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~ using my evil powers for good

Category Archives: Testing Humor

Perception and Certainty

27 Friday Feb 2015

Posted by claire in Approaches, Context, Design, Experiences, Experiments, Soft Skills, Testing Humor, Training

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A funny thing happened today at work. I found out that some of my colleagues literally see things differently. Many of us found ourselves surprised by what others perceived to be true about something as simple as an image. We were swept up in #dressgate: a raging internet controversy about a photo of a dress and its colors.

I’m on Team Blue and Black. However, I wanted to see how the other half lives. I tried various ways to see white and gold: viewing the image on different devices, changing screen brightness, angling the screen, walking around in different ambient light. The various experiments all produced the same results. Trusting my perceptions, I could not give any credence to the perspective that the dress was a different pair of colors, despite seeing many online posts to that effect.

I mentioned this to my team at work, only to discover that there were others who had no idea anyone disagreed with them. As a member of Team White and Gold, my team’s designer was surprised to hear there was a Team Blue and Black – as surprised as I was. 🙂 I couldn’t help wondering whether she was expecting a covert camera to emerge as part of some elaborate prank.

Fortunately, working with designers means having deeper organizational knowledge about colors. By the time lunch rolled around, another colleague had created an online tool for experimentation with the image to see for ourselves how image manipulation would change perception. Another designer mentioned that he had sampled the original image to identify the colors and then created swatches of the colors perceived by others to overlay the image in order to show both positions contrasted with each other, explaining about the impact of shadows and subtle colorblindness.

Designers FTW!

Designers FTW!

Then, he suggested another avenue of investigation: flash blindness. In flash blindness, a bright light bleaches (oversaturates) the retinal pigment resulting in sudden vision loss that doesn’t immediately return to normal, but it usually wears off gradually. So my team devised an experiment to expose our designer’s eyes to a bright white lightsource: a blank page on a screen. When she quickly switched from the bright white background to the original dress image, she was able to see blue and black coloration. However, after a few moments, when she glanced at the dress image again, her retinas had recovered and she saw the original white and gold pigments. This was consistent with reports from other online posters who mentioned scrolling down the page and then being able to see different colors. This transient state seemed to be a source of great consternation and some panic.

While this was a fun way to spend our lunch hour, it was also a great opportunity to practice some of the problem-solving skills I learned at last year’s Problem Solving Leadership workshop:

  • Experimenting to gather information – Although I was not able to see the white and gold version of the dress without manipulating the image, I learned new ways that didn’t work.
  • Perceptions, What’s true for you – I felt quite certain about the stability my own perceptions after looking at them from various angles
  • Watch how other people are behaving – While I thought it was quite surprising that many others had such completely different perceptions, I did not assume they were wrong just because I couldn’t observe the same things.
  • Be cautious about not noticing – I gave others the benefit of the doubt knowing that I can bias myself to ignore information sometimes.
  • How to take in info – I looked for a variety of sources of information about the disparate points of view to obtain a balanced set of data.
  • Resisting information – I paid attention to reports of heated arguments between people from the different viewpoints, noticing the emotion involved in what seemed like a purely factual question.
  • Motives (test interpretation, seek intent) – I asked two observers from Team White and Gold questions since they could see what I could not
  • Reading minds – I tired not to assume that anyone was punking me or simply being ornery but instead was open to the possibility of being wrong.
  • Style vs intent (make more congruent) – Rather than trying to convince anyone of my point of view, I listened to their experiences and observed their learning process.
  • Social structures – It was interesting to see that even within the design group there were opposing assessments of the information. I also saw how team members collaborated rather than confronted each other when trying to understand where each was coming from.
  • How do you get people to recognize what you saw? – I waited for an opportunity for them to experience it directly and shared the information that I had so the other team members could judge for themselves, now that they had more to work data
  • Show you care by speaking up – I could have ignored people who didn’t agree with me, dismissing their viewpoint as simply wrong. However, engaging in dialogue was a great team-building experience and helped to establish more common understanding.
  • Reactions – By giving myself a charter of observing others’ behavior, thought processes, and evidence, I was better able to empathize with what was a shocking experience from their point of view.
  • Eyes open! Use your senses – I took suggestions from the designers about resources for assessing color perception and did not assume that I could gather unbiased information. In the end, I know more about myself than I did when this silly discussion started.
  • Learn from others – I certainly know more about color, perception, troubleshooting, experimentation, and these particular colleagues than I did before I posted the question “What color is this dress?” so I call today a win. 🙂
  • Aaaaand I couldn’t help trolling just a little bit by “wearing the colors” today…
Blue-Black or White-Gold?

