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aclairefication

~ using my evil powers for good

Monthly Archives: April 2012

Staying on track

24 Tuesday Apr 2012

Posted by claire in Agile, Automation, Experiences, Experiments, STAREast 2012, Volunteering

≈ 1 Comment


A while back, I was talking to Matt Heusser about my sticker shock when it came to conference attendance and he pointed me to his blog post on creative ways to reduce the cost:

No, you don’t have to be a speaker. That may be the most obvious, easy, usual way in, but there are plenty of ways to serve for people not interested in public speaking: you might serve on the program committee, work the registration desk, introduce speakers, organize lightning talks, or serve as a “runner” in some capacity.

I took one of his suggestions to heart and volunteered to be on staff at STAREAST this year, which gave me the opportunity to look behind the scenes this past Wednesday and Thursday. (Sure, I missed out on the awesome tutorials this time around, but I did get that one key day of floating peacefully in the pool.)

This is a considerable shift from last year’s STAREAST, when I was free to simultaneously learn about my professional needs while designing and executing my conference schedule. This became particularly apparent to me as the week progressed and I made new tester friends who turned out to be speakers, inviting me to their sessions and I just couldn’t shirk my duties. Bummer. I’ll know to look for their names in the program next time around.

This year, I put in my bids for track selections about a month ahead of time, based on the published schedule, and hoped at least one of my first choices would appear on my list. When my track chair packet arrived, I delightedly perused the list of my tracks and my speakers. On my roster were several notable testers and several newcomers. I loved knowing I would get a glimpse into the processes of both the polished professionals and the fresh first-timers.

I read over the instructions with a highlighter and multicolored pens, calling out the relevant details so that I could support these live performances without a hitch. I’m not good with form letters, and I feel that it’s fair warning to let others know that I have a more casual and enthusiastic style of interaction, so I drafted my own email for first contact. From there, all of the advance preparation went off without a hitch and I eagerly anticipated getting settled in on Wednesday morning.

Fortunately for me, my first track was Agile Testing, so the speakers were predisposed to understand iterating to better and better results. It helped that I knew the first few speakers from in-person and online interactions. Speakers aren’t the only ones who get nervous! One of my tester friends from Twitter was in the audience to help me work out the kinks of the tasks set before me and to tune my results to make things easier on all the session participants and to keep me from stressing out.

One thing I quickly realized was that my introduction of a speaker could hardly do him or her justice, especially when we had just met for the first time, so I resolved to keep it short and sweet, trusting everyone could read the program’s bio and knowing that we were all there for the benefit of the speaker’s wisdom, not my scintillating 30-second background recap.

Though troubleshooting the hardware was certainly on my mind, I was particularly concerned with making sure the session feedback was collected and returned to the conference organizers so that they could tabulate results and provide it to the speakers in a more succinct and organized way. I know from observation and discussion how much work speakers put into their presentations and how open they are to comments. Speakers care for their audience members!

The hardest part of track chairing for me was not being free to type, scribble, or live tweet all the wonderful information flying past me! Normally, I write everything down, but I had to take it in stride and trust that my familiarity with some of the material would carry me through. However, I was also supporting sessions I might not have chosen from the program since they seemed to have a focus that didn’t match my day-to-day duties or needs – so I snuck a moment here and there to note some new revelation. As it turned out, I gleaned some value from every session, despite my expectations. Sure, I don’t work on specialized medical hardware or ERP systems, but the generalizable lessons will stand in good stead as I broaden my understanding of the variations of software testing.

When it’s all said and done, when the conference attendees have all gone home, it’s the information transmitted that can make a difference in people’s work lives – and perhaps even their personal lives – that gave me a warm fuzzy feeling to go along with the sore feet.

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Creeping CRUD

13 Friday Apr 2012

Posted by claire in Context, Experiences

≈ 1 Comment


I recently tweeted that I was feeling frustrated with the medical billing industry. At that moment, I was particularly bothered by the seemingly endless wait of navigating the phone tree to get to a human being only to be shunted to voicemail. However, miracle of miracles, I did in fact get a return call from a person to discuss a recent explanation of benefits (EOB) I had received from my insurance company.

