Sketching for fun and profit

17 Friday Jan 2014

Posted by claire in Agile2013, Approaches, Experiences, Experiments, Soft Skills, Speaking, Training, User Experience, Visualization

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As I recently wrote in Better Software magazine, I tend toward visualizing information. While this does not mean I skimp on words – as anyone who has been near me for 15 minutes can attest – it does mean that I think more clearly when I have a whiteboard in front of me and a chisel tip marker in my hand.

Ode to whiteboards

“@aclairefication: No sticky notes. No whiteboards. #FiveWordTechHorrors” this happened to me last week.

— James Grenning (@jwgrenning) December 11, 2013

One Christmas gifts my husband installed a wall of whiteboards in our home for the children to draw and scribble. The children loved it and happily covered it with unintelligible childhood graffiti. As it turned out, this blank wall was a greater gift to me. When I was preparing to present at conferences in 2013, I was feeling quite blocked in writing proposals and producing presentation materials until I relaxed and just let myself have time with my home whiteboard.

I hadn’t realized how much I missed having a large expanse to fill with thoughts as they came spilling out. At my first testing job, my XP development team installed a wall of whiteboard for just this sort of thing, removing barriers to collaboration by having enough space for any conversation the team needed to have. Of course, some corners were dominated by persistent big visible charts but those lasted only as long as they were needed. Yes, I was spoiled.

I decided to keep my presentations simple and sketched the images I wanted to have in my slides on this wall. It turns out taking well lit pictures of whiteboards without glare is sufficiently difficult that there are apps for that. Go figure!

Takeaways

I also realized that I would be in a fix at the conference if I didn’t have a whiteboard handy, so I scoured the internet looking for portable options. It just so happened that one of my favorite nerdy websites was advertising a foldable pocket whiteboard. One look and I was in love. I was able to easily take notes in any way I saw fit and at a scale that pleased me, not being limited to eight and a half by eleven or whatever dimensions a digital application considered adequate.

In my day-long tutorial preceding CAST 2013, on a team with people I’d never met, I wasn’t sure how to begin solving the problem, but the casualness of a portable whiteboard that could be unfolded, scribbled on, wiped away, and stowed out of the way was definitely an asset to establishing good communication from the beginning.

It also came in handy when I was able to snag a table at one of the Agile2013 social events to catch up with a speaker whose talk I had missed. He liked it so much, he bought three. Subsequently, another friend from the conference asked whether that would be a good speaker gift and I heartily assented. Now I’m wondering whether this company pays for referrals. 🙂

Drawing pictures at work? Really!

At Agile2013, in his presentation Sketch you can!, Jeremy Kriegel explained using graphic facilitation to craft meetings that better involve attendees. People can focus on visuals easily and suggest improvements. This sketching is a combination of note taking and wire framing, which is something user experience (UX) folks do routinely as part of their work. He describes trading quality of the drawing for speed in order to keep the focus on communication, then enhancing the drawing later. The focus is on the need people are trying to satisfy and understanding the context of that need.

By sharing in a concrete way, you can validate precise language and discover where meeting participants are not agreeing. The result is a public record of the conversation that can be shared. (I’ve been known to take many many pictures of whiteboards in my day.) However, the communication is more important than the deliverable, which helped to free me of my concerns about how much artistic talent I have. I felt comfortable improvising and the sketching was a sort of performance, although in the class we were not standing up in front of a group.

Earlier today, I was having a conversation with a colleague at a whiteboard and sketching the interacting parts of the problem we are testing was very helpful for focusing the conversation and revealing areas that we needed to investigate. I’m definitely a fan of drawing pictures at work and I appreciate Jeremy’s encouragement.

Sketchy people

Periodically, I rediscover Gaping Void and wallow in the talent and inspiration of these images. My most recent visit followed a tweet to his blog on new year inspiration:

I guess my “mountain” was drawing cartoons (like the cartoon at the top rightfully indicates), although it took me DECADES to find that out. – Hugh MacLeod

However, I was so drawn to his live sketching videos that I decided to give it a whirl. Not sure where to begin, I snagged a photo of my 95-year-old grandmother off a family member’s Facebook and took a shot at digital sketching. I’m pretty pleased with the result. It’s not my best effort and I’m not worried about that because it was so much fun to try.

