mission we would like you to frame your exploration on your own. We
2/4/2012 1:12:04 PM	Tim Western	Setup	are about to give you a 'black box machine'.
2/4/2012 1:12:11 PM	Tim Western	Setup	You will have 60 minutes. At the end of the timebox present your notes (no more
2/4/2012 1:12:20 PM	Tim Western	Setup	than page long) to the group chat.
2/4/2012 1:12:28 PM	Tim Western	Setup	What to report and in what format - we leave it up to your decision. We hope
2/4/2012 1:12:34 PM	Tim Western	Setup	everybody will bring a unique bit of experience we all can learn from.
2/4/2012 1:12:59 PM	Tim Western	Setup	[1:11:44 PM] Weekend Testers Americas: http://www.workroom-productions.com/papers/puzzle_03.swf
2/4/2012 1:14:55 PM	Tim Western	Setup	Chrome test opening: http://www.workroom-productions.com/papers/puzzle_03.swf
2/4/2012 1:15:03 PM	Tim Western	Test	Open in Chrome results in blank screen? odd
2/4/2012 1:15:48 PM	Tim Western	Test	closed Chrome; try again... now instead of about:blank its spinning.
2/4/2012 1:19:04 PM	Tim Western	Test	Try Firefox; but it wants to download (may not have plugin installed
2/4/2012 1:19:08 PM	Tim Western	Test	Try IE 9... and it loads
2/4/2012 1:19:50 PM	Tim Western	Note	See 8 buttons 2x4 half blue half gold 2 read out lights left red; right green; and a meter. Label at bottom says puzzle 3
2/4/2012 1:20:20 PM	Tim Western	Note	Since only IE 9 will load for me (will explore why later) I'll use IE 9 for testing
2/4/2012 1:20:50 PM	Tim Western	Check	hover over flash to see what is clickable; or where mouse over changes.
2/4/2012 1:21:40 PM	Tim Western	Note	Hover over image in lower right reveals ''Work room productions; Test Strategy Quality Assurance text
2/4/2012 1:21:53 PM	Tim Western	Check	what happens when you click on the icon in lower right; now being called the spool
2/4/2012 1:22:52 PM	Tim Western	Check	Click reveals some text; partiall transparent. Seems to be a message from the author.
2/4/2012 1:22:59 PM	Tim Western	Check	Can't read entire text and type at t same time.
2/4/2012 1:23:27 PM	Tim Western	Check	text covers most of the app; but it bleeds through making reading a bit tricky.
2/4/2012 1:23:51 PM	Tim Western	Check	Click the ? above the spool; reveals another message.
2/4/2012 1:25:03 PM	Tim Western	Check	nothing in the blue area appears clickable.
2/4/2012 1:25:26 PM	Tim Western	Check	So now trying the blue and Gold Buttons; will do a zig zag starting in upper left.
2/4/2012 1:26:05 PM	Tim Western	Check	Seems that four buttons pressed causes green light to come up
2/4/2012 1:26:21 PM	Tim Western	Check	Try all blue: (if any yellow are pressed beyond four it has both lit up
2/4/2012 1:26:48 PM	Tim Western	Check	Green light lights up with B1; Y1; B2.
2/4/2012 1:26:56 PM	Tim Western	Check	Stays on with Y2
2/4/2012 1:27:02 PM	Tim Western	Check	Stays on with B3
2/4/2012 1:27:07 PM	Tim Western	Check	stays on with Y3
2/4/2012 1:27:13 PM	Tim Western	Check	stays on with b4
2/4/2012 1:27:20 PM	Tim Western	Check	Goes red with Y4
2/4/2012 1:27:23 PM	Tim Western	Check	un click all
2/4/2012 1:28:05 PM	Tim Western	Check	Seen combinations of 7 and 6 buttons that will stay green. Y4; B1; Y2; B2; Y2; B3..
2/4/2012 1:29:10 PM	Tim Western	Check	Now check if any single button causes the red
2/4/2012 1:30:04 PM	Tim Western	Check	S+T Exposes Timer
2/4/2012 1:30:49 PM	Tim Western	Check	If I click in the target that shows up with the target/timer thing I can type into it
2/4/2012 1:30:59 PM	Tim Western	Check	Only seems to except numerics
2/4/2012 1:32:00 PM	Tim Western	Check	Trying finger drag across keys to see if any other special commands.. noticed that a box can go around the buttons; how did I do that?
2/4/2012 1:32:24 PM	Tim Western	Check	U puts a box around the buttons
2/4/2012 1:33:37 PM	Tim Western	Check	the lower right yellow button now seems to cause a red condition when certain pairs of the blue are pressed along with it.
2/4/2012 1:33:48 PM	Tim Western	Check	B1 B2 -> Green
2/4/2012 1:33:56 PM	Tim Western	Check	B1B3 -> Green
2/4/2012 1:34:03 PM	Tim Western	Check	B1-B4 -> Red
2/4/2012 1:34:17 PM	Tim Western	Check	B2;3 -> No indicator
2/4/2012 1:34:33 PM	Tim Western	Check	B3;4 with Y4 -> both red and green
2/4/2012 1:34:54 PM	Tim Western	Check	If both Y3;Y4 are prssed; either B3;4 causes red
2/4/2012 1:35:23 PM	Tim Western	Check	Now checking pairs of blue with Y3
2/4/2012 1:35:35 PM	Tim Western	Check	B1;2->Green
2/4/2012 1:35:47 PM	Tim Western	Check	B1;3 -> none
2/4/2012 1:35:54 PM	Tim Western	Check	B1; $ -> none
2/4/2012 1:36:13 PM	Tim Western	Check	B2;3 -> Nothing
2/4/2012 1:36:22 PM	Tim Western	Check	B3;4 -> Green
2/4/2012 1:36:26 PM	Tim Western	Check	Interesting is that the only one?
2/4/2012 1:36:36 PM	Tim Western	Check	All but B3 -> Green
2/4/2012 1:36:43 PM	Tim Western	Check	All but B4 -> Green
2/4/2012 1:36:55 PM	Tim Western	Check	If I had more time I'd setup a truth table for this chart and see what happens.
2/4/2012 1:37:25 PM	Tim Western	Next Time	Set up a truth table on a sheet of paper and note what the combinations are. I'm betting there are some that are DOn't Care some that are alway on. could be wrong.
2/4/2012 1:38:20 PM	Tim Western	Next Time	Aha; i finally got the dial to move by rapid clicking
2/4/2012 1:38:36 PM	Tim Western	Check	B1; B2 Y2; B4; Y 4 un check B2 and it rolls
2/4/2012 1:38:47 PM	Tim Western	Check	unchecking B4 causes the dial to go down
2/4/2012 1:39:21 PM	Tim Western	Check	now what happens when it gets in the red of the dial?
2/4/2012 1:39:41 PM	Tim Western	Check	dial can be pegged
2/4/2012 1:39:44 PM	Tim Western	Check	doesn't move
2/4/2012 1:39:49 PM	Tim Western	Check	now trying to unclick B4
2/4/2012 1:40:03 PM	Tim Western	Check	red light went off still pegged in red
2/4/2012 1:40:13 PM	Tim Western	Check	B2 and dial is going down again
2/4/2012 1:40:35 PM	Tim Western	Check	hit combinatoin b1 B2 Y3 B4 Y 4 to stop at 12 oclock position.
2/4/2012 1:45:24 PM	Tim Western	Check	each button... do they do the same thing each time clicked click each button on and off five times to see
2/4/2012 1:46:02 PM	Tim Western	Check	not with individual buttons
2/4/2012 1:46:12 PM	Tim Western	Check	however; I've noticed that sometimes the needle goes up when its not green.
2/4/2012 1:46:39 PM	Tim Western	Check	B2;3;4 Y2;3 causes needle go down and green
2/4/2012 1:47:04 PM	Tim Western	Check	also if you press B2;3; Y2;3 -> Y1 goes down.
2/4/2012 1:51:23 PM	Tim Western	Session End. Duration	00:50:10

What follos is a very a brief conclusion after I looked over the report from RapidReporter before I began to compile my notes to share with the other session participants:

Conclusion: There seems to be some sequence or groupings that determine if any, one, or all lights go on, and in sequence one button toggled may affect the dials movement up or down, or freezing. I didn't feel I got accurate information as I was not taking as concise a notes in this regard as I would have liked too. I could see doing a combinatoric check on this thing for combinations up to 7 or 8 buttons before having a full idea of how its logic would flow.

Lastly, as far as the Weekend Testing session went, I think it went well. I'm glad I attended and participated. I have felt stuck in a rut when I have been testing of late, or focusing on logic and business rules rather than what interfaces may actually be doing. My testing environment at home was actually not a distraction at all, but I'm wishing now I'd taken even five minutes to get a note pad to do a truth table. It would have saved me some effort I think, and perhaps given me more confidence in the session over all. In truth, at present my tasks have been more coding than testing centered for the last few months, so exercises like this were important to keep some of my testing knowledge fresh. If you've never had the chance to attend a Weekend Testing session, or if you are interested in participating in our next Weekend Testing Americas Session, it will likely fall on the first Saturday of March (March 3rd, 2012), and typically starts at 2 PM Eastern time for me.

Acknowledgements: The exercise was produced by James Lyndsay who has a number of such exercises for practicing exploratory testing. Thanks to James for allowing us to use this in our session today. His site can be found at: http://www.workroom-productions.com/ and this exercise is one of the public Black Box Testing Exercises at: http://www.workroom-productions.com/black_box_machines.html I give major kudos to James for having a practice applet like this on his site and would recommend anyone interested in learning more, to please contact him to find out how you can learn more about Exploratory Testing.

Reflections on 2011, a year of trial, growth, and questions

2011-12-30T04:45:00.000-05:00

It has been a while since I've had time to pick up my bloggers pen. October is traditionally a hellish month for me, even when work isn't trying, the Cub Scouts have kept me busy all but a single weekend that I recall, and then on Sundays our son plays soccer. However, things quickly went off the rails this year. The whole family came down sick over the span of a month, and one week, we were all sick at the same time. Yikes! Praise God, we are better now, but that isn't the only change.

My duties on my project have shifted back to more coder oriented tasks, and less focused on testing. While I enjoy both programming and testing pursuits, I'll admit, I miss the testing aspects of what I was doing before. It is funny in a way, when I first got approached about a 'Automation testing' position in 2009, I was worried about being pigeonholed as a tester and excluded from some kind of elite club of programmers. Yet that was a bit a naive thing to worry about in hindsight. Testing brought back my love of learning in a way I had not felt since college. It returned to me part of who I always was, but had kept silent in order to make ends meet. I've learned a lot as I ran that course, and I wouldn't trade the decision for the world.

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.

This feeling has left me feeling a bit lost internally because I know I can succeed at anything I choose to focus my efforts upon, it wouldn't matter if it was testing and programming, or some other group of tasks from which I must choose. I have the drive to do what is necessary to succeed. Still, I find myself at this cross roads because I enjoy doing things that provide value to the teams that i work with, no matter how small or great the achievement may be. Up till now it hasn't mattered whether I was a tester, programmer, or performing some other service to the project team. As long as it was value that I added, I was happy, content and felt fulfilled inside, Yet I find myself feeling as though I am stuck at a fork in the road.

I feel as if I have paused at a great fork where two rivers meet. One is a possible focused career on testing, the other, a continued focus on programming, its methodology, and potential as a generalist programmer. Either fork in the river looks potentially enjoyable from a learning stand point, with its opportunity to pause to fish, relax, or just skip a rock to the other side. Like most rivers though, I realize that I can only paddle up one stream at a time. Although the left fork might be easier, the right might be the more fulfilling, or the converse could be true.

For nine years, I have worked professionally to develop, test, and support various software efforts. I have learned something from every experience that I have been fortunate to endure. I wouldn't trade those experiences away as they define a bit of who I am personally and professionally. As I enter my tenth year of service in software development, I find myself looking back over the peaks and valleys behind, and ahead up the forks in the river, yet seeing behind the first bend of either is impossible. So I am presently anchored, where I am at this fork, pausing to consider and reflect upon what my dreams are for the next ten years. Where do I want to be? What roads will I need to travel to get there? These are questions that I have no answer for currently. So given that the new year is around the corner, I can see myself at least initially focusing greatly upon what exactly it is that I most want to do, and the realities of that choice which may require not just myself, but my whole family to adapt as well.

It may take some time for me to come to some answers, and the pot has clearly become foggy and hard to see how its contents will turn out when I finally reach that conclusion, but I want to consider things more closely, set a plan and then rush after it to attain it. Perhaps it is the nature of how I 'fell into' my current assignment that is at the heart of this muddled mind of mine. At least I know it is something I can do for now, while I sort through my feelings and make what could possibly be the biggest personal, and professional decision I have made in my life thus far.

But enough about me, as you read this and other blogs, I imagine you may be reflecting on recent events, just as I have been. Where do you stand? What's your dream? How will you decide what to focus upon this year, and as a result, what areas that get left behind will you perhaps miss when we reach this point a year from now?

Diary of a Soccer Coach: Week 4

2011-10-01T11:56:00.000-04:00

You've been there before a well worn meeting room with your team gathered around a table going over a list of action items related to the project you've been working. Sometimes they are new requirements, perhaps they are refinements of existing functionality, or tweaks of the deployment procedures taking into account lessons learned in that first deployment of the software. The first practice after that first game, is very much like this. Often there isn't enough time to discuss defensive or offensive tactics with the players before the first game.

It is sometimes a matter of perspective, a coach after the first game of the season, or a manager or lead on a team reviewing the steps they took on that first ever critical deployment, the first game, the first actions of substance as far as the customer might see. So in hindsight, that first practice, that first meeting, is often a discussion of the aftermath. For our kindergartners, we discuss the issues I noticed during that first game. There are almost always a few areas to correct, and they aren't always the same from Game 1 in one year versus any of the others.

Typically a reminder of the rules is necessary. A reminder about which goal we are attacking, which one we defend, a reminder not to use hands except for the Throw-ins, and an encouragement to stop play when the whistle blows and quickly bring the ball to the referee when there is a stoppage of play for going out of bounds. While errors can occur in any game, I try to point out the mistake, and correct the behavior without singling out any particular team member. The point after all is not that someone erred, but that we play the game correctly to reduce stoppages of play.

With the instructional league sometimes this is difficult. Some players have an over arching desire for the ball, and they may indulge this by diving at the ball. This is a behavior we try to discourage. For one thing, falling to the ground is as bad as waiting flat footed for the ball. They aren't upright able to move with the ball, and if they are down where the ball is, there's a higher possibility of injury as other players go for the ball around them. Sometimes they fall down, and stay on the ground, and again even if the ball isn't near them, this isn't behavior we want to encourage. Sometimes its a sign that the kid is tired, but they rarely will get into shape if they sit down when they are supposed to be in the game, and the ball could come at any time too.

Ever been on a team where similar behavior happens? Where they get tunnel vision, seeing only the one task before them at the expense of what is going on around them on the field? How can we avoid this behavior? What's worse is what if a team mate ends up blocked or stuck in some area and doesn't realize it? As professionals we can try to encourage, give a second set of eyes to these issues, but in the end its really up to the individual to get themselves back on track. We can encourage that team mate to come back on board, but honestly, if that person cannot take the initiative, there may be little we can do to really fix an issue that is internal to them.

Just like with my soccer players, I take them back to basics, breaking down the basics of the pass, of corner kicks and goal kicks, of throw-ins and kick-offs. Only so much time can be spent on correcting the past, as new challenges and new games await. So before the second game we spend a little time talking about defense. Of reminding the kids that in our league, there are no goalies and therefor noone should go into the goal arc even to go after the ball, but more importantly we teach them what to do to protect their own goal.