While my family had benefited from the services of this provider over the course of the last couple of years, we decided to move on and I was looking to settle accounts. I couldn’t help noticing that the EOB included Dates of Service that occurred after we had changed providers. Not wanting to immediately proclaim insurance fraud, I called up the provider to discuss what I imagined to be a data entry mistake.

The helpful billing staff member at the other end of the phone call fielded my questions calmly and clearly had heard this complaint before. She explained to me that sometimes there have been data entry mistakes related to the intake of a patient. Since recurring billing is scheduled based on this intake date, she had encountered situations where all of the billing they ever submitted for a patient had incorrect Date of Service values. She said that in this case she would have to make a note of the error, remember that it had occurred, and continue to submit that note with any problematic records since she wasn’t permitted to alter the medical record. I don’t think she meant that the software provided the option to enter an explanation:

If possible, explain why the earlier note was incorrect, the reason for the error, and the reason the error was noticed.
— Medical Economics

Rather, I think she had some separate, manual workaround for note-taking related to someone’s file.

Apparently there was an update/edit capability in the software but she was instructed not to use this due to legal concerns around altering a medical record. Presumably, their software did not provide differentiation between original and updated values with appropriate timestamps:

With electronic medical records, the computer program must show the dates of the original notes and the dates of any changes or new entries.
— Medical Economics

For the user, the result was effectively having no way to edit data. What a difference that context makes!

However, this was not our problem. She also elucidated a software bug in the system that involved a gradual creep of date ranges. For example, a monthly shipment of supplies would be billed over the course of 4 weeks after each ship date. After 2 years of shipments, the weekly billing dates had a lag of 11 days, which happened to put them after the date they discharged us from their care, making the incorrect billing appear to be fraudulent.

Despite having full CRUD functionality to allow correction of incorrect data entry, the staff would not correct records and in addition to that had to live with the pain of a creeping inaccuracy, leading to enough friction for the billing staff user that she had a canned answer for my concerns, which she had clearly addressed many times with other patients and their families. What a knot of confusion for the staff to untangle over and over again.

I can only hope that my new medical provider has a different medical record software provider and that the creeping crud doesn’t prove to be highly contagious.

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A House Divided

12 Thursday Apr 2012

Posted by claire in Context, Experiences

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Amenities

With the recent The Hunger Games movie release came several fanboy and fangirl friends banding together to attend a performance on opening weekend. For good or ill, I ended up purchasing the tickets for the group. I made it to the box office days in advance and the transaction was happily mundane and successful.

The day before the show, one of the friends decided to bring a plus one along for the fun. However, she was very concerned that she couldn’t purchase a ticket online and didn’t want to cancel the date due to technical difficulties. She asked whether the theatre could add a ticket to my transaction and I agreed to look into it.

Give me something I can work with

Visiting the theatre’s website, I confirmed that the online information made the date seem doubtful, showing only 2 performances at that time with one of them in sold out status. When I tried the performance that wasn’t sold out, I noticed that the list of available tickets was rather short and only included reserved seating types. I hesitated to buy a single reserved ticket since the rest of us had general admission tickets.

(For those of you outside the U.S., we don’t have many movie theatres with reserved, or assigned, seating here. Almost every showing I’ve ever attended has been general admission. I only recently started patronizing a theatre that provided reserved seating – for a premium. For my American readers, one of the considerations for movie theatre software sold to international chains is the need to provide support for reserved seating as well as intermission.)

May the odds be ever in your favor

I tried calling the theatre to no avail, so I resolved to head over there after work to see about that ticket. When I spoke to the cashier, she explained that what had seemed like 2 separate performances online were really just 1 showtime.

Some programmer’s technical solution to the split house for a single performance came through to the web interface in a confusing form. In my experience, an auditorium, or house, had always been either general admission or reserved seating. And, although I tested movie theatre software for over 5 years, I had not encountered this feature request: splitting a single auditorium into 2 classes of ticketing.