When I’m so busy that I don’t have time to blog or read a book or play a board game, I still have time to sketch something out, however crudely drawn the result might be. I know I won’t turn into an Andrea Zuill overnight, so I keep at it a little at a time.

I’m finding that sketching on digital photos or enhancing existing images (so far no original memes!) is much much easier than starting from nothing, so that’s kind of my thing at the moment, but I’m finding the courage to stretch a bit more into original composition. We’ll see if anything comes of it. For now, it gives me something creative to do that personalizes my slides a bit more.

How do you use sketching for fun or profit?

Est testing parfait?

19 Tuesday Nov 2013

Posted by claire in #testchat, Agile2013, AgileConnection, Experiments, Exploratory Testing, Hackathon, ISST, Lean Coffee, Podcast, Retrospective, Skype Test Chat, Social media, Software Testing Club Atlanta, Speaking, Tea-time With Testers, Techwell, Test Retreat, Testing Circus, TWiST, Volunteering, Weekend Testing

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I heard that Gerry Weinberg has an exercise called “Mary had a little lamb,” in which you analyze each word in the sentence to elicit implicit meaning that might be important. This sounded interesting enough to try, so when the opportunity came to propose a topic at Test Retreat 2013 I went for it. My topic “Is testing for me?” didn’t end up formally scheduled but made a nice interstitial topic to discuss with those milling about in the main room.

I chopped the sentence into separate words and wrote them top-to-bottom on a large sticky note. Then, instead of giving some sort of prepared remarks, I elicited brainstorming from the gathered participants. Having received interesting feedback on my professional and personal strengths at Agile2013 that had left me questioning how best to use my evil powers for good, I wanted to hear how others were thinking about the testing field and how it fit them.

The resulting scrawled notes ended up a mindmap, the path of least resistance for me. I won’t say the discussion solved all my problems, but it did give me some direction for future exploration – exploration that might also be helpful to a newbie wondering whether to pursue a career in testing.

Which brings me to some interesting recent events:

the first ISST webinar by Ben Kelly
Our second meetup for Software Testing Club Atlanta
Randomly running across a new tester on Twitter
This testing blog post I read recently

I started composing a list of things I’d recommend to people just starting out as testers to help them to evaluate whether to continue. I wanted to encourage them to jump right in but also think big, not waiting them to wait 5 years to reach out to the wider world of testing (like I did).

Here’s my current list. I blogged about various experiments I tried, so you can read for yourself to see what it’s like to select what’s a good starting point for you.

First things first: Whatever you try, frequent retros
Social media, especially Twitter
Try exploratory testing
Weekend Testing
Chatting with other testers online
Books, Podcasts, Blogs, maybe even writing for some ezines or websites?
Meetups, local events, Lean Coffee, conferences – attend (in person or virtually), live-tweet a conference, volunteer, speak (lightning talk, whole session, workshop, tutorial)
Open Source, Hackathons, innovation days, etc
uTest/Applause? I’ve heard of this but not tried it. Seems like a lower barrier to entry/way to get started?
And, last but not least, who do you want to be?

No matter how many times I think I’ve found all the meaning in my testing career, suddenly I realize there are more layers… but like a parfait, not an onion.

Donkey: Oh, you both have LAYERS. Oh. You know, not everybody like onions. What about cake? Everybody loves cake!
Shrek: I don’t care what everyone else likes! Ogres are not like cakes.
Donkey: You know what ELSE everybody likes? Parfaits! Have you ever met a person, you say, “Let’s get some parfait,” they say, “Hell no, I don’t like no parfait”? Parfaits are delicious!
Shrek: NO! You dense, irritating, miniature beast of burden! Ogres are like onions! End of story! Bye-bye! See ya later.
Donkey: Parfait’s gotta be the most delicious thing on the whole damn planet! – Shrek

Thanks for the inspiration to write, EmJayKay80 and Niyi!

STC ATL Lean Coffee #1

11 Monday Nov 2013

Posted by claire in Agile2013, Approaches, Experiences, Experiments, Lean Coffee, Software Testing Club Atlanta, Speaking, Volunteering

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Over the last few years, I have been getting to know other software testers here in Atlanta. Frequently, beginning this new acquaintance is such a positive experience that the other tester urges finding others similar to us to meet more regularly. This is such a common outcome that I am no longer surprised when first conversations end this way.