First involves positioning, if a player is following an opponent bringing the ball up, we show them how they can move their feet with out crossing them, using the balls of their feet to have better response time in their jockeying back and forth. We show them how to encourage the ball handler to dribble a particular direction, to funnel them away from a straight shot on goal, or to where we hope additional team mates can cut off their lane of advance. We also try to show them that having everyone covering one person leaves open lanes of passing to the opposition, it leaves area of the field uncovered, and opens up easy attacks on their teams goal.

In software development, testers play a part of defense, not from bugs scoring on them, but from preventing threats to the value of the product. If the goal as a team is to release a product with value that's usable by the client, then anything that allows the product to be misused, leaves features less than fully implemented, or just plain not covered is a threat that we as testers try to find. The one difference here is that unlike in soccer where we can see the ball coming many times before it arrives near our zone of defense, in testing we don't have the ability to look at the software and say a bug is coming from here or there. We have to instead visualize it with our mind.

How can we visualize where bugs might be? One way is to be involved early in the process, be in with the conversations with the customer or client and helping to determine how the software may be used. We also must consider the negative, the view of what invalid data, or improper operations might do to the software. What if a file consumed is missing settings, does the software resort to a default and store that in the configuration for next time? If you start typing before the software can fully load, will it cause an unexpected behavior? We can brain storm a horde of test ideas to try to cover the entire areas of the application, but the reality is just like in soccer, we are just one tester, we can only cover so much ground in eight hours of work time.

What about opposition tendencies? It may be possible in soccer to see that certain players tend to favor an attack on goal from the right or left side. Some players may prefer passing the ball forwards, or looping back rather than continuing forward at a bad angle. As testers, we can evaluate the software for tendencies, are there certain areas that seem more bug prone, are there areas that are more critical, or more likely to be highly used and thus could cause more risk? Is there a particular feature set which sets your software apart from another, then that is an area I'd be sure to test.

Then a foul may be called. Maybe one player pushed or tripped another, maybe it was a hand ball. Maybe there's an area of your software that is of particular risk to the customer. They need that feature to work, quickly, to solve a time critical problem. Whatever the case may be, we try as hard as we can to find every single bug there may be, but the reality is we can't cover the whole of a software that's anything but trivial. The nature of software and the myriad of systems it may be installed upon create such a large volume of possibilities that we cannot test it all, so we use techniques to break the software down into areas that we can cover. We find ways to distill problems to a range of possible outcomes, and we try to think of new ways to test old functionality, because you just never know when a new feature may impact an old one.

If its not random, how to decipher the pattern?

2011-09-27T21:36:00.002-04:00

Earlier this week, I wrote about the software fault in the Staunton, Virginia, teacher payroll system. I talked at length about the concept of 'random', and the importance of distinguishing between something that which is truly random, from something that is better described as unexpected, unpredictable, or just 'having no discernible pattern to me as far as my sense go'. Using precise language when describing defects in software benefits everyone on the team, including the customer.

Unfortunately, the fault in Staunton, Virgnia's payroll system wasn't found by a tester, instead it was discovered by someone researching the finances of the county's school system. Now we may not know exactly how this fault was first brought to the attention of this school district. That doesn't preclude speculation how an investigation of a similar fault on a hypothetically similar system could be conducted.

So imagine a hypothetical payroll system for an organization with multiple locations, accounting for user entities of diverse pay grades and positions similar to the school systems. The more layers you add to the structure of the system, the greater its complexity. Now let's suppose the vendor of this software received word about an apparent bug. This bug affects certain persons within the system who would receive an unexpected, and here to fore unnoticed pay increase. So if you as a software tester for this software vendor, receive this notice where would you start?

Reporting and analyzing a defect that a tester stumbled upon through his or her own investigation of the software is one thing. Trying to track down a flaw someone else found and reports is quite another. If we follow the example of the of the system we discussed earlier we can imagine the reports taking the form of output, potentially pay stubs, ledger logs, bank statements, etc. In short, we possess a log or evidence that the problem occurred, but this evidence may be far enough from the system itself to not be able to produce the same conditions without a bit more digging.

So how can we reproduce these conditions and figure out where the real defect resides? More information is required, and like a software Sherlock Holmes we must examine the evidence, and piece together the story of what happened. In the case of the pay roll system it is likely important to know how many individuals were impacted. Might a search for more information related to the individuals effected, reveal each user to be part of particular entities or organizations with in the system? Did they work at particular locations, or have their data maintained at a particular data center? An exhaustive analysis of whatever data can be culled from the system could help establish a definitive relationship between the affected users.

From the headlines, it sounds the School district performed an analysis just like this. The result seemed to have something to do with individuals who went to a particular school. Now the age of the defect in the system may not be clear. If a lot of time has gone by, it may be possible that the connection is more subtle, and won't track to any particular organization, or be so obvious; however, in this case we strike pay dirt. One piece of the puzzle is in place.

Given that all those results might track to a particular organization within the software, this may lead to our first hunch. Were all the people assigned to this organization, also receiving the same bug? This might be where the first bump in the investigation may be encountered. Maybe they aren't all affected. That idea may lead to a belief that our initial hunch was wrong, but it could be that there's a reason why they turned out to be the exception.

It's at this point in the defect analysis where a history of debugging similar enterprise applications could prove beneficial. From reviewing some of the articles around the defect, a number of ideas come to mind, all of them based on similar behavior I've encountered in other projects I have worked. If these employees all worked at a facility that was shuttered, what happens to their accounts when the facility is shut down? Are they transferred to a new facility? Are they suspended out right? Are they removed from the system?

I recall once with a customer relation management system that we encountered a bug when a user account was removed from the system. All the records linked to it, would cascade and delete, or disappear and not show up in the system when searched. Could a data integrity issue regarding the integrity of the data for these closed locations be responsible for this behavior?

Another possibility that occurs to me, is that a system that freezes pay for all employees may apply to a group of employees by group. Might a group that these employees belonged to be used to freeze all of their pay for some time period? Might failing to belong to a group due to the original group being inactivated cause the issue of applying this freeze to miss these accounts?

It may be difficult to see the cause from just reading the few reports you receive from the user, but a simple logical, and step by step examination of the system could help reveal how the issue happened, and if it was a case of the system being used in a manner that was unplanned by the software vendor, it may indicate a fault in the business rules, or lack of training for the users of the system. Whatever the case, the team is now on its way to finding where this issue occurred. Where would you test next?

Pay Freeze, slightly melted, a random bug? Maybe.

2011-09-21T19:57:00.004-04:00

Every now and then I read about a problem in a software system that makes the news. I look at the article and read what is described as the problem, and I often wonder, how this supposed flaw got into the system. In my experience it can be easy to fault the software for an error. There have certainly been enough cases of odd failures for the general public to believe them, but is it really the software?

This week I heard about the story from Staunton, Virginia. Apparently the school board had frozen pay for all of its employees for some period of time, and as the article stated, the glitch went uncaught by a number of employees who spot checked this up until a news station requested records for salaries under the freedom of information act. This is when the discrepancy was apparently noticed. Now this glitch appears like something of a scandal. The political black eye alone could be enough to make anyone nervous about the 'quality' of the application in question.

What concerns me though is that this glitch is being described as completely random. First, do we really understand what it means when something is truly random? According to Dictionary.com, random has four customary definitions. The first means 'proceeding, made, or occurring without definite aim, reason, or pattern. The second is its use in statistics, specifically the concept of a process of selection whereby each item of a set has an equal likelihood of being selected. The third definition applies to physical trades, where a part, parcel, or piece of land or item may appear non uniformly shaped. The last one is an informal use implying that it was an occurrence that was completely unexpected, or unpredictable.

Let's take a moment and consider the story for a moment. The first definition implies that there is no rhyme or reason, no discernible pattern to something which may make it random. Is that the case here? Reading further I notice the following:

" the pay increase malfunction was random and included three teachers at Bessie Weller Elementary School, four at McSwain Elementary, four at Ware Elementary and a speech teacher and a secondary special education teacher."

Several of these teachers had one thing in common, they attended one of three elementary schools nearby. Wait does that mean what I think it means, could this be the beginning of an actual pattern emerging, enough to discount the perceived randomness? It could be, but as testers in this situation, our job is to determine the nature of the fault, not just give our 'best guesses'. We know a fault happened, therefore we must find a way to duplicate it. If we continued on this analysis, we'd likely have a couple of test ideas to begin testing, we'd look at the data for all of the affected persons and see just what is it that happened. Is the over payment of salaries here the problem, or is it a side effect of some other hidden flaw that just became visible due to some quality of the instance that we are examining? Fortunately, I did a bit more research and found another article on this on MSNBC's site. Now I will note that MSNBC's article is dated the sixteenth of September, and the other article earlier on the Second day of September, however, as I read I find another nugget that seems to confirm my suspicion.

"All the affected teachers had previously worked at Dixon Elementary School and were reassigned to other schools after Dixon closed two years ago."

So it appears that this bug affected teachers that had all been assigned to a school, that closed two years ago. (No doubt around the time of the glitch actually occurring.) Would you call this random? No I see a pattern, so it doesn't hold on the first definition. The Second definition doesn't hold up to the story at this point either, as given a sampling so large, would you really expect to find just a handful of salaries that are wrong? I don't buy that either. The third definition doesn't apply in this context, which leaves us with the remaining informal definition: simply that it was odd or unpredictable

This fact I do not doubt, no one predicted this to happen. Now I'm not writing this to criticize the vendor or the county in question where this happened. That's not the point of this article. Instead, my hope is to make you think. As a tester, developer, user, consumer of computing appliances, how often do we encounter behavior that surprises us? How often do we not only get surprised but feel the event to be unpredictable, with no reason it should be happening?

I imagine this happens more than we might like to admit. How many times do we sit at our computers, doing something normal. We're checking our email in our client of choice, we have had no problems with our service and expect to get a no messages found if the service has none waiting for us. We hit the send/receive button, and wait gleefully hoping to find/not find email. Then we get a message that it was unable to connect to the server. That catches us by surprise, maybe we think its an aberration, so we click the button again.

That second click does what? It allows us to check to see if it was a hiccup, a momentary failure, or perhaps a sign of a long term issue. I've had this happen from time to time on web pages I may visit frequently. A forum for a football team may load very fast during the week, but on game day as people are checking up on their team, it slows to a crawl, and a dependency like a style sheet, or images fails to download due to the sudden hit to bandwidth serving the multitude of requests at one time. It might even take minutes before you get that white page with some structure, and no formatting. Do we immediately think, wow that's random, this forum is really bugged? But I know from experience, this isn't a fault of the software itself, at least as far as I can tell, but instead it is a function of a high load on a system that may not be able to keep up with a sudden increase in demand.

As testers, simply finding and reporting bugs is wholly insufficient to communicate to the developer the nature and scope of the fault we've encountered. In the case of the forum software, a subsequent refresh might fix the page, and it may load fine for several hours thereafter, unable to have the issue reproduced. Whatever the issue is, we must dig, and see if we can prune down the steps that we followed. We can try to see if the bug happens if we hit another location, try a different path through the software, or perhaps try a different role or persona. The point here is it is our job as testers to imagine how this bug could have occurred. What would your tester instincts tell you to go to prove and find this error so it could be fixed? Do you have the answer?

Hold that thought, because I am going to revisit this question later in the week. For now, just remember that just because we can't see the pattern for a bug, doesn't mean there isn't one, and as testers in particular, our use of language should be careful so as to not mislead the public, our developers, our clients, or our managers.

Diary of a Soccer Coach: Week 3 and First Game!

2011-09-20T22:37:00.000-04:00

I'm a bit behind on blogging due to duties last week, but I'll catch up by throwing the third week of practice alongside the first game. In our league the third week of practice heralds two things, first the last practice before our first game, and the arrival of our team rosters and uniforms. On this particular day, the 'head coach' of the league, who has been helping out with our Kindergartners had to distribute the uniforms to all the different divisions. This left me alone to do a lot of work with the kids on my own.

This worked out fine, and as I always try to keep the kids moving it worked out great. The Third practice is where we honed in on basic shooting skills. For most introductory soccer players, the more advanced steps are not always easy to pass on. At this practice I focused in on keeping their eye on the ball and following through as they shot. Also, as with most practices I got and kept them moving as much as possible.

I started by having them stand next to the ball and shoot it stationary. After each player had tried this a few times, I had them try shooting the ball by first running up on the ball and then kicking it into the goal. Afterwards, I made it more difficult by having the players dribble the ball and then kick it into the goal.

On many development projects I've seen a similar step by step building up to completion. A feature might start out very simplistic, or it may seem that way so we start by taking our first shot at it, just as my players might in their third practice. Sometimes we may not understand some of the nuance to a requirement. It may appear simple, just like striking that ball, but there are intricacies and un revealed flavoring that needs added for the code to really pull off what is intended. So as a team maybe you work up to these features, adding a little more speed, a bit more control, and higher accuracy in its calculations.

I've found similar patterns in testing. The first time through, you may just be poking around in an exploration of the application under test. You may not have a full grasp of the features, how to activate or use them, or the intent, but you build a bit of confidence and then take another test run at the software. Then you might discover that this type of software is documented to have a particular susceptibility to one kind of fault, and begin tailoring your exploratory testing to hit those weaknesses.

The first game of a soccer season is always exciting. Its the first time the kids are in their new uniforms, and you just never know how much the kids have absorbed from the limited practices you've had thus far. Each year is a little bit different. One year, one team may have a very good grasp of the game and create a lot of goals in that first game. Others might find it difficult to juggle defending the approaching ball, redirecting it to the goal they are attacking, or they may even get a little winded as they aren't used to moving so much at one time.

The first year I coached, an older coach told me, "You'll see the most improvement between the Second and Third games." I wasn't so sure how to take that, but later I realized what he meant. Suffice it to say, many kids may not listen early in the practice. Until they see how they can apply it in a game situation, they just may not realize the advice you are giving them. I've seen this happen on development teams too. A tester might make a suggestion about how to improve a process or function within the application, and might be ignored, because its simply not their job, or because the developer is too much ' in the zone' to stop and see what is being said. There might even be, as is common in our first game of soccer, a lot of stops and starts as you build to a sustainable pace for development.

Bottom line though, remember it's just the first game. A lot can change over the course of time on a project. Change is inevitable in many projects, and how we handle and respond to it sets a strong light on our teams and how we cope with that change.

Nature Vs Nurture: Do we train the tester out of our Kids?

2011-09-12T21:59:00.000-04:00

While working through a serious of tests on our automation framework today, a thought came to my mind. Do we train our kids to lose the very attributes that could make them a great tester? Do we risk killing their curiosity, or train them to accept what is told, because that's how our schools are run? Psychologists and scientists have argued nature versus nurture for a long time now, but I never really framed it in this way before.

We have two young children, and I've had the privilege of watching my first born grow into a smart young boy. Now our almost two year old daughter is starting to pass 'little milestones' hand over fist. I remarked to my wife today that she looked like she had grown three inches since breakfast. Then later this evening while putting her to bed, my eyes did another visual inspection of her height; this time against something I knew was constant: The height of the bed rail for her baby crib.

Earlier this week, we had to take down the pack and play yard because she had discovered a way to easily climb out of it. Plus we knew she had grown to a size that had become too big for it anyways. So we knew she was getting bigger, growing as all kids inevitably do. Then tonight was the kicker, I saw her gymnast style on an uneven parallel bars nearly pick herself up to climb over her crib's bed rail. Then switching to a new tactic, she climbed up one of the spindles of the crib, one side of one foot on one side, and the other on the opposite. She was climbing as I've imagined or seen climbers on TV working an ascent on many a wall faces of a mountain, before slinging her leg over the rail, just as I reached out and caught her in shock and awe of all I have seen.