Fortunately for my friend’s date, movie theatre software has a sold out threshold greater than zero, allowing for eventualities like broken seats, roof leaks, or other unexpected customer service issues. Knowing that, I confidently requested another ticket and easily obtained it. Granted, we ended up sitting in the front row craning our necks a bit as the pack of tween girls next to us excitedly discussed the movie play-by-play, but for once my testing savvy turned up a solution rather than a problem, averting a star-crossed lovers situation.

Testing Bliss

03 Tuesday Apr 2012

Posted by claire in #testchat, Context, Experiences, Experiments, Soft Skills, Techwell

≈ 5 Comments

It’s no secret: I adore testing software. It’s my weapon of choice, despite having happened upon it by chance many moons ago. (What other career transforms forgetfulness and clumsiness into strengths since they result in unexpected, non-happy path usage? Ultimately, I think it’s the variety that keeps me coming back for more on a daily basis.)

Given my feelings about testing, it came as no surprise to me that others would agree and rate this profession highly, whether on CareerBliss or elsewhere, as reported by Forbes. (I’ll also admit to having been a bit of an I/O Psych nerd back in the day, so this survey appeals to me in various ways.) I can’t seem to leave my curiosity at the door, so I had to go see for myself what questions were used as the basis of this data. (Yes, HR folks, that’s my story and I’m sticking to it.)

With categories like Company Culture, Work-Life Balance, The Place You Work, The People You Work For, The People You Work With, It’s Party Time!, Work Freedom, and Growth Opportunities, it almost felt like attending a company meeting at my current employer. (Did I mention we’re hiring a developer for my team?)

I was curious to see whether other testers had the same reaction to the questions used to generate the data that CareerBliss analyzed, so I culled out 5 questions of at-most-140-characters designed to find out.

  • Q1) Which people at work most affect your happiness: co-workers, boss, CEO?
  • Q2) How does the level of challenge in your work influence your feelings about your testing job?
  • Q3) Is there a job-provided perk/reward/tool that keeps you happy as a tester?
  • Q4) As a tester, do you have a good balance of freedom and growth?
  • Q5) How does the support at work make testing a great career?

Check out the storify-ed version of our #testchat on Twitter.

Not everyone has the same experience of software testing and my experience has certainly changed over time. I wanted to take a moment to consider the various aspects of software testing that the article identified:

  • requirements gathering – been there, done that both before and after implementation
  • documentation – frequent contributor, sometimes sole author
  • source code control – only for my automation code, but I didn’t set it up myself
  • code review – if you consider pairing with a developer on code during a sprint, then I’ve tried it and with some success
  • change management – not so much, though we did have a composition book in the testing lab to log all hardware changes to a system I worked on; sometimes it was more like a log of who I should hunt down to get the hardware back…
  • release management – the closest I get to this is being able to deploy to my cloud test environment and boy am I happy about that
  • actual testing of the software – bread and butter for me

I love having been involved in the entire software development process at various times during my career. (I’ve even prototyped some UI ideas, though I wouldn’t call that an area of strength or concentration. Glad to have those UXers on board these days!) I do feel that I’m an integral part of the job being done at the company. I am quite happy that my job involves frequently working with people.

However, I do take issue with this being presented as a positive aspect of the job:

software quality assurance engineers feel rewarded at work, as they are typically the last stop before software goes live

Doesn’t that smack of Gatekeepers to Quality to you? I don’t ever want to set up an adversarial relationship with my developers that says I need to defend the users against their disregard, and I don’t want to be involved only at the end as a last stop before kicking a product out the door. I know that happens at times but it’s not my preference. Positive personal interactions and preventative measures certainly contribute to my testing bliss.

Take the survey yourself at CareerBliss and let me know how your experience compares!

I’ll be analyzing the tagged responses from Twitter over on Techwell soon!

Here is some related reading that has come up in recent days:

Q3) Is there a job-provided perk/reward/tool that keeps you happy as a tester?

Jon Bach on tools for testing

Ajay Balamurugadas on tools for testing

Q5) How does the support at work make testing a great career?

Horizontal careers: “each of us will need to overcome our personal assumptions about moving up the career ladder, and think more about how we add value across.”

Scott Barber disagrees

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