Blue-Black or White-Gold?

 

My stupid human trick

05 Thursday Sep 2013

Posted by claire in Approaches, CAST 2013, Context, Experiences, Experiments, Soft Skills, Testing Humor, Volunteering

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GRRRRRRRRR got locked out of @Twitter again 🙁
This time in the middle of @claubs_uy 's #AgileTDUSA talk
I'm not a bot, y'all!#nosaneuser #fastfingers #livetweeting @AgileTDUSA pic.twitter.com/yeaitrIwoI

— Claire Moss @ DevNexus (@aclairefication) June 26, 2018

When I was growing up, my family and I would watch shows like America’s Funniest Home Videos that often involved montages of people showing off their ridiculous talents – sometimes inadvertently!

One of my earliest experiences in my testing career was participating in a planning meeting. The whole product development team migrated to the corner of our open workspace where a large board-room-style table sat lonely on most days. We all pulled up chairs, but I was one of the attendees who also pulled up a laptop. I started typing up the details of what I was hearing and began asking questions, like I do. The most exciting moment of that planning meeting was the developers noticing that I was still furiously typing their responses to the previous question while moving on to another. Apparently typing one thing and saying another was my amazing stupid human trick. My keyboarding teacher would be so proud.

To this day, my fast fingers continue to amaze, as many physically present and online lurking CAST 2013 attendees can attest. So what’s the secret to my Twitter dominance? The Micro Machines Man John Moschitta, Jr. described his rapid speech delivery as just allowing the words to flow in through his eyes and out through his mouth, so my analogue is in through my eyes and ears and out through my fingers – though I’ll allow the 140 character constraint does require some synthesis along the way.

(So, yes, Claire, we’re all very impressed with your speedy typing, but is it really all that important? Is there a point behind your stupid human trick?)

I find that content generation is a valued skill, even when it’s just providing information from someone else via social media. Helping others to feel present and included is part of my hospitality charism and I want to bring that to bear in the context-driven testing community. I started out as an online lurker and eventually became a participant, but now I have the opportunity to be an amplifier. I like to think of myself as an information radiator, bringing valuable information to light. Now what will you radiate?

The following graph of Agile2018 tweets is even funnier when you realize I was also @agilealliance (not just @aclairefication) #top2 LOL

#Agile2018 via NodeXL https://t.co/FICKe7qFLH@agilealliance@aclairefication@t_magennis@johannarothman@domprice@miquelrodriguez@cainc@emibreton@christophlucian@franklinminty

Top hashtags:#agile2018#agile#womeninagile#devops#metrics#leancoffee

— SMR Foundation (@smr_foundation) August 11, 2018

What I Did For My Summer Vacation – Part 2

14 Wednesday Aug 2013

Posted by claire in Agile, Experiences, Experiments, Retrospective, Soft Skills, Testing Humor, Weekend Testing

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For Science!

For Science!

Our geek gals weekend was quite a memorable one! We had an email thread going around discussing all of our excitement that culminated in:

Road Trip Retrospective

Liked

  • Beginning new friendships and rekindling old ones
  • WaHo, or Waffle House for you non-Southerners, is a road trip staple
  • Seeing the sights: art gallery, street musician, architecture walk, shopping
  • Active pursuits: plantation tour, petting zoo, bodysurfing
  • Keeping it mellow: drip castles, collecting shells, yoga, sunbathing
  • Team-building through cooking indoors & grilling out
  • Kitsch juxtaposed with refinement: deep fried peanuts and formal high tea
  • Bizarre medical poster discovery
  • Conversation: discussions of literature, science, and life
  • Creative outlets: lanyards, scrapbooking, board games, magnetic nail polish

Learned

  • Having pricing/rental agreements in writing is essential – but at least one of us was overcharged and our deposit wasn’t fully refunded
  • Foodie friends should always pick the restaurant
  • Crafting doesn’t come as naturally to everyone – but collaborative art is more fun!
  • Twilight is hilarious when read aloud with expression and voice acting
  • About 1 in 10 photographs come out the way I’d expect
  • Vintage gold lamé will cover you in glitter
  • I can disassemble a grill to light it when the starter is broken – but I didn’t expect a fireball when I opened the lid!