I love my little girl, she's been a blessing even when she was born and admitted to the Neo-natal Intensive Care Unit (NICU), but she continues to amaze me. Born a couple of weeks early, you'd never know it to look at her now. She's a runner, a climber, a ball player, and a wrestler. Not to mention she sometimes likes to practice tackling her much bigger brother from behind. She's my little explorer, my future Venture Girl, and I wouldn't trade that for the world. Both of my children are special, and highly intelligent, but lately as I grow as a tester and parent to her and to him, my mind ponders how best to raise her.

The natural inclination of a parent is to want to protect, and keep their little ones safe from as many dangers as possible. Yet we as parents know the perception of our provided security is is not complete, as much as we may want, we cannot protect them from every possible hurt or injury. Just as testers realize that many of the security features we test, provide only a facade of protection, in this current day and age.

The process of rearing children has me pondering this fact. Parents set up rules for their kids behavior and activities in and around their home. Some of these rules may seem unnecessary or excessive at times, but they provide a structure, a framework around which they can begin their learning experience. Then later, if you follow the public model, they go off to school, or other extra curricular activities that provide additional rules, and layers of precepts that try to mold the child into a particular form.

Sometimes I wonder, just what are we trying to achieve? Are we stifling creativity by requiring them to paint within the lines? Are we killing their spirit by requiring them to sit like mindless zombie automatons. As I've watched my children in recent days I'm amazed at how many times they look fresh at some toy or item in our house, and find another unique way to interact or play with it. Many times this is fine and worth encouraging, other times it could be something they are doing is unsafe. Our urge is to jump, rescue, and shield them from this dangerous situation, but are we doing more harm than good?

I wonder. More with our younger child than our oldest, I hope to hone and focus that curiosity. I'm very cautious about how I deal with her when in the course of exploring she is doing something that could bring harm to her. It's like walking a tight rope though. I want to encourage the curiosity, embrace the questions, and the goofy ideas that may come. I want to give her the freedom to learn without constraining her to the factory school of thought.

We opted to keep our son home for his first year. Everything we'd read about child psychology suggested that boys may do better if not thrown into the structured environment of elementary school. Three years later we are still home schooling. What started off as an experiment to provide him room to grow paid high dividends. He has grown as he has learned, and it amazes me how much he can learn in a short span of time. Seeing his progress makes me sad at times, because I know that we may cover as much if not more than what a single day of school might cover, and yet he absorbs ever more. Heck this kid in second grade was upset that we hadn't taught him multiplication tables yet.

Our youngest isn't yet of schooling age, but I already see her reaching out and testing the boundaries the environment provides. Some of them are provided by us her parents, and some of them are a structure of nature and design of the furniture, or artifacts in our home. Yet I'm more cognizant of the decisions we make to correct, or alert her to dangers in her environment. If you're reading this entry and pondering the same things, I'm curious as to your perspective. Does our rule, and school structure result in breeding out the curiosity, the intellectual spark that may draw a child to be a creator or investigator of the world around them?

If like me, you have thought about this, and come to the conclusion that these factors do affect the development of the mind of a potential tester. Do they affect them for the worse, or the better? How can we improve them to harness that curiosity and prepare people to test the applications and services of tomorrow? I don't have the answer to these questions, but I may continue to ponder them for some time.

Off on the trail of testing, but wait, I forgot this one thing

2011-09-09T21:58:00.000-04:00

How many times in life, do we surrender to the habitual nature of our human psyche? Do we capitulate and allow what seems to be an established routine, repetitive task, and in our minds we've got it down to an art, so why just flip a button, and cruise on through each step of the process, without giving much time to pause between steps to evaluate where we are going?

News flash, tester or not, we all do this! In fact, I did it twice today, without even realizing it. Oh I wasn't 'testing' software at the time, but I allowed my inferred conviction of my own understanding of the early day's chores to not only lull me into a state of numbness, but introduced my own sort of performance speed bump that wasted hours of my time.

What started out today, as an early morning jaunt to accomplish to simple chore, turned into an exercise to remind me why falling into the assumption and autopilot trap are so dangerous. It started simply enough, just two chores and then I'd be home for the rest of the day, became an afternoon of back tracking, acknowledging a flaw in my own understanding, correcting it, and then executing essentially the same process, but in a slightly varied way. It started with a trip to the court house.

I was rather pleased with myself, because I thought I could complete two tasks in one visit. I might have even boasted internally, that I was a genius to take care of these two tasks at the same time. The first task, was to renew my license registration, at the Sherrif's office to bring my license plate current, and get the sticker to indicate to any law enforcement officer that might be checking my progress, that yes, I had paid my taxes and fees, and was not violating the registration laws for operating a vehicle in our state.

The second task, is one that maybe no one else will have experienced, but it required a trip to the County Clerk's office. You see, as a member of our community at larger, I stepped up back in 2006 to serve the community as a Poll worker for a number of different election cycles within our county. I do this as a service, because to be honest, the rate they pay for thirteen hours of open poll service, almost two additional hours of setup and tear down, is not a pay rate I'd accept for any of the professional work I do. However, as a concerned member of my community, an Eagle Scout, and a person of faith, I value the integrity of elections, and believe that doing so is an important part in ensuring our elections are fair. In order to participate after being selected, I have to fill out, sign, and return a form to the clerk's office. It was this task that I desired to complete today, because I had delayed sending it in earlier, due to uncertainty with my current job situation, and did not want to commit if I felt in good conscience that I would not be able to serve.

Those were the first two tasks of the day. I stepped out the door with the letter in hand, and my registration as well, and drove to the court house. I was pleased because I found a parking meter open within an easy walk, exited my car, added some time to the meter, and off I went, and that's when the first error dawned on me. I had my insurance statement, the registration, and the signed form for the Clerk, but a nagging thing in the back of mind then came into focus. 'Does the Sheriff's office take check cards, for payment?' Why I didn't ask this question before I left for the court house is unknown, but it proved to be the pivotal question, because they in fact did not take it. I asked the Sheriff's Clerks whether they accepted it as a form of payment, knowing already in my mind that the answer was probably no, and received the confirmation that, no, they only accepted, cash, check, or potentially a money order. I didn't have any of those options on my person, and truthfully I don't usually carry a check book with me unless I know I need it.

Now after reflecting I realize I could have potentially, walked over to the post office, paid the fee for a money order and then did it that way, but I'd have no record, no good one in my register to verify when it was paid. So the first task of the day, I struck out. I went ahead down to the County Clerk's office, handed the form to one of the workers, asked if it was yes, (it was), and was happy that I had at least one task done. I would have to return home, find our only check book and return to complete the initial first part of the plan.

Have you as a tester ever started working through a problem, you jumped to some assumptions, maybe you feel they are good ideas about how it in theory should work in your own mind's eye, and proceed to work through the process of massaging through the interface. Ever stop at some point to realize, you know, I wonder what would happen if I had done something differently that previous step, only to find that hitting the back button on your browser really isn't a good way to check this new test idea? It happens to the best of us. Sometimes a test that would make more sense to apply first, isn't, and has to be run again at the start of another iteration through the process. That can seem frustrating, but it is part of the learning experience we go through as testers.

Well, this did not just happen to me once, it happened twice. See I was also looking for information about a repair on my car. I traveled to the mechanic's garage I have grown to trust, and proceeded to inquire about an estimate on how they might do it, how long it would take, and at what cost. Surprisingly, they told me they couldn't do this kind of repair. They had an idea of how the repair could be done, but there was something particular about my engine that required something that they lacked, something that did not give them confidence they could complete the repair in a timely fashion.

What a bummer that was. However, I countered with a question. "Okay, if you can't perform the repair, as I understand it, then is there another shop who you might recommend to perform this fix? I know its not a critical issue on my car, but I would like to get this fixed just as soon as humanly possible." They gave me a name of another shop, and I then asked, if they thought simply calling them would be enough to get an estimate. They didn't really know, but suggested that maybe that would work, and it would save myself some money on gas driving out there unnecessarily. I liked that idea, and returned home to eat lunch with my family.

After lunch, I began looking for the phone number of the shop, first in a few paper phone books, then turned to google, and superpages, but could not find it. I found other shops, but not this one. So later this afternoon, I hopped in my car, and drove out to where the shop was (having received directions earlier). In hindsight, I wish I had pressed for a contact number before I left the first shop, but I honestly didn't believe that finding it would be that much of a hassle. That was my mistake, and yet another lesson learned.

Ever start testing a piece of software, and then at some point just stop because a question comes to the forefront, that you almost feel, man I wish I had asked that before I started? Sure, it happens, maybe more often than we like. We are creatures that learn and grow, and as Testers, we are many times going to develop ruts and habits. Try to break those habits from time to time, maybe you'll discover a new way to flex the software, to bend and contort it to find a brand new class of defects.

Ultimately, we must try our best to avoid jumping to assumptions. Never assume you already know the answer, if you've never even asked the question. Never assume that the developer obviously must have done something a particular way if you've never had a conversation about it, and never assume that you've brought and used the right tool for a type of test. Now this does not mean that we can never make assumptions, if we do, we need to realize that our testing is based on certain assumptions, maybe its a platform they are running on, or a particular style of device, that may be an educated enough of a guess to allow us to proceed, but we should remember that they are fallible assumptions, and present that as part of our test story when the time comes.

However, today's experience reminds me of something from earlier in my life. It's funny in a way, since college, my first rule of life has always been to avoid making assumptions. This was even before I considered, or even had a clue at all what it meant to test anything. Western's Rule #1: "Assume nothing, for when you assume, you are usually wrong!" At least that's how I wrote it as a freshman in college. Today I'd transform that rule to read more like this. "Make no assumption absent evidence, for assumptions are often based on illusions, that when that illusion is removed or proven false this can result in a great embarrassment to you in life." Honestly, it isn't that our assumptions are wrong, or that they might be based on inaccurate intelligence of the situation in our projects, it's the false confidence, it can breed, and the blindness it can bestow that limits our ability to test accurately and effectively that are the risk. It's the shock and awe that an illusion the team may have held as true, once removed can cloud judgment on the value in the product.

To conclude, monitor yourself as you test from day to day. Check to see if you feel yourself itching to turn on the autopilot. Recognize it, take a step back, and find another way forward. Use the pomodoro technique (Thank you Markus Gärtner), or some other focusing/de-focusing heuristic. Be skeptical of even your own best ideas relating to testing, and always strive for one more thing to learn as you flex your testing muscles. Try testing with a partner (Pair testing), so that you can keep each other from falling into a rut, or team with a developer and show him what you are doing to test the software. Whatever it is you use to affect how you keep from falling into an zombie like coma while testing, do it as often as necessary, you'll thank yourself later.

Oh that Bug? Yeah it happens all the time, don't worry about it.

2011-09-08T00:58:00.000-04:00

Tell me if you've heard this one before. A User calls into a help desk saying, hey when I go to do X with my software, instead of doing X, something else totally unexpected happens? And at some time in the past a root cause analysis is done on this, and they discover what has happened. The user has done something to the software, perhaps they've configured some optional setting that isn't a part of the normal settings, or maybe an incompatibility with another piece of hardware or software results in it being unable to perform the problem.

Normally you would expect the team to find, and smash this bug, and fix the defect right? Well what if that wasn't what they wanted? Or what if it was a feature they wanted to leave as it was. Maybe its a link to some documentation that moved on a website. It might be easy to fix, but getting a patch might be more expensive than simply telling the user another way to get that data? This situation comes to mind as I viewed today's Wizard of Id Comic:

If you've been on any software team long enough, odds are you'll eventually come across a defect or bug that you see as a potential loss of value in the product. After discussion with the team, that bug may be marked as deferred, or left as designed by the developer, and not handled as it is slowly forgotten in the code base. There are times when cosmetic changes, a font size, a color, may not make much difference to the overall user experience, but what if this deferred bug turns out to be something more, more insidious? What if it could be the bug that begins to build to a buffer overflow vulnerability that could result in your system being compromised and hacked?

As testers, its important that we maintain objectivity as we are testing. Sometimes, the development team may not all see eye to eye on what is of value to change for the customer, but we must be every cautious when a somewhat mundane bug is deferred. Deferred bugs may never get fixed, and as they get left in their unfixed state. Sometimes this may be fine, and something we have to accept as we strive to produce the most value for our clients, but we must always be careful that the thing we are putting off could be something serious that could put our customer, our client data, or even our own companies at serious risk.

Diary of a Soccer Coach: Week 2 - Inter-team Communication, Noise, and Dealing with the Unexpected

2011-09-07T20:22:00.000-04:00

Even before I woke up the day of our first Soccer practice I found myself glued to the weather channel. After seeing the massive thunderstorm and rainfall affecting so many College Football games during the past weekend, and knowing that the remnants of Tropical Storm Lee were predicted to stall out and take time to clear out I was growing in concern. Some of the weather maps predicted as many as five inches or more of rain locally. Flash Flood Watches had been issued by the National Weather Service, and there appeared a high probability of rain in the forecast for our game.

Now normally, a little rainfall would not have introduced a bit of concern about whether to have our Soccer practice or not. Typically the only thing that has ever affected that was thunder storms, or extreme bitter wind chill conditions. In truth only once in the three previous years I have coached has any of these conditions even been approached. So naturally I was a little concerned here. The place where we practice is in a low lying area, that lies in a flood plain area that has flooded in recent memory. Because of this it was important to know what the weather conditions might be for the weeks practice.

As it happened though, by mid day the rain had mostly moved on, and though still overcast, the rain was gone, and it was modestly cooler, although humidity was still high for our practice. In software teams, how often do we plan for contingencies like these that could disrupt development, or delay deployment? Sometimes the unexpected may happen. A freak ice storm could knock out power to your data center. A Nor'easter could barrel up the coast and cause localized flooding around the facility you were supposed to test remotely against. What if the shipment carrying a key part for your data center crashes forcing you to wait an additional two weeks for a customized component to be fabricated?

These are natural impediments that could affect your development process. As a Tester, a network issue could deprive you of the ability to test on your virtual laboratory. It could result in a mistaken deployment that results in a dirty configuration unlike the clean environment you are expecting and then it can cause problems as you start encountering bugs, and half to track them down. There are perhaps a hundred or more situations that could result in what I call a noise condition within the team. Some of them are internal, within the mind of the tester or team member, some of them are virtual, on the box or serve where testing is to occur, and some could be physical or natural noise that can interfere with your ability to test effectively.

Some of these impediments can be considered in your deployment process, and perhaps avoided or at least minimize the effect it has upon your testing. However even the most rigorously documented process is only as good as the people implementing it. As we are human beings, and prone to make errors, you can never avoid all of these. A missed deployment to a test environment could indicate a whole or missed script in the deployment process. Why did this script get missed? The manager may ask this question, but I find the same thing can happen in the soccer field as well.

For the second week of Soccer, I like to hone in on two key skills. The first is communication. Whether the players realize it or not, learning to talk to their team mates on the field make a big difference in how they will play down the line. For Soccer the simplest form of conversation is the pass. A simple plant of the off foot toward the targeted team mate, and then following through with the passing foot, ankle locked to connect with the center of the ball right about the inside of the ball of the foot. If done right, the ball will travel straight and follow the same line of travel that your foot was pointing. I demonstrate this once or twice to our players, who I've saved the trouble of having to find a team mate to pass to, by pairing them up, and have them start with this basic pass.