I don’t have much experience with the particulars of sifting through a large tech community for people interested in hanging out during their personal time to chat about testing software. However, when others insist on giving you a boost, it’s harder to say no.

I have demurred all these requests until now. Eventually it seemed silly to continue to turn down the genuine offers of resources, energy, and enthusiasm. I almost felt bad about denying people the community they so clearly craved. So here we are.

I love meeting new people and engaging them in conversations. However, I realize not everyone is comfortable doing that. I’ve noticed that having a structure to interactions can reduce the social barriers for those who might otherwise hang back.

At Agile2013, I noticed that Lean Coffee was an easy way to get to know a group of strangers, so I thought it would be a good place to start for the newly formed Software Test Club Atlanta.

I have participated in several Lean Coffee events run by different facilitators. I liked the simple style and frequent feedback so much that it was the first thing I brought back with me to work after Agile2013. The format proved fruitful for an internal meeting and so it seemed like a good idea for starting this local meetup.

Another good idea for starting something new is affiliating with established allies. Since one of my benefactors was part of the Software Testing Club community, I thought co-branding made a lot of sense. I led the idea of extending their brand to the United States since doing so would bring more people together worldwide than I could on my own. I wanted our nascent local group to be connected to the larger world of testing enthusiasts from the beginning. That would support the new members’ sense that each of them is not alone, the connection that drove creating this group in the first place. This is really a community building itself. I just happen to be in the center of it.

I love helping people to connect deeply with one another, so it seems only natural to put in the effort of providing the means for others to come together. Now that I work in social media, setting up channels for others to find us and join in the discussion was my first step. I want to be discoverable so that other local testers who feel the need for connection won’t have to wait so long for me to happen along.

I really appreciate that local businesses are supporting our efforts to make time to tackle difficult questions in testing and to share what we’ve learned through our professional and personal experiences. So you will definitely hear me being vocal about thanking them. I wouldn’t choose to do this alone and I’m encouraged that others think this is a cause worth the investment. I’m confident that we’re building a strong community of thoughtful and curious folks who give each other’s ideas a chance.

At our first meeting, I facilitated the Lean Coffee format since I didn’t want anyone to feel put on the spot to take over something they hadn’t experienced. Since we had 15 other in-person attendees and 3 online folks, this was a much larger group than normal. Although I recognized that groups of this size would normally split, I thought keeping everyone together would be better for cohesiveness.

We did use a simple personal kanban board. Each person had a chance to contribute topics. Due to the size of the group, each person had 3 dots to vote on which topics had priority. We established a 5 minute interval between votes to continue. Then, I added a “mercy kill” rule that after 10 minutes we had to move on to the next topic. I wanted everyone to experience the variety of Lean Coffee and knew that our topics were so complex that they could easily take over the entire time we had to meet. Those topics we still wanted to pursue went into our future meeting backlog.

As a result, we covered all of the topics that had received a vote. When items in the To Do column had an equal number of votes, I picked one to be the next to proceed to the In Progress column. Any topics we had covered sufficiently went into our Done column.

While this execution wasn’t a strict interpretation of Lean Coffee, it was a perfect adaptation to our purposes. The conversations continued after we had officially ended and people are looking forward to getting together again next month. We had lots of leftover pizza and beer, possibly because we were too engaged in the interaction to step away to enjoy the refreshments. All in all, it was a great investment of my time and I look forward to doing this again and again.