Lacked

  • Roadside attractions
  • Strange food venues
  • Pest control (huge roaches landing in my hair? unacceptable!)
  • Respect from the rental agent who told me I was a b*tch on the phone (keepin’ it classy!)
  • Support from the rental agent to operate the hot tub that we were forbidden to adjust when it was tepid

Longed For

  • Working internet connection (seriously, who cuts a bunch of geek girls off?)
  • Privacy: long term renter walked his dog through our space each day
  • Functional bathrooms: inconsistent water pressure, toilets constantly running or clogged and leaking, shower door jammed, scalding hot water hurt a couple of us, and what’s with the toilet installed in the linen closet?!?
  • Stable floors: I fell through the deck once and nearly fell through another part of the deck a second time, squishy kitchen floor
  • Sturdy roofs: bedroom ceiling collapsed
  • Nighttime lighting out on the uneven decks
  • Ovens/grills that heated evenly and to the designated temperature
  • Cleaning crew: moldy air conditioning unit, dust, dirt, bug parts, expired cleaning supplies
  • Maintenance crew to shore up the framing and carpentry

So how did our product turn out? Our execution wasn’t flawless, but we have very fond memories of creativity, conversation, and survival. Nothing like a few disasters to remind us how fortunate we are.

What I Did For My Summer Vacation – Part 1

31 Wednesday Jul 2013

Posted by claire in Acceptance Criteria, Agile, Approaches, Context, Experiences, Experiments, Retrospective, Soft Skills, Testing Humor, User Stories

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With the First Day of School quickly approaching, it’s time for:

What I Did For My Summer Vacation – Part 1

Exploring Requirements

I get really excited about hanging out with people, especially friends, especially a combination of new and old friends. So it was with great happiness that I set about organizing a geek gal weekend.

Our first conversations centered around budget (fixed), deadline (fixed), and features (flex). We started talking over the various activities that different destinations could provide to entertain us. Then, I paused the conversation to bring the focus back to value: when we looked back on this weekend, how did we want to remember it? how would we feel about the way we spent that time together? would features even feature in these stories we would tell? Instead of features, we realized that functions (what the product was going to accomplish) and attributes (characteristics desired by the clients) mattered more. (Why yes I was reading Weinberg this morning. How could you tell?)

Vintage gold lamé (see that gaw-jus totally 80s animal-print metallic finish? oh yeah.)

Vintage gold lamé (see that gaw-jus totally 80s animal-print metallic finish? oh yeah.)

We wanted to relish the simplicity of being together, whether wearing goofy vintage clothes (gold lamé for the win!), cooking our own meals together, telling silly stories, or engaging in feminine activities with a geek spin (magnetic nail polish was not as simple as expected) that would be low-key and more about togetherness than busyness. We wanted to craft something lasting (collaborative artwork – packing the craft supplies was a must not a want!) and reinforce durable friendships that appreciated our differences.

With this clear focus in mind, suddenly the locale was much less important than inclusivity to maximize togetherness.

Planned For Sand

So we made an informal backlog of tasks to tackle researching options (beach vs mountains), reviewing results, and prioritizing options (beach!) before presenting our findings to the group for dot voting. (Typical agilists, I’m tellin’ ya.) Fortunately, we found a viable approach and went forward with making arrangements to execute this solution (road trip!), adjusting as we went to accommodate discovered needs.

How did it all turn out? Stay tuned for scintillating tales of laughter and danger in What I Did On My Summer Vacation – Part 2!

Ash-ceptance Criteria

29 Monday Apr 2013

Posted by claire in Acceptance Criteria, Approaches, Context, Testing Humor, User Stories

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Ash-2Weapons
Someone asked me for examples of testable acceptance criteria… Alright. Who wants some?

User story:
As Ash, I want to defend myself against deadites (undead creatures) so that I can retrieve pages from the Book of the Dead.

Acceptance criteria:
– defend from a distance
– defend at close range

Two distinct pieces of value, huh? Clearly, we need a story split here!

User story:
As Ash, I want to repurpose the stump of my right arm into a fearsome weapon so that I can defend myself against undead creatures at close range.

Acceptance criteria:
– portable
– well supported, weight-balanced
– hands-free operation
– use available materials
– holds up under stress
– close-range fighting

Technical implementation:
– leather harness
– chainsaw mounted on handcuff
– chainsaw pull operated via bracket on harness

User story:
As Ash, I want another weapon for my left hand so that I can defend myself against undead creatures at a distance.