So I watch the players as they work on their first few passes. Some kids pick this up very quickly, some quickly get frustrated. Younger, smaller kids may not be able to kick the ball as far or hard, or might be more focused on kicking the ball, than the technique of the inside pass. I watch for moments like these, and let the player try a few times before stepping into correct them. Sometimes they figure it out by trial and error, but sometimes they keep doing it the same incorrect way, and I can see it could cause a bad habit to form.

At this point as the coach, I step in. I remind the kids to plant their foot toe pointing towards their team mate, to lock the ankle with their toe slightly raised towards their shin and connect with a straight swing of their foot connecting just above the mid point of the ball with the ball of their foot. A couple more passes, and a little more encouragement may be required. Keep your eye on the ball (once they get the skill down this may not be as important, but early in the drill process a it may help if the player sees as the perform the task.) After a few more times if one or another player are having difficulty, then I may step in and demonstrate again, showing what to do, and then emphasizing the difference in how I performed the pass versus how they are doing it.

One of the common early problems I notice is a player trying to kick the ball with the toe of their shoe. Kids seem to think they can get more power passing this way, but it really leads to an unpredictable movement of the ball, especially for the younger inexperienced player. This isn't something you want the kids to do early in their development. The toe is a very small area on the foot, and many shoes are 'V' or 'U' shaped meaning that if you miss the exact center of the ball and shoe you may hit it more to the right or left and the ball will go out in the corresponding direction. I may even have to demonstrate how wrong this is, so the kids can see the difference, but after doing so I get them doing the passing correctly, back and forth, and may float between pairs, repeating this process as need be.

As more of the players seem to get a hang of this simple pass, I will then offer them the option to try the same style of pass with their normal off foot (typically the left), and then give them a demonstration of a more advanced pass. This time using the outside of the foot just behind the joint of the littlest toe and driving the foot to the side, you can actually pass to the side. All the while I continue stressing, getting the team mates attention, pointing the foot in the proper direction and following through on the kick.

This may seem like a very repetitive and boring process, and for some of the older kids it might. It doesn't take but a few minutes before I begin to see the first side effects of noise on the practice field. There are other things to get the kids attention. Someone brought their dog with them, a butterfly might fly onto the field drawing attention from the drill. Kids on another field might be doing a slightly different drill and that catches the kids attention. We have the same kinds of noise in our software teams as we communicate.

A HVAC unit could be louder than normal, a team member may be mulling over some problem they've encountered as we're describing a test we just ran, and the flaw we think it uncovered. Whatever the noise may be, that noise can impede our ability to communicate effectively the point we are trying to make. So how can we avoid noise? Sometimes it may involve asking another team, that is goofing off in the cube next to you, to keep it down as their voices are starting to carry. Maybe it involves interrupting another conversation that has your team mates attention, when what you need to say is more vital. Sometimes we have to wait for the noise to pass, such as when a train goes by blaring its horn and drowning out almost everything else you might hear. Assuring we can communicate our message is key in any context.

Now these example are good if it is an audible noise, what if it is an internal noise? This is where noticing nonverbal cues is important. If your team mate is listening, but focused on reading something on a wall, or their computer screen, it may indicate their attention or focus is elsewhere, that could be internal noise. Another example, is if someone has a habit of doing something with their hands. It could be something as simple as scratching the back of their hand, playing with a toy of some kind, or twirling of a pen in their fingers. All of these are nonverbal cues that your team mate try as they might, may not be committed to the conversation.

So how can we avoid these things? In soccer, when passing I encourage my player to start the passing conversation by calling their team mates name. Then as the ability to pass becomes second nature I instruct them to keep their eyes ahead of them towards where they are passing the ball. The other player, I instruct to keep their eye looking back towards the ball as often as they can while moving around the field, so they are prepared to receive and complete that transmission of the ball across the grass of the field to their feet. Ever wonder why eye contact is often stressed in verbal communication situations? If our eyes are turned away from the team mate who is trying to communicate with us, then also our ears may be turned away and reduce the optimal ability to hear what they are saying. That is not to say that we should stare a hole into the head of the team mate we are trying to communicate with, but we should make enough eye contact to show that we value what they have to say.

What do you do when your comrade's attention is wandering, or they are busy multitasking and can't seem to keep up with the conversation? Ever been in a meeting, in person or virtual were someone is being told something and then the speaker follows with what should be a typical yes response question? "Does that make sense, John?" The initial reaction may be for the person to say Yes, but what if their attention had drifted, they might realize they didn't fully absorb the importance of what was being translated to them, and the cue, is John's chance to say, "No, I was having trouble following what you are saying, can you please repeat that?" During any conversation we can show our continued attention, not just by eye contact by other nonverbal and verbal cues. Nodding of our head, a quiet yeah, or aha can indicate we are following the chain of the conversation well.

There is one more nonverbal cue I look for when talking with a team mate. That's when their hands come up to their mouth. You've probably seen someone at some point do this. You mention something, and they may begin to cover their mouth with one or more fingers, indicating subconsciously that they are trying to parse together a question or response to what is said, but those fingers indicate that a lot of thinking is going on. This is a telltale stop sign. If you see a team mate do this, then it is highly likely that they have a different point of view, or something to contribute to the conversation. There are other mannerisms that can indicate this desire to contribute back to a conversation. Someone looks like they are trying to reach out and give you a subtle stop sign, is another.

There are so many things we may communicate through nonverbal cues. How often do we ignore these cues and keep on rambling through our point, wanting to reach its conclusion without allowing our colleagues to collaborate and fully commit to the conversation? Regardless of your place on the team, be it a tester, developer, manager, or team player. Communication is critical. Without it, the noise may increase, and the ball we are trying to pass to our team mate may end up in the wrong cue, or intercepted by the competition and then we are back tracking trying to recover, and catch back up to what we've lost.

So as you go back to your work spaces, consider these thoughts: Where in your environment does audible noise interfere with communication? What can you do to work around it? What can you do to react better to the nonverbal cues of your colleagues? How can you make sure they are able to contribute to the conversation, and thus collaborate towards a better end?

Diary of a Soccer Coach: Week 1 - Getting the Players Attention

2011-08-30T23:44:00.001-04:00

As I enter my fourth season as a Soccer coach, I can't help but reflect back on the previous three years. There have been a lot of kids I've had the opportunity to work with. The prior three years I coached the 'instructional division' as it was first called to me. In essence I've had the honor of coaching up kids ranging from Pre-K through Kindergarten age. I've coached the same level for three years now, and again this year I am stepping up to do the same.

In some ways its hard to be a coach to the youngest in the league. Some of them are already quite athletic, but lacking in coordination, some are squeamish about falling down, or running into someone else. Some don't quite know what to expect from this their first athletic endeavor. It isn't always easy on the coach either. Sometimes we just barely get a season to get to know the kids before they begin to bloom and are ready to play up to the next level. Some only get the one year, then are moved up with the other kids their age. In essence each season is like starting over fresh. There are always a few faces you remember from the previous years, and you may recognize the growing boys and girls practicing on a field not too far from your own teams, but your focus is now on the next group.

For companies like my current employer, where professionals might work on multiple projects, or bounce between roles and wear different hats within or between teams as the needs become evident, to a team leader, it can seem quite a challenge to start from scratch with a team. It can also be a challenge to get the new people involved and fully engaged and invested in the project.

For the first session of the Soccer season as with any team, it is imperative to set the ground right. The first practice always starts with a quick introduction and brief overview of the most basic rules of soccer. Then we quickly transition into a couple of warm up exercises. They aren't typically long exercises, but are designed to get the players moving, loosened up, and in the mind of being at practice. Warm-up exercises could be great for team building, or for helping to transition a new team member into being part of the esprit de corps. Having transitioned to several projects in my career, I feel that many of these warm up exercises did a lot to help smooth my transition into the team.

Of course, practice does not end with these warm-ups, nor should it be the end of the team building process either. As Michael Larsen (@MKLTesthead) so eloquently put in describing the stages of team development in his emerging topics talk on teams and the EDGE method employed by the Boy Scouts of America - The team is still forming, here, it hasn't even begun to play soccer, nor has the new team or hire really progressed to a state of being fully in tune with the team's software development process.

So the next step of practice, is the first of many drills. For soccer in the introductory division, the most basic of drills typically involves dribbling, around a pair or square of cones, emphasizing technique for controlling the motion, the tempo of the dribble. For software teams, tempo, and pace are something that teams struggle to achieve, and hold once they have it. The same is true for Soccer, and our instructional division is no different. The secret you see to these kids, and I'm betting many other youth organizations, is to keep the meeting or practice as active as possible.

So we run them through a drill for five, maybe ten minutes, and then may start another. This gets the players used to moving around, and focusing on one type of task or another. However, at some point the kids need a break, so we give them a bit of time to run to the restroom, and get a drink before having our mid practice huddle. More on these huddles in a later entry, but suffice it to say, the kids almost without fail come back refreshed, and ready to do more, but it is still the First practice, and i its important to temper our expectations with that in mind.

With software teams, the same is true. Each member needs down time to assimilate lessons learned, to rest from exertion of the mind, and for testers, to de-focus or refocus on whatever the next task may be. Without this crucial down time, tasking begins to run right into the other so quickly that one may begin to lose sight of where one testing objective ends and the next begins. It also presents a danger, because as creatures of habit establishing routines that are unhealthy will inadvertently result in inattention blindness, and as tempo and feel for how the project flows is learned, the risk increases that things move at a certain pace simply because they've always moved at that pace, whether the process or project are really at a achieving and sustainin velocity or not.

For my players in their first practice of the season, I see them in the scrimmage we typically run at the end of each practice. They chase the ball without any rhyme or reason, with out any strategy or objectivity. They believe the goal is to get the ball, and that to do that they must run to the ball. There's just one problem. someone else has that ball, and is accelerating in a different direction. so each player changes their angle to try and chase the dribbler down often from behind.

At times it can look like a swarm of honey bees, buzzing to one corner of the field, then changing course and quickly buzzing to another all around and trying to catch the ball each time, and inevitably these kids will trip, fall, or bump into another. We haven't yet taught these kids how to move laterally, or even backwards when necessary, nor have we shown them the strategy of picking a place between where the ball might go to cut it off, rather than trying to chase it as if chained to the player with the ball like a rail car. Inevitably the first practice always looks like this. The older kids may not run into this scenario, as many have years of soccer under them by the time the season has started again, but for these new boots to the field of play, or to their team in the software world, they're a blank slate practically and in need of mentoring and guidance.

The question you have to ask, is how can I influence them for the better, and help them see their role as more than just chasing the ball, as chasing this bug or that bug, when they may be leaving square feet of the field uncovered that could give them an advantage? For me, it is important to remember that this is the beginning of a long journey we take together, and for better or worse we are here as part of a team striving to create that which our client needs. However, even us experienced software professionals can occasionally trip over someone else's toes and fall flat if we aren't careful. So trod carefully in those first days on a team, until you have a good picture of the terrain you must climb.

Today, I Choose Yellow

2011-08-29T22:27:00.001-04:00

Sometimes the smallest things can be inspiration for test ideas. Sometimes they make you sit back and pause and consider. After enjoying a nice lunch with my family, my wife presented me with a colored page of Dora the Explorer, with my daughter's name and the date on it. I took it to work and proudly displayed it on part of my cube wall. I examined the picture and considered how she had gone to work coloring it. Now she's not even two years old yet, so staying within the lines is not something I'd expect from a soon to be two year old.

However, two things jumped out at me. For this page she had chosen a single color: Yellow. It wasn't any particularly stark or bright shade of yellow, just a plain almost mustard color. So then I began to think, why Yellow? Dora isn't blonde, she has brown hair. Her shirt is usually pink, and she wears orange pants. Her backpack is a shade of magenta or a light lavender. So there isn't a lot of Yellow there to work with as inspiration as far as I could tell.

So when I ponder why she selected those colors, as a Tester, the initial thought was that she had a reason for choosing that color. I wasn't present when the picture was colored, but when I think back to the beginning, of other pictures she has colored, then the reason becomes clear. My little one you see, isn't logical yet, her mind not quite fully developed. She's bright and smart, charming even in her own way, but she's not even two yet. More than likely she chose the color yellow because that was the first crayon her hands came around, and then, instead of changing colors for different parts of the picture, she continued until her mind felt she had colored as much as she dared too, and then moved onto something else.

How many of us as testers and software professionals do that? How easily do we grab a hold of an emotion or an idea in any particular day and then view and work the entire day as if through that color whatever hue it may be? Does that emotion and idea affect everything we do that day? Do we let it bleed into our code, our testing, or our conversations with others? When they look at you that morning, will they see the color yellow?

I learned from a book "Anger is a choice", that many emotions, anger in particular, are neither negative or positive. It is how we react when those emotions come up that determines how we are viewed. How many of us as Test or Software Professionals have encountered something, maybe it was minor at some point and we let it go, but it nagged at us. As much as we tried to ignore, or deny this one thing, there it was the color of red, that our mind didn't want to ignore. At some point, do we then find our focus so deeply on the color that we begin to see everything as if it was tinted that shade?

There's a danger here for Testers. When our reaction and emotional make up begins to bleed through into our work, into our analysis and observation of systems under test, there is the possibility that it could lead us astray. It could cause us to miss something that we'd see if our attention were not partially focused somewhere else. It could cause us to react reflexively to something someone said that was intended in all good fun, or perhaps to help us with something with which we are grappling.

It's important I think to remember that Testers, like the clients for which we test software, are emotional beings as well. Maybe our clients will see red when this one really annoying malformed feature crops up again and again. Maybe they've ignored it thirty times through the application, then one day, when their emotional system is already spent from something that happened on the way to the office, or at home, and bang that one annoyance becomes the lit fuse that sets them off. Ever know any people like that? Ever had a client like that?

Now let's turn this on its head. Maybe there's some issue, some flaw, that the team doesn't really classify as a fault in the software, some piece by which something is not as correct as it could be, but in your mind you, or the team in general have decided that's not important. It's a minor, non-critical issue, and why would a user care if the time and date are displayed in YYYY:MM:DD form vs DD:MM:YYYY form? Maybe on a normal day they won't, but do we ever consider how emotion on the part of the client, may play to what bugs they see as critical or important?

Furthermore, do we as Testers always try to enter into our testing sessions with as blank an emotional slate as possible? Do we try to be like the Vulcan's of Star Trek utterly devoid of emotion, and creatures of pure logic for the duration of the test run? If so, why do we do this? Do we think a user will view the software with such a dispassionate view of how it works?

If, like me, you have ever had the chance to work the support lines for a company, then you know what I mean when I say that the customer has a personal way of dealing with his or her own emotions. They may be struggling to get the software to perform, maybe they've had training and have used it successfully in the past, but one little nook, one little detail escapes them as they are partially distracted by some emotional atrocity they have endured this week.

Michael Bolton, no not the singer, or guy from office space, gave a keynote talk at the 2011 Conference for Association of Software Testing. Michael talked at length about the history of testing, and at one point described how decisions on quality are "both political and emotional." Another tester there, Michael Hunter (@humbugreality) in one of the emerging topics or lightning talks also talked about the 'emotional tester'. I was able to follow some of these talks online, and I can't give enough kudos to the organizers of CAST and the hard working volunteers that worked to have those talks and the keynotes available online for those of us who were unable to attend.

How much role does emotion really play in our craft? Do we allow it to simply be, to drive our assessment, to harness, or control it? Do we inject it intentionally to see how it may color our opinion of an interface, or to see how our perception changes when our mood has changed? Those are questions I'll probably ponder for a while. It's funny how something as simple as a colored picture of a cartoon character by my youngest child could bring me back to contemplate these ideas in testing, but then maybe these ideas have been buzzing in my head since I first heard them, just like the color yellow.