Please join us again this coming Thursday for another rousing Lean Coffee! We will have a WebEx available for virtual attendees, so tweet us to let us know you want to join in. See you then! Or on Twitter, Software Testing Club, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, etc

Software Testing Club Atlanta’s 1st Lean Coffee topics

7 dots:
- (1st) Who should “own” test automation? dev/test?
5 dots:
- (4th) Testing in SAFe
3 dots:
- (2nd) ATDD and/or BDD
- (2nd) Specification by Example – getting started
- (3rd) Exploratory testing
- (5th) Testing in Kanban – its own column? encourages handoffs?
- (6th) Test Manager Role on Agile Team
- (7th) How to integrate off-shore testers w/agile teams
- (8th) Hiring GREAT people – finding testers
- Logic Flow Analysis and test coverage
2 dots:
- (3rd) What is breakdown of time/resources for: exploratory/scripted/automated testing (rough %)
- (9th) Test/programmer pairing – success stories? Does it work?
- (10th) Testing Meetups near us and around
- Creating User Acceptance Testing
1 dot:
- Let’s get speakers! Topics?
- What do you use to test multiple browsers?
No votes:
- When to Automate?
- What avenues do people use to find out about testing methods/tools?
- LAWST Workshop in Atlanta?
- Developers don’t test (?!!) (What?!!)
- Test metrics
- Whole team testing – good idea? How to get it working?
- Gov’t shutdown & testing

Guest author at AgileConnection

06 Wednesday Nov 2013

Posted by claire in Agile, AgileConnection, Experiences, Experiments, Publications

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Check out my recent article Eat Your Veggies over at AgileConnection.com

Claire Moss shares with us a personal story on how using agile methods helped her family with managing meals and groceries. By using techniques like a Big Visible Chart, dinnertime for Moss’s family became less of a chore. Remember, nothing ever goes according to plan, but that’s true for any healthy team.

Here’s the big visible chart that turned our dinnertime struggles around:

Testing For Humans? Try Empathy

11 Friday Oct 2013

Posted by claire in Context, Experiences, Experiments, Personas, Skype Test Chat, Soft Skills, Test Retreat, User Experience, User Stories

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Two months ago, Matt Heusser organized Test Retreat and I attended, along with 27 other testers open to new ideas and wanting to change the world. Sound a little ambitious? Let’s find out!

My first blog post in this series is about Michael Larsen‘s Testing For Humans, which he was unable to live blog due to presenting. 🙂 However, Michael did post Alessandra Moreira‘s notes in his live blog of the event.

Fortunately, I was able to live-tweet the talk that he described as:

Testing for Humans: It’s Sticky, Messy and Very Satisfying

Abstract: Software development is a beautiful thing. We often create amazing ideas and features that would be wonderful… if only those pesky humans that end up using, abusing, and mis-understanding our brilliant code weren’t part of the equation. Unfortunately, we’re all in the business of developing software for people (yes, even when it’s machine to machine communication, it serves human beings somewhere. What are some ways that we can approach testing software outside of the theoretical ideals, and actually come to grips with the fact that real human beings will be using these products? How can we really represent them, test for and on behalf of them, and actually bring in a feature that will not just make them happy, but represent the way they really and actually work, think and act?

Expected Deliverables: An excellent debate, some solid strategies we can all take home, and some “really good” practices that will be helpful in a variety of contexts.

My take-aways were:

People are imperfect so ideal users aren’t enough for testing.
By definition, a composite of many people (e.g. user persona) is a model.
Too many user descriptions based on small differences is overwhelming, not practical for testing.

On Wednesday night of this week, I joined Christin Wiedemann‘s regularly scheduled Skype test chat with some other lovely wonderful tester folks and we focused on empathy in testing. We wrestled our way to some working definitions of empathy and sympathy, which was much better than shallow agreement though it took a bit of time to establish. We agreed that testers need to observe, focus on, and understand users in order to serve them better. We find that empathy for our users and passion for our testing work go hand-in-hand since we care about helping people by producing good software.

Then we struggled with whether empathy is an innate trait of a person testing or whether empathy is a learnable skill that testers can develop through deliberate practice. (Go watch the video behind that link and come back to me.) We concluded that knowing what others are thinking and feeling, getting inside their skins, in the context of using the software is essential to good testing, though this might require a bit of perseverance. This can go a long way toward avoiding thinking we have enough information just because it’s all we know right now.

As I mentioned in the chat, I’ve found that user experience (UX) design is an amazing ally for testers. One tool that helped me to develop more empathy for my users is user personas. (Later, I found that forming user personas of my product teammates helped me to develop empathy for them as well.)