Acceptance criteria:
– portable
– easy storage
– one-handed operation
– uses available materials
– distance fighting

Technical implementation:
– sawed-off shotgun
– uses right-hand-mounted chainsaw to saw off shotgun (story dependency or taking advantage of existing features?)
– convenient back holster

Bonus feature/discovered value:
– clever shorthand terminology: “Boomstick”

By now, the distinction between testable user story acceptance criteria focused on user value and the resulting technical implementation should be painfully clear. Groovy?

Tonight’s episode is brought to you by: the beauty of claymation, the number 2, and the words Klaatu… verata… n… Necktie. Nectar. Nickel. Noodle.

Image source

Wedding Crashers

27 Friday Jul 2012

Posted by claire in Experiences, Testing Humor

≈ 1 Comment

There comes a time in every woman’s life when her friends announce their engagements. The joy she feels about the momentous occasion of the wedding carries her through the mundane details of choosing what to wear and shopping for a gift to wish the newlyweds well. With wedding showers appearing on the horizon, I knew it was time to go back into the fray of shopping at the mall.

American custom encourages couples settling down into a life together into a frenzy of spending. Aside from the gorgeous dress, lovely ceremony, and honeymoon in some secluded far away place, couples select the accoutrement needed to establish their joint household. For younger couples who have not had long to establish their own independent living situations, these gift registries can be quite extensive. Even for couples in which the man and woman have been on their own for a while, there’s the temptation to upgrade furnishings or to plan for the grand entertaining they will do together in the future.

Granted, not all of the domestic needs are so thrilling as fine china. A house needs brooms, wastebaskets, and the like to function well, so some kind friend or wedding guest is likely to select these items as practical assistance. While it might not make for a thrilling hunt, for me it has always been an adventure to find the right items, in the right price range, in the right store.

Last night was one such quest. I steeled myself for the arduous task of tracking down registry items and then plunged in. Wielding my trusty laptop, I expertly navigated to the wedding website and found the registry links. Although I only had experience with single-retailer registries, I encountered the innovation of aggregate registry websites in all their glory, allowing couples to gather treasures from far-flung places together into a unified whole. After some contemplation, I decided upon some likely candidates and clicked the links to review the items more closely.

One aspect of registries that makes them so appealing is the automated coordination of purchases. Since so many well-wishers like to provide gifts a couple really need or want, some items are more likely candidates than others. Desired quantities, purchased quantities, and quantities remaining abound, requiring real-time accurate updates. It has been my experience that these quantities are seldom correct and that the updates are slow and unreliable. Therefore, I resolved to pursue a defensive shopping strategy.

First, I found the item of interest on the registry site. Then, I searched for the most convenient location with the item available. Next, since I would rather not venture out after work only to fruitlessly tug on locked doors, I carefully read over the store hours. As it turned out, the online registry location functionality for this particular retailer’s site did not synchronize with their regular location search and the selected store’s open and close times were both listed as “none”. Having recently arrived at a local bookstore only to find that it had closed for good that week, I had no desire to drive around trying to find an open location. Fortunately, the regular store location search was working, revealing the actual hours of operation as well as the handy main phone number.

As I worked my way through the phone tree to an actual human, I was transferred several times incorrectly and ended up needing to redial, which was a small price to pay to avoid driving all over creation to find the gifts. Eventually, the helpful staff member listened to the numeric item identifier as I repeated it over the phone and manually entered it into the system. However, being a savvy saleswoman, she also knew better than to trust the inventory displayed at her terminal and actually pulled the item from the floor for me, holding it at the counter since I was heading right over to purchase it.

Upon arrival, I wound my way through the various displays and discovered the item in the expected department of the store where the saleswoman found me. The transaction went relatively smoothly, aside from the obligatory sales pitch of the retailer’s branded credit card finding no purchase – though they did sneak me onto their mailing list by offering to email me a receipt. I was all set to head on to the next location when I realized my error: while I had remembered to ask for a gift receipt – granted only after the transaction was tendered – I had entirely forgotten to mention the registry! She directed me to the wedding consultants and the heart of the store.

I tentatively crept past the immaculate displays of place settings I couldn’t afford and that would never be practical with small children in the household until I found the wedding registry consultant with the power to correct my mistake. She was an older woman with neat fingernails, adequate computer skills, and familiarity with my problem. She started the registry software whose interface looked like it had been designed in the early ’90s and struggled to recall the process. She pulled out a notebook scrawled with her somewhat indecipherable handwriting and flipped through trying to find her tips & tricks for this particular task. She resorted to pulling out a large binder that was a mashup of store policies and user manual and found the page of instructions.