(Edit: Thanks to Justin Hunter (@hexawise) for remembering it was Michael Hunter who gave the emerging talk on "Emotional Testing""

So what's your priority?

2011-06-22T23:11:00.001-04:00

In the fast paced world of software development, sooner or later you or someone on your team will find a situation where they are faced with multiple tasks, and competing priorities. So what does a person do when an urgent list of changes to a software under development is received? Then what do you do when the expected time to deliver these features appears to be something rather aggressive?

Let's take a step back for a second to discuss the requirement process. Often requirements are not as detailed as necessary to begin to design or codify. Sometimes requirements may be in a list form, they may be rather obvious, but more likely they are obscure, cryptic, or down right confusing. Because of this, very often there is a necessary feedback loop between the team and the client just trying to make sure they understand the change, and the impact it may have on the system.

This back and forth, haggling over specifics, and gaining enough understanding to model the process necessary to be implemented can be very time consuming, and often the hardest part of the software process. Customers do not always have the computer knowledge to give sufficient feedback about what they write, and as a developer it is our jobs to not just verify that we are building the software correctly, but even more critical, we must validate that which are building actually meets the needs expressed in the requirements.

Often the understanding of a requirement will morph over time, but for simplicity's sake let's assume for a moment that the haggling over the requirements has already taken place. So your team is called into a rushed meeting to discuss a list of changes. The manager describes the ten items that need to be implemented, and expresses the hope that it can be done in a short amount of time. For sake of argument lets say its a week.

Immediately the issue of time and priority may come to the forefront. If there are ten changes to a system, ten changes that do not necessarily 'interact' with another or depend on another, then how do you prioritize them? Depending upon what model your process is based upon the answer could vary. It may be the Project Manager who sets these priorities, or in a more agile environment it could be the customer, or the person designated as the 'product owner' within the team.

So the team after a little debate comes to the decision, much as they might like to pick and choose which pieces to do in what order, they need one more layer of feedback about the requirements, what is the order of priority for these changes. Given that the team is taking some measure of risk trying to rush these ten features into the system in a week's time, they believe that this risk would be easier to stomach if they could impose some logical order to implement the features, so that if the time should prove insufficient, they could at least be sure to have the most critical features done and deployed.

So what do you think the response would be? Hopefully you'll get a list of points itemized from one to ten giving a clear order of development and importance to the customer. That would be the ideal, but what if the list comes back with six of the ten items listed as priority number one, and the other four as priority number two? I posed this question on Twitter.

I received a few different responses two of the more interesting ones were from Stephan (@S_2K) "Everything is most important. " Morgan Ahlström (@Morgsterious) replied with the understanding words "That noting is REALLY important." These were very much my same sentiments when I pondered this question. If someone cannot distinguish a hierarchy between two things, let alone ten things, how then can you know which items are of most importance and tackle those ares of the software first? Even if you have multiple team members, it is only natural that some components may still have higher precedence.

So what do you do when you have this sort of situation? My hope would be that enough time would exist to push back for further definition of the structure of the requirements. However, given that the customer might not be as eager to be asked the question a second time, or might not be as readily available, the team is then left to its own deductive skills to try and figure out the proper order to do them in. This is where knowing a bit about potential dependencies within the requirements could lend aid into determining an order of construction.

Nevertheless, it is still highly probable that there can be no clear prioritization gleamed from this answer. With time being ever more tight then the team is left to its wits, and knowledge of prior conversations to try and 'best guess' the order they should tackle the changes. In the end the team might complete all ten, or they might completely only a handful of the tasks. In the later situation, the customer might then push back and ask why they completed one task but not another. The team then can remember that it didn't get the accurate feedback it requested on prioritization, and could provide this as reasoning for the order they had chosen.

The customer might not like that sort of response, but sincerely in the absence of information, it becomes better to complete at least some of the work, even if you do not know how much, or what order it should be done in. This may not be an ideal solution, but it should be evident from this how important communication with the customer must be to ensure accurate building of the software and the timeliness and sequence of delivery.

Some thoughts about Version Control

2011-06-21T21:55:00.000-04:00

In my time as a software professional I have seen many systems for maintaining and tracking changes to code in progress. Whether this is the archaic and I hope no one ever really uses this on a real project practice of passing along zip files of changed code with comment mark-up to indicate where changes were made, or to full featured source control solutions, like subversion, team foundation server, or git, every project at some point or another will have to make a decision on how to handle these files.

I could spend time dealing with the importance of choosing any source control solution, but that's not what this post is about. Instead I'd like to take a moment to describe some of my experience with source control solutions.

In general there are two sorts of source control mechanisms, one is like that used with Microsoft's Team Foundation system (and before it Visual Source safe an incremental check out/check in system, and the other is a check out the code base, and commit/update to get/add the latest changes to the current working version. There are pluses and minuses to both schemes. The incremental check out/check in system really feels like a pull system. While you can download the latest tree from a base directory, to make changes, and have them be saved with out the IDE screaming about read only or protected files, you have to make a point to check out in essence pulling on TFS to make the file ready for editing. Team Foundation Server (TFS) allows you to do this in an exclusive mode, essentially locking out any other attempts to check out and change the file by other users, or a less prohibitive more shared lock.

I've only had the privilege of working on a single project with TFS thus far, and that project relies on the exclusive kind of check out system most of the time. This means that if a developer needs to make a small change to a file that you are working on, he will have to communicate that need to you, so that you can then do a hand shake of releasing the locked edit, so that the change can be checked in. It can be a real pain at times when you want to try a quick fix and the IDE prevents you at times from trying something simply because it's marked as 'read-only'. It provides a benefit in that it limits the number of files you might accidentally touch which can be a blessing at times. It also means that anyone trying to check in another fix may not be able to do so while it is held checked out, and as has happened to me a few times, sometimes files in a project may get checked out by the IDE automatically even if you did not intend it so.

The other form of version control management is the style for which Subversion has become known. It is in essence a more push style of architecture, where by, you can check out an entire source control tree (much like getting latest for any particular folder), and then have significant freedom to make changes, erase a file and refresh/revert it from the last commit, or even make a series of changes and check them in one after another. The draw back of this system, is that because anyone can edit, there is the possibility of files getting more and more out of sync from the base or trunk as it is called in subversion. This can present problems when during a commit a major conflict arises trying to reconcile differences between the two files. In my experience though, if used judiciously and kept up to date and committed as often as necessary, these conflicts can be minimized fairly easily. Subversion also has the bonus in that it is portable to other operating system types, and is not dependent on the windows/.Net stack as much to function.

There may be other tools that fit your needs better, Wiki's can be edited inline from a browser and keep good version tracking of each meta page, content management systems like Share Point can allow you to track updates to your requirements, contacts, or serve as a portal for storing key documentation for a production. Whichever tool your team chooses for source control, it is critical that your entire team is on board with its function, and regular use to help avoid major headaches between builds. The value of source control is manifest in how it allows teams to track branches of in progress development code, tag certain releases for easy comparison later, and giving a history with comments about the update and logs of the files that have changed. This logging function can be of great value when trying to track down how a particular strain of bad code may have made its way into your product.

Then some source control systems allow you to track the progress of development from requirement, to deployment. Team Foundation Server has these features out of the box, while open source tools like Subversion require other components, for example TRAC, to help track the progress of development. I hope that whatever your team chooses to use, that you will find the source control to be a great asset, that helps facilitate your development needs.

Some thoughts on the Programmer vs Tester Argument

2011-03-13T15:40:00.001-04:00

Shrini Kulkarni wrote an interesting blog about arguments related to the programmer vs tester who is better at testing and why (Programmers make Excellent Testers - Arguments and Counter Arguments). The idea comes up now and then in development circles, and whether you are a programmer, a developer, a manager, or a student of Software Development, sooner or later a question like this may enter the picture.

Shrini does a pretty good job of illustrating some of the reasons why at any given snap shot moment, why a programmer or tester may be better for a particular task of testing. I've hard some of these arguments before, and I find that the context of the situation, and sometimes the budget of the team often dictate just how much a programmer or tester is asked to do. One thing that I find interesting, is why things end up being the way they are. Each of us if you will may start off as a blank slate at birth, and we learn many, many different tasks. When we enter the Software field, we even at that point have different ideas, philosophies and hopes and dreams of what a life and career in software might be. Whether that is to be an Engineer, Programmer, Designer, Architect, Manager, Lead, Tester, each of us started off with an idea of what we might get from this rewarding field. How many of us though stay on the path we initially pointed our ships bow of learning and experiences towards? I'm not sure a survey could even give a good idea for why people choose one career path from another. People are as varied and individual as grains of sand or rocks on any given beach.

So when I reflect back on my career in the software profession. I can't help feel the irony to have basically come full circle, and reminded of at least one of Shrini's points. When I Started, all I wanted to do was write Code. I had aspirations of being a "Software Engineer" and thought I had a pretty good idea of what that entailed. Though I lacked experience I had not thought beyond that little view point. So when it came time to start my first professional job, it didn't take long before the ideal, and reality clashed.

Learning is often seen as climbing a pyramid between four points. Along one Axis is technology and the closer to it the more experienced with technology, particularly specific technological contexts represents your learning and experience. At the other end of that Axis is the Second point of our Pyramid, that of working with people. The closer you get to it, the better you work with people, but perhaps you end up spending more time with people then the technology.   Then off on the opposing axes would lie the other two points, in one direction is that of being more of a specialist. The closer to it, the better and more specialized you are in your context. You might call someone at that point an 'expert' of sorts, while at the other end is the generalist. They may be better at one thing than another, but their broad base of experience helps give them a larger context to evaluate their problem set.

As you move from the Technologist point of extreme towards the specialist you are really moving around the base of the Pyramid. Or if you move to generalize you may be moving back the other way along that face. However, since Computer and technological problems are inevitably people problems, noone stays on the base very long, they begin to grow upward, and toward being able to deal with people.

I recall being taught taught this 'myth' that programmers code, and testers test, and neither the twain shall meet. Thus fresh out of college there was this propensity among some of us, myself included to see testing as beneath them and not worth their time. This may have been vocalized by professors, or it may simply have been a matter that Testing was not a focal point of CS or Engineering coursework in college. The absence of a tester point of view from my Academic experience, clearly colored my early thinking about software.

I had a desire to crank out quality code, usable code, and I saw Software Engineering as a tool to get there. Just one problem. In the first shop I worked, Software Engineering principles were not necessarily being practiced. Even if they had been, I'm not convinced it would have solved the host of problems I encountered early in my time there. I came to realize very quickly that programming alone didn't insure the code was ready and met the customer expectations. Heck sometimes even other programmers don't meet other programmers expectations. Now almost 8 years later, I'm a full time tester, and now I see the other end of the equation, where some developers seem to see the majority of testing related tasks as 'not their job' or beneath their position or station.

I'm sure, I am not alone in seeing this, and I find it both sad, but in some ways understandable. After all in the technical realm you have generalists and you have specialists, to be good at one thing requires many hours of study and honing of that skill, often at the expense of others. Thinking back to that Pyramid, and admittedly, this is a very rough model or metaphor in need of tweaking and polishing, We may walk around a level of that Pyramid closer to one skill or another, We may move up it at an angle as we learn multiple skills practically at the same time, and sometimes we may move straight up.

I see the technical Specialists close on the face between the top of the Pyramid (the metaphorical pinnacle of learning success), and the Specialist and Technology points. The more specialized the developer, the closer to the specialist point they may be, and likely further up the pyramid to its zenith. For generalists, the same could be said between the Technology and generalist point to the peak.   The more a person pours into one technology or into technology in particular the less time they've spent gaining other experiences. So it should come as little surprise when a twenty or thirty year experienced developer who has poured his life into coding has gotten so far away from knowledge about testing as to see it as a foreign country.

Even among programmers there are generalists and specialists in particular ideas or platforms, and each type of developer brings their own unique viewpoint to the problem at hand. What does that have to do with testing? Well we have something a bit similar do we not? We have people who focus on particular schools of thought, we have people who pour everything into automation, or pour everything into exploratory style testing. We even have some who are trying to learn as much as they can from every category, not knowing what tool they'll need next.

Now Imagine that there were two more points, a high and a low along the Z Axis the top would be Programmer and the bottom Tester.   I can see from adding those points, and removing the metaphorical pinnacle and replacing it with a point for programming and testing. A person who is a good programmer and continues on that path, may learn at the expense of learning things related to testing. Just like a programmer who chooses to learn more about testing, will have less time to focus on the craft of programming.    Each of us then may move upward or downward toward being more programmer or tester. Forward or backward at being more involved in the technology vs the people, or more a specialist in one area vs a Generalist in others.

So when I look at the tree of development with Development as the grand daddy of all the other nodes, and programming, and testing each on separate branches, I can't help see that there are so many varieties of testers and developers out there. Making each of us unique, or different as our experienced build upon one another. The real question I think we should be asking, is where do we fit in these areas. Are we more technical or more people oriented? Are we more specialists or generalists? More programmer or more tester?

So who is better? I'm not sure the question matters. I think the context of program budgets, team size, and backgrounds often weigh into who does what, and as a team on a project we must each do what we feel we can do that will help the project effectively. Maybe that Senior level developer with twenty years experience would be wasting his time testing, its not his strength, or area of study, so a specialist tester would be better. However, I would hesitate to ever rule out a particular individual from testing or other development tasks simply because of lack of experience. The software profession, like so many is one where dedication to life long learning is paramount. So we should bear that in mind as we forge ahead, no matter which direction we point our bow of learning to on the next course we may set.

One question, many responses.

2011-02-05T19:37:00.000-05:00

I have been going through something of a transition phase in my life. The project I was on, has effectively run its course, and so the uncertainty of where I would end up next began to pop up. It has been a stressful time, and I know that there may be more stress in the future. Change seems to require quick study, a measure of patience, and the eagerness to take it by the horns and honk till the cows start moving.

As I have begun preparing for this next assignment, anticipating that Testing will once again be a primary role that I will fill, I began thinking of how I could be better prepared to meet my new project team, and how I can be ready to give an answer to some of the things that may come up as a direct result of statements I might make, statements that are greatly influenced by a large measure of reading, and collaborating with other Test Pros online, through the blog o sphere, or twitter. I find I am on edge, not in a bad way, but the Eagle Scout in me likes to be prepared.

Up till now, I've been something a lone gun tester, going where ever the current test ideas, or recent releases seem to point as areas of risk. Sure, the previous project I worked with a pair of testers, but so much of the work I was doing, was different than theirs, that in essence, I brought something unique to the table something that provided value for those teams. I want to continue to provide value on my next task. There will be a lot of new faces, new ideas, and new challenges to overcome, but I'm ready, and eager to mount up and go chasing over and after what lies at that horizon.

As I have been preparing myself mentally for this scenario, a thought occurred to me late last night. It was a thought that gave me pause. The thought was this:

If you as a tester on an existing project, were allowed only one question on your first day about the project, what question would you ask?

I regret that I had to hit the hay before I could see some of the fantastic responses from the twitterverse. Some of the responses were similar to the ideas ruminating in my own head. Reid Sheppard asked: "What's the URL to the SUT?" Lanette Creamer asked: "1 question to who? Very important to know."

Truthfully, Lanette's question was really asking for clarity to the context of the above question I asked. Since it was framed with out any context for where, or who was available to ask, it was very much an open ended question. I intended it to be a little open ended, but as I slept on it I realized something. Not only was it lacking in context, but it begged the question. For any given project X, how much might you as a tester know before officially being on the Team?