I immediately took to (end) user personas as a natural progression from user stories. After all, user stories are focused on value to and outcomes for a particular group of users. Describing those users more specifically in a user persona dovetailed nicely. Rather than some sterile requirements that never name the user, identifying a role – or, even better, a rich symbol such as a named primary persona – focuses the product team’s efforts on serving someone by helping us to understand the purpose of the work we do.

We also discussed interviewing users, visits to users, and experiential exercises as techniques to help us call upon empathy when we are testing. In my work history, I’ve been fortunate to hear about my UX team’s great work in a collaborative design workshop, to contribute to designing ad hoc personas for my product, to participate in a UX-led contextual inquiry, and to log actual usability sessions led by my product team’s UX designer. (Yes, my fast fingers came in handy. Yuk yuk.) My innovation days team developed a usability logging product that evolved from an existing solution I tested/used in those usability sessions, so I was a natural fit to test it. I’m curious about empathy maps but haven’t tried them myself yet.

It’s fair to say I’m a UX-infected tester. More than fair. I identify with the curiosity I see in the UX profession and I admire the courage to kill their darlings (carefully crafted designs) when evidence shows it is time to move on. After all, we’re not building this product to marvel at our own cleverness but instead to serve humans.

Image credit

Sick and Tired

03 Thursday Oct 2013

Posted by claire in Experiments, Lean Coffee, Speaking, STARWest 2013, Training

≈ 1 Comment

Brain_Drain
On the first full day of STARWest 2013, I ended up at home with my sick son. (Stomach bug. Boo.) Fortunately, most of the excitement had passed by morning and the day turned out to be blessedly restful, which was essential for this sleepy mom keeping vigil.

We rolled out of bed and sat on the couch watching a cartoon in companionable silence while I poked about on Twitter to find information on the morning’s Lean Coffee to attempt virtual attendance. Since it turned out to be a Google Hangout, my son became much more interested in paying attention, selecting various digital accessories for me – much to the amusement of the other attendees. (Son’s first Lean Coffee? Check. Wearing a digital monocle? Check. Winning at parenting? Check!)

As with any remote conferencing system I’ve ever used, the setup and logistics had their challenges, but I was happy to be included in the event in this small way. The one topic that I could clearly hear concerned sharing conference learnings after returning home.

The classic: presentation to the team.

Many people have blogged about writing – or presenting – a great trip report. Usually these start out with advice for writing your conference attendance proposal to include some language about teaching what you learn, perhaps at the prompting of your boss. At the conference, you take great notes, perhaps even writing up your report during a layover on the way home. Upon your return to the real world, still on a conference high, you set out the conquer your problems with the grand visions of a better work life only to confront business as usual… which you will somehow overcome in a single hour or two of lecturing? It’s a rude awakening. Somehow the top-down decision that the team will learn – from you. right now. – isn’t quite working out. So how do you overcome the resistance to change and really bring home useful lessons?

The subtle: solo experiments as exemplars.

A tactic I prefer is coming home with a list of things to try “on Monday” when I’m back in the office. I think of this as a series of small experiments. Matt suggests keeping these experiments isolated to your day-to-day work in order to improve results without running into the dreaded inertia of the system. As they say, big wheels turn slowly. I can certainly see his argument there since past attempts to suggest alternate approaches that radically changed others’ tasks haven’t really worked out for me. I feel a lot of ownership of my experiments and the experiences have opened up my thinking to additional new techniques, approaches, and strategies. Is your pen mightier than the the sword? Will your report really sway your audience? I certainly have tried this option in the past, but teams may find that approach tired, just one more meeting to attend.

How to bring conference learning back to the team? #leancoffee #starwest @mheusser does experiments solo. @g33klady is doing a presentation

— Claire Moss (@aclairefication) October 2, 2013

The novel: long and drawn out denouement.

The new shiny approach that I’m currently tackling is making connections among different presentations and topics to connect them in ways that seem particularly relevant to my work team’s context. My current experiment is a series of smaller presentations, complete with food and succinct snippets (the TL;DR) in emails that will link to blog posts (the deets). Gradual exposure seems better than bombarding a team with new information in a one-time brain dump. I just hope no one gets sick of my weekly missives!