Not wanting to rush her but slightly impatient to venture on to the next mall for additional purchases, I read the instructions upside-down from across the desk. They were relatively straightforward but clearly not routine for this user. She looked up the bride’s name, found the registry, and eventually unearthed the screen that allowed altering the quantities for desired, purchased, and received and edited them directly. Before sending me on my merry way, she caught her own deviation from process and navigated to a different window where she again scrolled through a dense grid of product data before finding the item I purchased. She entered my name as the purchaser and the price I paid before attempting to save. An error message popped up and I could tell that this was not meant for human consumption, referring to some internal error code. When she tried again, a different error occurred, resulting in application crash. She fell back to hardcopy, scrawling the details for a later second attempt.

Having thus far survived my shopping ordeal, I doggedly drove to the next mall and planned my rapid strike and escape. This store wasn’t in the mall proper, removing some of the harrowing details or the earlier endeavour. Inside, I wandered until I found the item and then stood dutifully in line until a helpful saleswoman heard me mention the registry. I was pulled out of line to visit a separate kiosk that did not recognize the bride’s name or the groom’s name. After some reflection, the saleswoman mentioned that aggregate registries did not interface with individual retailer registry systems, preventing me from automatically reporting this sale. I forked over the money and toted my prizes back to the car, knowing that I was not yet finished, with the troubleshooting of reporting the bricks & mortar sale to the online aggregate registry system remaining ahead of me.

Still, upon reflection, discovering a bug in the online system and crashing a desktop application without even touching it is all in a day’s work for a software tester, so I can wrap my hard won gifts, don my party frock, and go off to celebrate the wedding with the satisfaction of a job well done.

Image source

Yo dawg, I herd you like ET

19 Monday Mar 2012

Posted by claire in Context, Experiences, Experiments, Hackathon, Retrospective, Testing Humor

≈ 1 Comment

I wrote out my Lab Days experience recently but didn’t get to bring you down the rabbit hole with me to experience the recursive testing goodness.

My project for Lab Days was an enhanced logging tool, but the logging is the heart of the matter, with users putting it through its paces much more stringently then the analysis functionality.

Since I usually do exploratory testing of applications at the day job and the time pressure of Lab Days left little room for formal test cases anyway, I decided to try out a new exploratory testing session logger: Rapid Reporter.

I didn’t have a lot of time to devote to learning Rapid Reporter, so I didn’t bother reading any documentation or preparing myself for how it worked, essentially exploratory testing my exploratory testing tool while exploratory testing my application under test.

It turns out this kind of recursive testing experience was just what I needed to liven things up a bit, all in the spirit of trying something new! I discovered that rapidly learning about a session logger while testing/learning a session logger, pulling log entries from an original session log, and reporting bugs via a session/chat room (HipChat) made for some perilous context-switching. More than once during the day, I had to stop what I was doing just to get my bearings.

I clearly enjoyed the experimentation because I decided to repeat the experience, though with a little less context-switching, when we upgraded our usual ET tool: Bonfire. The funniest thing about using Bonfire after working on my Lab Days project was that I realized there were tags available for log entries but the tagging indicators weren’t the same as our choice for our usability testing tool. I kept trying to use the tagging that I’d been testing all week and had to retrain myself, improving their documentation as a result of my questioning.

Still, seeing how another logging tool uses tags gave me some functionality to consider for our usability logger: how would users want to interact with tagged log entries? Clearly time to circle back with my UX designer to discuss some enhancements!

Image generated here

Three heads and a tiara

08 Thursday Mar 2012

Posted by claire in Experiences, Soft Skills, Testing Humor

≈ 2 Comments

(Trying out a shorter and more casual post style, so let me know if you like it!)

Tiara

The other day I went into our office building’s bathroom down the hall. When I went to wash my hands, I noticed a white box sitting on the counter by the sink and saw that it contained a tiara, of all improbable things.

Since it was getting to be the end of the workday on a Friday, I thought someone surely would need this for some social event over the weekend. Having only one female coworker – and she’s not a pageant contestant – I hoped it would be a lady in one of the neighboring offices and went knocking on doors. Unfortunately, the two people who answered were males who looked at me strangely.

Fortunately, one of them, a man whose first language was likely Russian, allowed for the possibility that something might just be lost in translation and took me to his HR colleague. When I explained the same thing to her, she asked the other woman in their break room about it and then followed me back down the hall to see for herself. I appreciated that she allowed for the possibility that I might be reporting something factual.