Every test effort begins a bit differently, but I imagine many of them where a new person is brought into an existing team (the specific context of which I was mulling), would begin by some kind of interview, or screening. Unless the tester and hiring authority had some familiarity with the particular tester they are hiring, The tester could be just as much an unknown to the hiring manager, as the hiring manager, the test team, and product under test is at the start for the newly hired tester.

I find myself coming into a team that to my understanding has already been through several bug/fix and release cycles. So to me, the context in this case actually includes a few things that are not clear in my statement. The Customer is an entity with which many people might have some experience, or at least preconceived notions regarding how this entity helps them leverage what their service provides.

Stepping back from the specific instance in my mind, to a more general case, which is really where this question began. How much does the average tester know about a project before going in? It might depend upon how their interview and contact with the team began. Maybe you know who the Customer is, but maybe that information is sensitive information that is only given once a person is a part of the team and agreed to sign on. Maybe, you do not even have an idea of the scope or mission of the subject under test before agreeing to act as a tester. Sure there may be cases were that information is available in that screening process, but if it isn't, that's context most testers would hope to grasp early in their testing role.

Others responded with questions about why the limit of only one question?

Ajay Balamurugadas asked: "How can I get information without getting restricted by number of questions? #there is a better question :)"

In fact, the limit of one was not meant in my formulation as a hard limit. My thought was what is the first, question, the first one you'd ask so you can begin pondering all the who's and whats, whens, wheres, whys and hows of testing the application. Perhaps I can give more idea why my thinking was 'limited' in this context.

When I first came on board here, I remember days of reading that I had to go through. Much of it wasn't even related to the tasks I would be doing day to day. time sheet training, ethics rules, benefit packages, taxes, I-9, so much paperwork. So for someone who is coming in brand new, to be a full part of a team as a tester, the thought occurs to me that they might spend most of their first hours doing a lot of untester things. So what if at the end of the day, you have an hour left, your tired from all of the tedious paperwork you've had to file, you've signed your life away with a non disclosure agreement, or perhaps signed a contract for term to serve. Whatever the case is, the thought was this:

What if in the span of that one remaining hour, in the process of being greeted by the team after you emerged from where HR had you sequestered, what if one of those team members, not a customer, probably not even the manager, it could be another tester, a developer, a business analyst, whoever it may be, what if they turned to you and asked that question, "Hey, we are glad to have you with us. Just ask us any question and we'll try to answer it." However, the new colleague, then adds that they only have a few minutes to spare before they will be leaving for the end of the day. It's possible you might only have enough time that first day for a single question to ask. There are so many questions you could ask, and maybe there would be time for more than one question, but depending on the answer you receive it could take up the rest of the time to complete. This was the frame of mind I was in when pondering this question.

In reality, that first question could be very important, or it could be just the first of a series of questions. That first question might be forgotten, and left in the dust bin never to be remembered. The thought would be not so much what is the one question you might ask, but rather what is the first question you would ask? Would it be the same question in a different context? Perhaps it would be different.

Truthfully this does not really matter, there are many questions that will need to be asked to successfully test any product. Some of these will be obvious, and some will have to be unearthed after peeling back a few layers of the onion. So I come back to Lanette's question, who is there to ask?

If it is a tester, perhaps you might ask what areas they've had difficulty testing? Or maybe you could ask them how the team documents the defects encountered. If it was a programmer, you might ask them where they think the code is weak, or as Lanette suggested: 'I like to ask developers, "What was the hardest part of X to design? What was the hardest to code so far? What worries you?' Sometimes the developer will know where their code is weak, or what areas were harder to code, or what areas they've had particular difficulty with. These kinds of questions would help to identify areas of risk.

In actuality, it may not matter what our first question might be, in fact the thing that sticks out to me is that the issue really shouldn't be what the first question is. The first question could have a myriad of answers, and in turn a number of counter, or clarifying questions could come up in the course of understanding that answer. I found this an interesting puzzle to consider. Just like I do not believe there is a such thing as 'best practices' in testing, there is testing that is good, and techniques, or approaches that are good in some contexts, but perhaps dangerous in others. So perhaps the best response would be to ask the developer or tester that has opened this door, to simply explain their experience while testing the product. As such an open ended question, the ideas that might be unearthed could be true gems that lead to effective testing down the road.

From the dark ages, to test automation

2010-12-03T11:15:00.005-05:00

Some days inspiration comes so thick that all your ideas begin to stick together in one melding like pancakes with butter, maple syrup, and strawberries. What follows is a second post, that begin inside my earlier posting: Where in the world are all the software testers? So if some ideas from that post are also found mixed in here, that is why, but I did my best to refactor my initially 2,500 some odd words from the initial post to create what I feel are two very distinct posts. While the first one is my thinking about Alan Pages blog on forward thinking, this one is a bit of an experience report, all be it a bit of a history about my first experience in software, and a bit about some of my more recent challenges. I describe the trial of working with out a source code repository, and even describe some of my frustrations at having to build using clearly out dated technology. Sometimes it is hard to realize how valuable any given tool is, unless you have ever had to try to work on a project without that tool. This is where I began, and to forget how I first tread foot into the industry, would be to forget how far I've come, how much I've learned, and how much more there is to learn and do...

When I first started in Software, testing was seen as something I did when the time and necessity called for it. Though initially I was hired as an integration developer, focusing on piecing module code from one place into another in the stable product line, testing was something that seemed as if it was just part of the job, but not necessarily the most important. Maybe its the way software engineering is glamorized in the courses I took at WVU, I'm really not sure; nevertheless, as I began to grow understanding around the product, its structure, and purpose, It was not long before I found myself in a "Test First, Test Often" mindset.

The reality of my first professional Job seems almost barbaric compared to recent projects I worked on. There was no source code repository, no Visual Source Safe, Subversion, or CVS in general use, so this meant that when new modules were being developed they were always in what was deemed as the last stable development build. Many times the build that the features were added to comprised a number of new features and bug fixes, so the porting of that code had to be done laboriously by hand. If I had not been so green as a Developer at the time, and had scene the value of source code repositories before my professional time, maybe we could have changed how things worked.

In any case, it was my job to kick the tires on these features by porting them into the latest and greatest build, and then seeing what the new additions actually did. Suffice it to say, I highly recommend a source code repository for projects, especially when you have people working remotely or on different sites. However, this was the situation I found myself in as a young software practitioner. Finding all the right bits of code, initially was not easy. Sometimes I would get complete source, and have to scour every class for changes (And really, with little background on the project before, It is quite possible some of those changes had been changed not by that module, but in previous bug fixes in the new build.) So I began pushing back to have some way of seeing and marking what areas they had changed, so I could focus there, and not on other parts of the code. The wrap around comment with tags for each module became the first thing I searched for when integrating.

That's how the process was initially described to me, so that's how I went about my tasks early in that assignment. This turned out to be a harder more time consuming method though. With developers deployed overseas, sometimes on different operating system setups, even the code they wrote that worked on their systems did not always work correctly on hours. Were these Regression errors that crept in as features kept being added? Or were these simply the result of the different platforms we were using? To this day I am still not certain, but the obvious solution came that we began requiring a demonstration build of each feature. First it would allow us to see if the build actually worked on our production systems which were perhaps closer to what our customers actually used, and secondly it would also allow us to see whether the feature worked as expected before putting the time consuming 'monkey work' of copying code A to class B.    So I found myself doing about 50% more testing than actual clerical/coding work on our project, and found a lot of bugs in the process. Suffice it to say, I look back on those first steps as very raw, hard ones in my development professionally, and am thankful that I have learned and moved beyond such outdated techniques.

So it has been just over five years that I have been on this latest assignment, and one area that I have found myself thrust into has been testing. What others on our team realized, though I couldn't see it from my eagerness to help out the team in any way, was that I was actually a pretty good tester. I'm not sure where this skill, or perceived confidence in me as a tester came from, but as a Colleague said to me just this past week, "He's a testing Wiz." I smiled and accepted the compliment graciously, but deep down, while others think I have it all figured out, I know that I have a long way to go before I consider myself to be any kind of expert, at Testing or Software Development.   Truthfully I wonder if it is even possible to be an expert in anything software related given how fast the state of the art moves in some areas.

So what does this have to do about forward thinking? Before the last year I had not seen myself as a tester, just a software developer, eager of doing whatever the team required to succeed on our projects. I stepped up to an offering of a different role as a developer of test automation, and also testing in general, and I embraced the chance to learn and do something new. I did so not enter this assignment knowing how long I would be kept on the project, and I did so, having done perhaps more coding work than actual testing on recent assignments, but I didn't let that stop me. As I had recently learned from the classic book from Spencer Johnson, M.D. "Who Moved My Cheese?" to not only anticipate change, but to embrace it, and relish it, I plunged into what initially seemed like a rather dull engagement, and not to mention highly time consuming, but I could see why they needed someone to focus on test automation, it just frankly took too much time to have the regular testers doing it.

So I embraced the change, challenge, and at times boredom of test automation, and learned how to string together tests in a version of the test tool we used. While I looked for and anticipated change, I had set my mind to get 'comfortable' in performing these tasks the way they were demonstrated to me. I didn't know at that time that anyone else had tried and given up on the effort in the past, nor did I have any prior experience or research to back me up in finding a better way, but it was a start.

As I pushed forward through these challenges, I took time when I could to research the certain unique problems I encountered along the way, and at some point I stumbled onto a blog. I don't recall which blog it was that I first read, but I began reading this blog and using the challenges to learn more about testing in general. Then one blog linked to another, Google Reader began suggest some other similar blogs, and suddenly a new world of testing was open to me, and as I learned, read, and absorbed new ideas, and techniques, and it transformed my understanding and view of the field.

Now I am engaged on a new project, one where I am not constrained to a particular tool set, rather constrained to doing the best job I can in testing the application to find bugs, to learn, and to apply as never before new found technology. Some of my tasks have afforded me the chance and need to develop a test harness, utilizing both C# and Selenium. Perhaps later I shall try to bring some examples of the generic process I went through to create and build a test harness for some of the automation tasks that make sense for this project. For now, it feels good to no longer be back in the dark ages, but to be in the present ever living moment, applying new ideas as I encounter them, learning and building both my knowledge, as well as wisdom on when and where to use certain testing ideas.

Where in the world are all the Software Testers?

2010-12-03T10:48:00.001-05:00

One of the blogs I read on a regular basis is Alan Page's Tooth of the Weasel Blog. Recently I have been particularly engaged in thought on the question of forward thinking as it relates to software testing. There have been discussions on Twitter recently about just these sorts of things, and as Alan wonders on his blog entry Careers In Test: "What are the new ideas in testing? What is our role in the future of quality software? How do we advance the state of the art in testing?"

These are interesting questions, and initially a lot of this discussion focused on some of the concepts other authors have been writing about for years. The problem seems that in many places testing doesn't has the appearance that it hasn't changed, that it isn't any different than it was twenty years ago. Now I have only been in the technical field of software professionally for about eight or nine years now, so I do not have much first hand experience to go on about what was the common practices in testing fifteen or twenty years ago. However, I have been able to get a peak back by reading every morsel I could get my mind's fork into as I gobble up old software test articles, or books written that give some shading and hue to the background of the field I now find myself thoroughly engaged.

Once upon a time, testing was just one sliver of what I did in my role on a software project, but now testing is very much a key and important part of everything I do, for it is by testing that we learn about the projects that we build. Which brings me back to Alan Page's recent entry. Where are the forward thinkers? I don't know if I qualify as a forward thinker just yet, but I am certainly more aware and active in my role in testing than I was before. But Alan raises an interesting question, why don't we see more Forward thinkers. I personally believe they are out there, but where I could not guess, and there certainly are some forward thinking minds that are now practically famous in the testing community now, too many for me to list them by name. However, it got me to thinking about why things may have been different twenty years ago and one word came into my head: the net.

Twenty years ago even dial up service was hard to find in some areas, and the so-called "Information Super Highway" had not yet materialized as a tangible valuable asset that it now is today. When I think about testing, and the norms of any work place, I can't help but picture that many are just working in their current area to earn a buck, to put food on the table, to continue to exist with some level of lifestyle familiar unto them.

I find that many people are developers or testers by day, but by night they put off that cloak and become something else, a husband, a wife, a father, a mother, a friend, a sportsman, a couch potato, a bachelor, whatever. Many of these people are very bright in technical areas, and people I hold a great deal of respect for. I imagine there are many Joe or Melissa, average testers out there striving to make their little corner of the software world cleaner, like a broom trying to get the last few kernels out of a corner. So I found myself this morning commenting on Alan's blog and found inspiration for my first Blog of December. (Thanks Alan!) So here is the crust of what my thinking was this morning: my original comment is here.

After writing some more this morning I had more thoughts on this, so I'd like to even take it one step further than that, to issue a challenge to my fellow testers out there, some may have already done this, but earlier in the year I put out a question on twitter for any testing societies within my home state. As of right now, there are none, none that I can find, so this is something of a troubling thing for me. One of my hopes, and goals should I continue to do as I have here in West Virginia is to find a way to establish a community of testers either within just my corner of southern West Virginia or perhaps the entire state. The problem is how to start it.

The first is to reach out to testers that you know. On my hand, I can think of four people at work who are testers on other projects, and there may be others. The challenge I think is to find a way to network with those we know, those we may come in contact them, and invite them into this world that is growing online. My challenge is this, what can you as a Tester do to grow our reach as a community? I challenge you to invite one person, one possible tester into this world. Invite them to check out at least one part of our growing community. Whether it is the articles and blogs on Software Test Pro or show them the site for the Association of Software Testing. Link them to blogs and sites for other testers like Michael Bolton, Lanette Creamer, James and Jon Bach, Matt Heusser, Alan Page, or maybe some other site or part of our community. Let's do our part to build the community of testing up, and through that maybe we may find out where in the World are All the Software testers?

Edit:

(I forgot to link to Alan Page's Blog post, Thanks Michael Bolton for catching me on that, I will try to do better on my citations in the future.)

An End, and a new Beginning...

2010-10-22T10:00:00.002-04:00

A lot can happen in two months time, nations have fallen, court proceedings have been completed, and sports seasons are nearly done. When I last posted in August, I wasn’t quite expecting to go all of September without a blog entry. I knew that based on the schedule for our Cub Scout Pack, Soccer, and Work schedules that October could be a heck of a month, but that was still almost six weeks away.

I had just completed a research project, and come to the determination that if we wanted test automation that was easier to maintain, and of long lasting value, that we would very likely have to move away from using the older tool that we were using on the project. Then came the exploration of a slightly newer version of the tool, and yes it provided some new bells and whistles, but when it came down to it, I still felt that given the way our website worked, that tool was not meeting our needs.

It’s a shame that it took me nearly a year to come to that conclusion. Oh I knew the tests I was capturing, building, and testing were brittle, and sometimes it’s not something that’s easily avoidable given development practices on any given team, but it had become crystal clear to me, that building and maintaining automation did not have to be so hard. Well, it is shear irony that I came to this conclusion just a couple of weeks before I was told they would not be keeping me on for the next contract year. I thanked the project manager for allowing me to learn so much from the time I spent with their team, but realized that shifting gears at this point was not a logical possibility. So I resolved to capture as many tests as I could in the short span of time I had left, and to leave behind documentation of the struggles, and conclusions I had come to so that in the future better solutions could be chosen for their team. I am hopeful that work was not done in vain.

It was an interesting project, and I am thankful for every moment, every topic that came up in the pursuit of becoming better at testing, and specifically test automation as I worked to test for that project. I really enjoyed working with the great group of people that comprised that team, and I hope I may one day be able to work with some of them again, but it was good to move on.