I’m putting together Lunch-n-Learn presentations and weekly email/blogs to distribute. Less info dump, more learning #leancoffee #starwest

— Claire Moss (@aclairefication) October 2, 2013

As the conference delegates adjourned to attend the regular sessions, I remained sitting with my son. It might have been the exhaustion talking, but when he asked me for my mobile phone I gave in. Within minutes, he found an odd interaction (bug?) in the mobile Hangouts app and shortly afterward froze Angry Birds with a feathered missile in mid-arc. Natural born tester, I tell ya. Making his momma so proud it was easy to forget the sickness and fatigue.

Update from this morning’s Lean Coffee!

Going to use #LeanCoffee as the way to share what I’ve learned at #starwest with my team

— Hilary aka H-Bomb (@g33klady) October 3, 2013

Image source

Story Time!

16 Monday Sep 2013

Posted by claire in Acceptance Criteria, Agile2013, Approaches, Context, Experiences, Experiments, Metrics, Personas, Publications, Retrospective, Speaking, Training

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As Agile2013 considers itself a best in class kind of conference “designed to provide all Agile Team Members, Developers, Managers and Executives with proven, practical knowledge”, the track committees select from a large pool of applicants and prefer vetted content that has worked its way up from local meetings to conferences. I have only one talk that fits this criteria since I presented Big Visible Testing as an emerging topic at CAST 2012. I developed several versions of this talk subsequent to that event and doing so had given me confidence that I would be able to provide valuable information in the time allotted and still leave enough time for attendees to ask questions and to give feedback on what information resonated with them.

I worked to carefully craft this proposal for the experience reports track, knowing that if I were selected that I would have a formal IEEE-style paper to write. Fortunately, my talk made the cut and I began the writing process with my intrepid “shepherd” Nanette Brown. I wasn’t sure where to begin with writing a formal paper, but Nanette encouraged me to simply begin to tell the story and worry about the formatting later. This proved to be wise advice since telling a compelling story is the most important task. Harkening back to my high school and early college papers, I found myself wading through different but largely similar drafts of my story. I experimented with choosing a different starting point for the paper that I ultimately discarded, but it had served its purpose in breaking through my writer’s block. Focusing on how the story would be valuable to my readers helped to hone in on sequencing and language selection. Once I had the prose sorted out, I began to shape the layout according to the publication standards and decided to include photographs from my presentation – the story is about big visible charts after all!

Investing sufficient time in the formal paper made preparing the presentation more about strong simple visuals. I have discovered my own interest in information visualization so prototyping different slide possibilities and testing them out with colleagues was (mostly) fun. I’m still not quitting my day job to go into slide deck production. Sorry to disappoint!

Performance anxiety

Despite all of this preparation, I couldn’t sit still at dinner the night before my presentation and barely slept that night. I woke before the sunrise and tried to school my mind to be calm, cool, and collected while the butterflies in my stomach were trying to escape. This was definitely the most challenging work of presenting!

As a first time speaker, I didn’t know what to expect, so I set my talk’s acceptance criteria as a rather low bar:

Someone shows up
No one hates it enough to leave a red card as feedback

When I walked into my room in the conference center, a lone Agile2013 attendee was waiting for me. Having him ready to go encouraged me to say hello to each of the people who came to my presentation, which in turn changed the people in the room from a terrifying Audience into many friends, both new and old. I think I managed not to speed through my slides despite my tendency to chatter when I’m nervous. I couldn’t stay trapped behind my podium and walked around to interact with my slides and to involve my audience more in the conversation. Sadly, I can’t share my energy with you since I forgot to record it. Oh well. Next time!

The vanity metrics

At 10 minutes into the presentation, 50 people had come to hear me speak and at 60 minutes I had somehow gained another 7 to end at 57 people. Thanks so much for your kind attention! I hope I made it worth your while…
43 people stopped to give me the simple good-indifferent-bad feedback of the color-coded cards (which I liked as a simple vote about a presentation) and I received 37 green cards and 6 yellow – with no red cards! Whoo hoo!

Words of Encouragement

Two people kindly wrote out specific feedback for me and I want to share that with you in detail, hoping to elicit some late feedback from attendees who might like to share at this point (Agree or disagree, I want to hear from you!)