When I took the step of faith to step out of my cushy box as a software developer, to walk on the other side of the cube so to speak, it was a bit of a risk. I had done some testing off and on before, it seemed to always be something I would be called on to perform now and then, but without any formal training, or much relevant experience to fall back upon, I did not know if I was equal to that task. However, I was eager to learn new things about software development, and was determined to become as solid as possible as a tester on this project. In hindsight, I believe I achieved that goal, and as a result opened a vault of untapped knowledge relating not just to software development, but testing as well.

The experience truly has transformed my thinking, although I now feel somewhat like a software development mutt, caring both about increasing my skills as a developer and tester. The new project I am on promises to permit me to grow, and apply some of the techniques and skills I learned about testing, even some that were not applicable to the kinds of testing I was required to do before. Plus, as a bonus I may get to learn more about a new technical area of which I have always had a small interest in, but little time to really dig into it until now.

So the old project is done, a new one is on my plate, and I couldn’t be happier for the change, change truly is good, and I thank God for the opportunity to continue to build knowledge related to testing, even as I find myself straddling a fine line between being a pure developer, and a pure tester. There will be more posts coming about lessons I’ve already learned and applied on this new project, but for now I am happy to be where I am professionally right now, and I can’t wait to see what’s around the next corner. So while I’ve come to an end, I’ve discovered that it’s really just a new beginning.

Navigating self learning

2010-08-25T05:08:00.002-04:00

I recently have pondered how things have changed in the quest to self educate myself concerning the software field, testing or other areas of interest.   When I was still a youth, I remember going to the mall and visiting Waldenbooks, and thinking what a great place this is, they have so many books. Oh the days of browsing just for fiction, thinking life was good.

Then moving to College, I found libraries with thousands of tomes, perhaps a million books on shelves, and bookstores that carried a lot of books not just texts.    This is also the place where I learned the evils of the text book industry. Some books you might want to sell back, finding little utility in them, may get stuck in your possession due to a new edition, or a semester where no class is utilizing the text. I learned early in my college career to be wary of where I spent my hard earned monies on books related to technical interest.

At a trade show, I once bought a new hard drive for my computer, a book on Access 97 published by Que, and a Java book, that was pretty worthless the moment I bought it. It was a hard lesson to learn, and for a time after graduating I steered clear of books as much as possible, not knowing how to pick a good book from the bad.

How many volumes can be written about a piece of productivity software? I don't know, but it was frustrating at times to find the Books a Million had two shelves full of books on Office, Outlook, and Word, but slightly less devoted to areas that actually would have been of help to me as a young software developer. We can look at publishers, Microsoft Press, or O'Reilly, and hopefully develop a familiarity for how books are written. This book may be a quick start guide, this one claims to teach you in 24 hours, or 30 days.

The reality is often different. Some books are good solid references, almost printed documentation of the language you are coding in which may be useful if there was no quality documentation online (Such as MSDN). Others spend a great deal of time on one set of features, yet seem to not cover one area of advanced use that is what you are really looking for. So how do you determine what is a good book and what isn't?

One way is to look at Ratings. You can go to Amazon, or some other book seller site and read the reviews of the book. Do the reviewers mention parts that you were hoping to get understanding from that book, do they down it? Do they list the table of context, or index to give you a partial idea of topics covered? Do they describe the book as far too long to cover so little? Yet Ratings games, like search engine optimization can still be played in the online market place, just as it could be played in a brick and mortar store where a book with a better price may actually contain significantly lower substance than a book of just a few dollars more . So, it is not always clear whom you can trust as an Author or Publisher at times.

When I first came on board as a full time tester on this project, I had not read a significant text related to testing, in several years. I dare say, the last mention was probably in a software engineering text book, that I have opened now and then just to refresh my knowledge. I learned to browse the shelves of fellow developers, sometimes to ask if they could recommend a good book.

As strange as it may sound, word of mouth was responsible for a number of quality books I bought when I first moved to Hinton, WV. A lot of data can be found online these days, and that's great for helping you through tricky areas of the work, but sometimes, nothing beats a good old fashioned dead tree to plop in your lap and devour.   Sure, I may read faster in an online format than I do in print, but there is something to be said about having those pages a few finger tips away.

However, what if no one you know has a text in that area you might wish to explore? That is the hard part. How do you figure out who to read when there may be so many texts? Some may contain ideas that may not be all that useful for what you or your team wish to accomplish.   Recently I've discovered a new and better way to learn about books, through Webinars, YouTube Videos, Blogs and Twitter.

I can't count the number of interesting blog entries I've read in the last few months, the thousands of tweets or YouTube Videos I have browsed. I know it has been a treasure trove of information, both about the areas I have been researching, and about the individuals themselves. I admit, I was a bit of a skeptic about Twitter in the past. I found Facebook to be more trouble than it was usually worth, and was not sure quite how twitter would really help. At some point I actually tried to follow some sports writers and bloggers on Twitter, hoping to get insight into this years NFL Draft. A lot of the commentary linked to places that required paid subscriptions to read, and over time, I realized it was not as valuable as I would have thought.

Then I began to watch Webinars by several testers and software development 'coaches' as I'll call them, and I realized that there was more going on twitter than just simply Facebook status messages limited version 2.1. I think Lanette Creamer was the first tester I followed on twitter, and shortly there after the Bach brothers, Marlena Compton, Michael Bolton, David Burns, and Adam Goucher and a host of others. I admit, I have never had a good understanding of how to network with people in my field, especially given the geographic region I work in. But Twitter has turned out to be a godsend for not just meeting and listening to conversations related to testing, but a major tool in expanding and learning how to be better at what I do.

Then I found out that, some of these folks, actually had written whole, or contributed part to any number of texts. So I began my quest to seek out these tomes, to see what may have been written, and over time I read and absorb as much as I possibly can. Like many testers, I've not had any formalized training, barring a few webinars, and free web courses I've taken. I had been thrown into the fire and reacted the best that I could, and tried to be as thorough as I could be as a tester.

It's interesting, because word of mouth brought me to purchase the first few books I acquired after moving here. Now it is not just word of mouth of coworkers and friends, but perhaps of the authors, editors, or even other readers whose opinions I have come to value highly as I consider what tomes to add next to my shelf.

To conclude, if you find the search for better technical publications to be a bit of a maze to navigate, I highly recommend seeking out individuals in the field. Look for papers they've written, articles in magazines, or even follow them on Twitter. Getting to know the author, is almost like establishing a relationship with someone as a trusted person in the community you live in, and grants that extra bit of confidence. I've found that makes the learning far more enjoyable. Thanks to Twitter, my desire to expand my knowledge into new horizons has ascended again, and I hope that many others will find the fires of Prometheus flame rekindled in their desire to learn.

Testing as an inter-disciplinary skill

2010-08-23T22:10:00.001-04:00

I know it has been a while since I last wrote a blog entry. Unfortunately lack of sleep and cramped schedules deprived me of much writing time of any kind the last few weeks. Hopefully I can find a way to fix time for this purpose, or at least leverage some for a crowbar before my ideas go stale. (Note to self, start carrying the notebook again.)

With the obligatory apology completed, now to some discussion. This past weekend, I had some time to spend with my father. He's a Chemical Engineering graduate from West Virginia University, and has worked in a number of different environments. Without giving you an entire biographical sketch on my father, let me just say that he began working for FMC in South Charleston, WV shortly after graduation, and now, through an ironic quirk of fate now works at the same plant, that has since been spun off and changed owners a few times as a Chemical Operator.

My dad, often reflects on how things are at his plant, a place I even had the privilege and honor of interning at for a summer, and learned a great deal about just how complex an industrial plant can be. This honor allows me to have a much better idea of the parts of the plant that he's referring to, even though it seems as though they've re-purposed some of the land for other things in his description I can usually get at least a basic understanding of what he is talking about.

I of course am not a Chemical Engineer, my last Chemistry class was Chem 16, and I was glad to be done with it, the likes of organic chemistry was not something I felt I needed to learn, although at one time I had considered that field. So while I may not understand all the complexities of how a plant is laid out and run, I found some interesting parallels to experiences I have had in the Software field.

For example, take a particular process, any process you can think of, be it software or industrial. Imagine this process produces a raw or virtual product. The process has rules, and procedures that are to be followed by the floor workers, the programmers, the so called 'QA' group and so forth. Maybe they have cross functional teams, or maybe they work in segmented distinct sections of the 'plant' to produce the product. Whether they are stamping out bolts and panels for a car, or controlling the flow of material inputs, you can see how the manufacturing sector and the Software Sector may seem to have a lot in common, at least on the surface.

What does this have to do with testing? Well, one area of interest to me has to do with how to improve the process in which software is developed on the teams I have worked in, and I have worked in several different situations. The first, and perhaps most frustrating happened near the end of my College career. I was taking an Operating System Class, and each class divided into smaller teams to build and code the projects. Somehow I ended up with a trio of other students, a pair of them Grad Students. Well, we began by planning, and figuring out how to divide up the work load. Things initially seemed to be going well, and then the worst thing possible could happen. The one other undergrad guy, dropped the course, which increased our individual work load, and then, soon to the Grad students disappeared from class. I suddenly was in a situation where I never wanted to be, alone trying to solve a massive project. Fortunately I was able to transition to another team later in the semester, but there are so many things I could have learned better if I had just been with them at the start. The team literally imploded under its own weight as people were pulled in different directions.

The same thing happens in software teams in industry. How many people have I known who share multiple hats? Lead architect, chief tester, database engineer, technical writer, system configuration admin, etc. Those are just generic hats, when you add in possible technologies like AJAX, jQuery, Flash, and other libraries and techniques, the distribution of knowledge in a team can be spread out. This may not necessarily be a bad thing, but it can hurt teams when people are retasked to other projects, or move on to other opportunities.

On one particular project, I was given the responsibility of picking up a section of the site, a search page to port it to the latest version of .Net.   I had seen the search in action before, and thought I had a pretty good idea of what was going on, well that was my first mistake. Once I dug under the hood, I realized the intricate classes and data connections related to this page were very complex.   The change to the latest version of .Net meant the manner in which data was passed around had changed, and it was not just a simple matter of pointing to a different data source. In short, maintaining that now 'legacy' piece of code became a headache, one that I prayed I'd never have to work through again.

Note it wasn't that this particular page was prone to error, it was literally a swiss army knife, with a multitude of possibilities, and that was before you started saving various searching configurations.   The draw back was that it was a difficult mechanism to extend, and that ultimately lead us to redevelop the module and to take advantage of another Reporting Service technology inherent within the version of SQL Server we were running at the time.

My father described what seemed to be a similar situation. Changes in how they ran the plant, where or how certain inputs were calibrated, and how they ultimately had certain effects on the outcome. Most teams in software will encounter bumps in the road that they have to learn to overcome, and it seemed that this was a similar process for my dad's company. If you encounter a problem in the process, you examine it, and try to determine how to fix the problem, and hopefully develop a procedure to avoid repeating the mishap.

There's just one problem, that in my Dad's case gave me concern. What if there was a situation where an error happened, but the process was not at fault? In software we can tweak and tweak until the cows come home, but with each new procedure, each new piece of red tape, how much do we slow our ability to produce and test code as we go?

My father went on to describe some of the different teams that worked in the plant. They have their managers, their QA people, their maintenance guys, their operators in various sections of the plant and so forth. I found myself asking my father what he thought Quality was.   Truth be told, I blame Jerry Weinberg for the question as I recently borrowed an old copy of Quality Software Management: Systems Thinking from a friend at work thinking it was out of print.   (It turns out I was mistaken on this. Thanks to Jerry, for pointing out to me that it actually is still in print, just not in Amazon's roster. It is still available with Dorset House Quality Software Management: Vol. 1: Systems Thinking by Gerald M. Weinberg. My apologies for listing it as out of print in error.)

I found myself wondering how my Dad, a chemical engineer doing operator work saw these things, and then I described how Jerry in QSM describes quality simply as value to some person.   Now I've seen a number of other tester bloggers wrestle with the ideas concerning quality. Unfortunately none of those entries were fresh in my head on this particular day. However, one point I did remember from the chapter I had just finished reading, was that because quality is subject to interpretation to some person, there are going to be different definitions, and expectations depending upon who the person may be. Jerry does an excellent job of describing this phenomena in the first chapter of that book.

This then prompted another question, "Is the Quality Assurance Group" the only people who need to be concerned with quality in the plant? I was trying to drive home that perhaps one of the issues in his plant was that people believed Quality is something that only that group in the labs is concerned with, everyone else is just a laborer doing what they are told.

I'll be honest I've never understood that mentality. I have always pushed myself to do the best of my ability and in a team setting to do whatever I can to make that group successful. The situation reminds me of one I've seen on paper in a few webinars. A software group may have a group of Business Analysts that try to figure out the requirements. They then pass those on to some architect, or developer group who tries to implement them in the chosen coding convention. Then those same requirements are then passed on along with the builds for the project onto the testers who have to then parse those requirements and try to figure out how to determine whether a product 'passes' or 'fails'?

Sound familiar?   My dad basically described this situation, where the Analysts would get an idea at a high level of something they'd like to see happen, but often times they don't know the capabilities of a particular piece of equipment or hardware, whether it has constraints that may limit how it is used. I'm reminded of the complaints about highway plans where I went to college. So many described the roads as poor and unorganized, and often as if there had been no plan at all. I often heard people say, that like the roads the best way to fail was to start by failing to plan.

Having lived through some similar situations I can attest that it can be very difficult. My first role as a Software Developer, I never imagined that they'd require me to do quite so much testing. Software Engineering Classes for BS Computer Engineers focused more on how testing was often a separate phase done by a somewhat independent group.   Yet here I was soon after starting my first professional job for pay, and I discovered myself having to test this module. Sometimes, all I had was the name of the module, no requirements, or notion of how it should work.   Even worse, initially I was only given the code, and had to parse through them buy hand to figure out what was changed, plug it into a newer build, and then test it.

It didn't take me long to realize that this was an untenable situation. How much time and effort was being wasted integrating someone's code into our project only to have to back it back out when we discovered it was not as mature a feature as we had thought. I prefer not to think about that, but I began to push back and ask for at least some basic requirements or description of the features, and eventually we began requiring a demonstration build of the project as a proof in concept that I could put through its paces and explore to see if it lived up to what we were expecting.

Honestly, it was a very hard experience. My dad says that Engineers go to College to learn how to think and how to teach yourself about the disciplines you encounter, but that you don't really have any clue how you will use what you've learned until you are out and working in industry. In short, as a fresh out of college graduate, I didn't really know jack about how to do my job well. There were so many things that I'd not encountered that I had to learn those first couple of years, and without any real guidance from the more senior developers in the team, I was left to figure things out on my own. Fortunately I am a fast learner, but even then I know that I probably made more mistakes that first year than I ever imagined possible.

This is not me being critical. Just like I look back at stories penned before I finished High School, and today I can barely understand what I was writing or how I formed lines of thought to compose one line of text and weave it into another. Truly they were embarrassing times, but they were learning times. They drove me to work harder, to try to be better at each little thing I did, and I felt I was making progress up until I got retasked to working the Tech Room. In truth, it was probably for the best, there were a number of glitches in our process for including and releasing new builds, and I was fortunate enough that my ability to work with people on the phone enabled me to switch hats, yet still learn a great deal about our product. It was that connection to the customers that finally made things start to click.

In any event, just like things were in flux in that first assignment, I wonder how such changes affect my dad at his work. How can they expect to keep their production levels high, when a key component goes down? How would I expect a web site to operate if a key database or server went out? This is what I was driving at with my dad. That maybe, just maybe, the ideas of Systems Engineering for software, of testing, and development, do not just exist in their own bubble, but are perhaps shades of things that could help improve things at his plant.

I really enjoyed the chat with my father. I wish I could have more such talks with him, to exchange ideas about how to think through problems as an engineer, or a tester. One thing is for sure, the more I read about software development, the more I wonder why more work place components are not striving to improve their processes instead of staying at the ad-hoc level.

PS. Thanks to Gerald Weinberg for writing Quality Software Management: Systems Thinking, and thanks to my friend Craig for letting me borrow it from his book shelf as the book seems to be out of print due to its age. I look forward to completing reading it, even though some of the ideas presented within may be a bit dated. One of the joys, that being a full time tester has brought back to me, is the joy of digging for new ideas and knowledge through books, blogs, and the internet. I'm not sure I would have had this wonderful conversation if not for having started that book, so Jerry, thanks a bunch.

My take on Adam Goucher's Six Shocking Automation Truths.

2010-08-04T19:02:00.000-04:00

Adam Goucher has a wonderful blog entry over at Software Test Professionals relaying Six Shocking Automation Truths. If you have not yet read the article I wholly recommend it as it does provide some high quality grade A discussion material within it.

According to Adam the six shocking automation truths are:

Truth One: You do not need to automate everything
Truth Two: Going forwards in reverse is still going backwards
Truth Three: The automation language does not have to be the same as the development language
Truth Four: There is not one tool to rule them all
Truth Five: There is no 'right' or 'wrong' way to automate (though there are better and worse)
Truth Six: Your automation environment is not production

These six ideas coalesce around several myths that many in our industry have not yet come to realize are myths. I find I agree with most of these Truths, or at least the blanket summary that Adam gives them, but I'd like to take a moment to expound upon what I these truths mean to me.

The first one, "Truth One: You do not need to automate everything" is easy. You can't automate everything rings very true for me. Some parts of a particular software may not be possible to attempt automation either as artifacts or side effects of how they are designed, or due to the nature and quality of tools available. What's more if you are like me, with several hundred test plans comprised of thousands of steps that cover the modules of an existing software, trying to automate everything could take a really long time. Likely much longer than the client is willing to pay you for which leads me into the next Truth.

The second truth: "Truth Two: Going forwards in reverse is still going backwards", follows from the first. If you have a large number of tests in need of automating, and only limited time to script/record/code/setup the automation tests, then given that time to complete the automation is very likely limited you have to be judicious about where you actually use automation.    Now some may argue that it makes more sense to start with the most stable older portions of a code base to automate.

I can understand the deceptive and seductive nature of this. Repeating these test scripts by hand every iteration may seem like a waste of time. This would seem especially true if they are often finding few if any defects to report. Yet that section of the application must always be regression tested, and is somehow of more value, despite the lower chance of defect occurrence. In addition, automation is desired even if no change in features actually intersects it. To this I find myself in disagreement.

First, old tests, that are used to regress the software do not always equate with relevance to the current build and software release. I have worked on projects where test plans from Release A or C were changed, or completely rebuilt from the ground up. Should they continue to regress tests and force automation to built upon test cases that are now obsolete? My answer is no.   There is nothing more costly than trying to automate tests which are invalid, obsolete, and not an accurate reflection of the current software's behavior. Therefore if your definition of Old is actually referring to dated perhaps obsolete and regression checks then maybe that's not what you want to automate.

Now Adam argues that the best place to start automating is on the new sections of an application. I can understand that thinking, but it also is not always necessarily possible to do that. In some cases it will be, and this may also be dependent on the kinds of tests included in your automation framework. If you are just starting Unit Testing for example, It makes loads of sense to focus on code that is currently in development rather than trying to cover old dated code. If however you are using a different type of automation that may not make sense especially given the pace at which code may change in a particular feature as it is developed.

So what then is the middle ground? I think a better way in many cases would be to focus upon the areas of the software that were most recently released. Recent release may imply stability, and though a recent artifact in the release it is most likely the most fresh in the minds of the team in general.   Newer modules may have a higher probability of being touched again as their functionality is expanded with additional features in subsequent releases.   This of course will not always be the case, but the chief concern of this truth is to remember the Pesticide Paradox.

The Pesticide Paradox simply stated is that "defect clusters have a tendency to change over time, so if the same set of tests is conducted repeatedly, they will fail to discover new defects." Or at least that's the paraphrased definition from a online course I recently completed. Or as another tester explained it to me, as bugs are found around particular code segments, reported, fixed, and retested, the old tests will begin to prove repeatedly that those bugs are gone each time they are run.   The problem though, is that these kinds of old proof tests may give a false sense of confidence about the stability of some sections of a site leading the team to focus on testing and developing the more raw parts of the application.   This is why we must maintain and especially update at tweak even old tests as new releases come out in order for them to remain relevant.

The third truth that you need not test using the same language that the code uses, seems a rather obvious one to me, but then I come from a development background before I became a full time tester. It should stand to reason though that if multiple languages can accomplish the same tasks, that it thus is not necessary for the tester to be fluent with that coding style, and in some ways may help enforce separation between development and testing areas.

The fourth truth, like the third, also seems like an obvious one to me, that there is no one size fits all tool. I remember when I was a young Boy Scout that another scout showed me his Swiss Army Knife. That thing had twenty five or more gadgets and was so wide I couldn't hold it in my hand to cut. Contrast that with the two pocket knives I used as a boy, the basic five gadget one complete with can opener, awl, bottle opener, large and small blades, and a cork screw, and the second a simple 3 bladed carbon steel knife (Three blades of differing lengths). I got more use out of those two knives and they provided all the basic functions I needed from a knife at that time. Today I carry a set of folding pliers one large one small that also have screw drivers, and scissors, and a blade on it, but I still find myself using that regular knife blade more than anything. So it doesn't matter if a tool has more functions than its competitors, if its difficult or cumbersome to use, or if it doesn't cooperate with tools other developers are working with. (I remember using the Ankh extension for Visual Studio several years ago, and had to uninstall it because my install would crash unexpectedly when it was being used.) The same is true for testing tools.

Truth five is in my opinion the hallmark of good testing, and especially for those who ascribe to be part of the context driven school. No test exists in a vacuum, and therefore consideration to the environment, the parties that will use the application, and risks involved should all be considered when testing approaches are mapped out.

The last truth, "Truth Six:   Your automation environment is not production" is the only one I really have some issue with. Sometimes it is easier and better to understand a software, especially one that you've only recently been brought into, if you see the actual data, or a good facsimile of what it may imply.   I do agree that it does not necessarily make sense to hunker down a local networked instance for test via secure HTTPs, but I am not ready to say that it should never be tested on a test instance. If your client, or process rules require your test instance to be exactly as it will be in production then I can see why a team may have no choice but to do things this way. However, my extraction from truth six would be that to do such should always be done with caution to keep in mind the importance of keeping the application as testable as possible.

To conclude, Adam Goucher's Six Shocking Automation Truths are concepts that all automation testers and the stakeholders planning to leverage automation in their projects should be considered before they have the testers hunkered down in their make shift bomb shelter cubes and putting the software through its paces. I think remembering these things will save many headaches for both the tester and the consumers of their testing efforts.

Finally, a First Post, and Some Background

2010-07-20T23:20:00.001-04:00

As an aspiring writer, I once tried my hands at blogging a couple of years ago on my old domain name. At some point I lost interest, probably because what I was blogging about was more of a rant about things as they were, and really wasn't where my true passions lay. This had been an outgrowth of my desire to share my opinions on certain matters after the loss of several forum communities of which I was a apart.

I gave up on the craft of blogging, and stuck to other forms of prose, namely a play by forum game called Battletech-Mercenaries where I had the opportunity to craft stories, and write collaboratively with those individuals who had joined my unit the Hellstorm Hussars. This was a continuation of other writing experiences stretching back to a group of fan fiction stories that I and several other fan writers composed around the PC game known as Starsiege, and even joined a Guild until my interest in that niche waned.

Even before that I had always enjoyed telling a good story, and at one point took a rather poor attempt at writing a novelization of a story idea during High School. That was before computers became a driving passion in my life. Even going back to my earliest days in school, I can remember having an interest in computers. I once thought that I would like to be a so called 'expert' in computers when I grew up.

While that expression was perhaps a bit too simple at the time, there was something about these machines that captivated my interest. I can remember co-writing a small adventure/quest program with one of my best friends, older brother's Commodore, writing some basic for an old TI whose model number I have sense forgotten, but I do remember that the games that came with it were cartridge based. In any case, you could say that I have been working with computers since I was a young child, but that would not be entirely accurate.

You see growing up my family didn't have a personal computer, (or an apple for those so inclined), and when my father got displaced from his job of fifteen years went and bought not a computer, that could serve multiple purposes, but a Brother WP-75 Word Processor. Oh it was a decent machine for word processing, using a daisy style printer, and small three and a half inch floppy disks (double density disks if my memory serves) to store a small number of files. It didn't provide me the opportunity to explore programming concepts in my Middle School to High School years, but it did provide a means for learning to type, and begin exploring my thoughts in a few story ideas.

I remember writing quite a few stories, reports, and papers for classes on into High School. Some were solid, some generally lacking in a few areas, but they were as a painters first sketches, first chalk rubbings a beginning, a testing and beginning to building my writers craft. It also is pure irony I suppose that I still find joy in writing. Back in Middle School and High School, writing was not something that came easy to me. In fact I struggled with english and literature classes in High School more than any other. Largely that was because of the mass amount of literature they expected us to remember for the tests. After getting a B in honors english as a freshman, my parents got me a tutor for the summer who helped me begin to hone in on my writing skills.

She gave me simple essay assignments about various types of boxes and through those exercises I learned and grew as a writer, a student, and a person. Though I never again took honors or AP level English, my ability to write grew and what once was a weakness would become a strength in College when I scored an A+ in my Composition and Rhetoric (English) class as a freshman. It was then I realized that it wasn't necessarily the grammar or writing structure that gave me problems in High School, it was the mass amount of data they expected you to learn in seven courses over the course of a full year.

Having turned writing into a strength, my skills were added to in College through a number of different reports, essays, and lab papers. As I began to also work on some aspiring writing on the side for Starsiege, I found that I matured as College progressed. Now, writing is a hobby, a way by which I make sense of the world, even though up till now most of my work has been fiction.

Truly writing fiction, even in already established universes is a challenge. For as Mark Twain once said, "The difference between truth and fiction is that fiction must make sense or nobody will believe it." As I look at some of the things happening in our world today, those words ring truer today than at any time in my life. Real life does not always make sense, and how we tackle and learn from our experiences is as much of our life's journey as the day to day tasks that consume our somewhat meager existence.

That brings us to now, and the reason why I have taken up this mantel and the gauntlet of blogging. In the recent years I came to Hinton to work as a Software Developer, primarily developing a Web Based application with ASP.Net and C#.   One of the skills that I have long sense possessed was the ability to quickly learn new source material, to pick up and leverage new ideas into perfecting myself, and my crafts as a software craftsman. In the course of this journey, I found myself assigned to a project for a partner company not as programmer, but as a tester.

This was not the first time that testing had come into focus in my life. My first professional job for pay was with a company called Stenovations, they make a Computer Aided Transcription program called Digital CAT for use by court stenographers to quickly transcribe and mark up depositions. One of my first tasks there was to work at integrating software modules developed by programmers contracted outside the company into our current builds.

I attacked my duties as I did with anything else, trying to absorb as much as I could, to learn how the system worked, and what it did; However, I learned over time that my job's first duty was not necessarily the parsing of the code, but testing these modules that were handed too me.   Many modules would be handed to me, and though I could scour the code for every artifact that had changed, the modules would not seem to work. So I changed tactics and began to first test the demonstration build provided by the developers, and only then if it appeared to work, to go through the process of integrating that feature into our product.

This proved a very smart decision. It allowed us, and me in particular to actually test the feature said to be added. To see if it worked as expected. In many cases I discovered that even in their builds it had not worked as we had expected. The lack of defined requirements was a problem at times. So it was suggested we should provide a list of these requirements, these desired features and let them build them for us.

It became apparent though that some of the developers were suffering from a perceived communication gap. I'm not sure if it was differences in culture, or something else that was proving an impasse, but this was my first step into the hat of a Tester. It was through this mechanism that I first began my story as a tester, doing exploratory testing even though I would not have realized it would become quite the buzz word till much later.

In this I became a tester first, and a programmer second. Because if the tests I ran failed to produce the advertised and expected outcome, then my programmer's toolbox would remain locked and closed. I couldn't very well fix code I had not written myself to work in a new build when that same code did not produce the expected effect.   At some point, I was moved out of the development side of the business and spent about a year or more as part of their help desk and support. It was a bit discouraging at the time, I had signed up to actually write code and use what I learned while enrolled at the University, but what I discovered was that in conversing with these customers I actually learned more about their needs, the problems that they needed help in solving, and that would make me a better developer and tester.

In fact at one point I decided to start writing some simple test scripts. They weren't all that fancy, just a Microsoft Word document with a table with I believe it was two or three fields one for the item to be tested, another for if it passed or failed, and another for comments. (Now that I think about it the pass and fail may have been logged in a single comments column, but it has been a few years.) Of all the things I did at the Stenovations, I feel that perhaps that step of creating a test script and actually putting the software through its paces as a help desk technician was one of the few lasting contributions that I made to the company.

In 2005, I came to work for ManTech here in Hinton, WV. Primarily I was an ASP.Net developer, but one of the things I love about ManTech is the way they encourage us to continue to learn and grow as individuals. I made the transition to use C# in a matter of months, and then helped our team transition and port our product from .Net 1.1 to .Net 2.0. During my time with ManTech, testing has been something I've occasionally volunteered or been tapped to assist with. Whether it was testing our flash based lessons for our e-Learning system, or testing our site at various stages of development.   I expanded my knowledge of databases as well as I began working with SQL Server. One other area of interest was that of documentation, and online help. I helped write our first FAQ system, and learned to use Adobe (formerly Macromedia) Captivate for the recording of interactive help.

I've worn many different hats at times while with ManTech, and currently I work as a tester, with primary duties relating to automated web testing for one of our client/partners NISC, now an IBM Company. As I strive to improve myself at the craft of testing, I've reached out and begun reading as much material as I can absorb on the subject of Testing, on Agile Methods, and project development. During these explorations I came across blogs for several knowledgeable people in the Testing Field. Some of these blogs (in no particular order) are those belonging to: Adam Goucher, Matt Heuser, Michael Bolton, Lanette Creamer, James Bach, Jon Bach, and Cem Kaner. There are others of course, but mentioning all the fine blogs I've discovered in the last few months would likely take up more space than I care to devote at this time.

I really owe my return to blogging to these and other fine upstanding testing citizens of the world wide web. I find their posts and tweets to be highly inspirational, and above all else high learning experiences.   If there is one motto I've put to use in life that stands above everything I do professionally, personally, or in civics, its that I always want to learn. Learning to me is the real substance of life. I've often joked that the day I quit learning is the day I retire, because that's how I feel. I'm a lifelong learner, whether it pertains to the technical field in which I work, about the people to which I associate, in scouting as I step back in to the organization as an adult leader for the first time, or even at home with my family. I thus strive every day to find one new thing, learn one new thing every day. Most days I learn a lot more than just a single item, and sometimes I learn more than could be compressed into a concise statement, but the point is that I learned it.

So as I set out on this exploration of learning experiences in this blog I hope to discuss areas of technical interest with a emphasis on testing in particular. I may be new to blogging, and growing as a new full time tester, but I look forward to the learning adventures to come.