Feedback Card #1:
– Best session so far!
– Great presenter – great information – great facilitator
– Would like to see future sessions by this speaker

Feedback Card #2:
Great Talk – speaker very endearing, Her passion for the subject matter is obvious.
A fresh perspective of how Developers and Testers should interact.
Should find ways to engage the audience

Someone else got a kick out of my saying, “I’m serious about my stickies.” and left their notes behind on the table after leaving. So thanks for sharing that. 🙂

One friend spoke to me afterward with some helpful feedback about word choice and non-native English speakers. When I was writing my talk, I was trying to focus on people who would be likely audience members, but I had not considered that aspect of the Agile2013 crowd. Since I was simply speaking off the cuff, I ended up using some words that would have fit in at our dinner table growing up but that would make for tougher translation. And yet, I got some wonderful feedback from Hiroyuki Ito about the “kaizen” he said I made. I can’t read it directly, but Google Translate assures me it’s good stuff. 🙂

uneasy truce

Finally, I discovered that my relationship with a linear slide deck is not a comfortable one. I wanted to be flexible in referencing each of the slides and having to sequence them hampered my ability to respond easily with visuals when discussing questions or improvising during my talk. I haven’t experimented with other presentation options, but I hope there’s an easy solution out there.

Image Credit

Big Visible Testing (Full Length) from Claire Moss

Always On

12 Thursday Sep 2013

Posted by claire in Approaches, Context, Experiences, Experiments, Exploratory Testing

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So there we were, Josh Gibbs and I, enjoying our lunch break on a lovely sunny day at Centennial Olympic Park. As an Atlanta native, I was living here when the olympics came through town and have a brick in the park. We took a little stroll to visit it and then settled down by the fountain to enjoy the Fountain of Rings show that happened to be scheduled at that time.

As we sat there absorbing the novel touristy experience, trying to identify the musical strains that blared from the speakers, we started to analyze it. We couldn’t help ourselves. That instinct to see beyond the surface, to reverse engineer the system through a verbal exchange, was too powerful for us to just be in the moment. This is why we can’t have nice things.

However, as we gazed upon these new and shifting patterns of water jets set to music, we noticed a flaw in the system. One water jet was misbehaving. At first, it seemed like some sort of counterpoint to the carefully orchestrated flow, perhaps a harmony in the song that I couldn’t properly detect. As the songs changed and that jet continued to spray, it became clear that it was out of turn.

So we started looking for rules we could test to explain the behavior systematically. We speculated that the jet was always on, but when the song ended the water completely died away. We proposed that this little jet was always spraying water, always turned on but only as long as any water was emerging from the fountain. When some jets were performing but the jets around it were not active, this jet bubbled closer to the ground, but as the jets around it reached for the sky the broken jet struggled and failed to follow suit. So that rule seemed to hold.

We considered the historical context of this fountain. Constructed for the 1996 olympics, the initial design had to be created with technology available at that time. So what kind of controls were determining where the water flowed, how long the water flowed (to produce the varying effects from a water ball to a towering jet), how hard the pressure was (to provide a jet of a particular height), how quickly the pattern could change, and so on? Had the original system been maintained all this time? How would you upgrade a system like that? Was there a fixed playlist with predetermined songs and water choreography or could someone provide new inputs? If you could submit a new sequence, was it possible to hack the fountain? And if so, what was the risk involved (likelihood, impact)?

(This just in: The playlist changes and, yes, the computerized fountain accepts new inputs! “The computerized Fountain can be programmed with special announcements as well as a variety of water displays including low-pressure, walk-through “water curtains”, fog and misting.” )

I think we left with more questions than we answered, but it was still a fruitful conversation. It was a nice little trip down memory lane and forced me to confront the reality that testing is a way of life, a path that I am always on.

aclairefication

~ using my evil powers for good

Category Archives: Experiments

Sketching for fun and profit

Ode to whiteboards

Takeaways

Drawing pictures at work? Really!

Sketchy people

STC ATL Lean Coffee #1

Guest author at AgileConnection

Testing For Humans? Try Empathy

Sick and Tired

The classic: presentation to the team.

The subtle: solo experiments as exemplars.

The novel: long and drawn out denouement.

Update from this morning’s Lean Coffee!

Story Time!

Performance anxiety

The vanity metrics

Words of Encouragement

uneasy truce

Always On