Having reported the strange observation, I left the situation in her capable hands and hoped that she found a resolution since the tiara was not still on the counter when I returned on Monday morning.

While I would like to say that I didn’t recognize the you-so-crazy looks these level-headed people were giving me, I have had enough odd bug reports to discuss with developers that I know well the look that developers favor when I approach them with a bug report: I clearly had sprouted two more heads. That had to explain the strange things I was spouting. And I certainly do appreciate the ones who willingly suspend their disbelief – or indulge their curiosity – long enough to investigate my strange claims.

Of all the people who could have found the tiara and reported its presence for claiming, at least I knew from day-to-day work experience what it was like to have three heads.

Image source

Monkey testing

23 Monday Jan 2012

Posted by claire in Testing Humor

≈ 1 Comment

Monkey chain

I discovered the term “metal monkey” today and found myself quite amused. Though it sounds like a term a barfly might use in requesting the next round of shots for his compatriots, the metal monkey turns out to be a Chinese astrological symbol, an apt subject for today’s Chinese New Year.

Metal monkeys are like testers in that they are:

  • inquisitive in the extreme, needing continual stimulation to keep themselves interested and amused
  • highly adaptable and versatile
  • enthusiastic about everything, spending time broadening their minds
  • inventive and intelligent, solving most problems quickly and skillfully
  • assimilating facts, figures, skills, and techniques quickly
  • passionate, demonstrative, strong, sophisticated, and independent

Another interesting aspect of the Chinese astrological calendar is that the element metal and the animal monkey correspond not just to years but also to days within years:

Once in two months, in the night of a Metal Monkey day (according to the sexagenary cycle in the Chinese calendar), while one sleeps, the three demons leave the body and go to the Heavenly god and report to him the sins of the person they inhabit. Then the Heavenly god shortens one’s life span according to one’s bad deeds.
— Annie Pecheva

Here is another aspect of the 3 monkeys that mirrors what testers do: report on the failures of the whole to the powers that be. Now, we don’t want to be termed demons, so we must do this respectfully but honestly. We must also be careful to focus on what is most important or be accused of nothing better than random or automated testing.

See no evil, Hear no evil, Speak no evil

Ford! There’s an infinite number of monkeys outside who want to talk to us about this script for Hamlet they’ve worked out.
— The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

In contrast, monkeys are also used to reference randomly producing input, both for the infinite monkey theorem, in which monkeys on typewriters (or rather “an abstract device that produces a random sequence of letters and symbols ad infinitum”) produce Shakespeare, and for software testing. For programmers, a monkey test is a unit test that runs with no specific test in mind. For software testers, a manual monkey test would be on-the-fly random application tests that ignore typical usage. An automated “dumb monkey test” would be an automated testing tool sending random input to the application through the user interface, which although at first seeming to have little value can produce hangs or crashes in applications, “i.e. the bugs you least want to have in your software product.”

For user experience professionals, a wireframe monkey merely churns out rapid prototypes rather than performing ideation and problem solving. Yet another mindless monkey.

Given the choice between monkeys, I myself would prefer to be metal.

Image source

Quality Is Undead

31 Monday Oct 2011

Posted by claire in Automation, CAST 2011, STARWest 2011, Testing Humor

≈ 6 Comments

QR Skull

Though many give credence to the sentiment that quality is dead, testers linger like ghosts with unfinished business who cannot move on from this plane. There is never as much time for testing as we would like and some of our bug reports are regarded with as much skepticism as messages from beyond the grave. We tend to haunt the developers with questions and carefully couched criticisms, and I daresay that some programmers might like to call for an exorcism.

We may think of ourselves as shuffling zombies toward the end of a long release cycle, when testing time is often sacrified for feature implementation and we can end up working long hours, though thrown under the bus may not be the worst way to go. Those carefully scrutinizing our exceptional strength to endure the inevitable crunch time, our keen powers of observation in uncovering bugs, and our cold appraisal of the software will realize our true nature and may start stocking up on stakes and garlic, peering into our cubes looking for the coffins where we sleep as we must surely be vampires instead. So far, I have no reports of testers biting co-workers, however tempting at times. After all, wouldn’t we want to pass on our dark gifts to our team mates, test-infecting them to become more like us?

Testing wants Braaaains

At STARWest 2011, James Whittaker and Jeff Payne heralded a dark future for testers without automation scripting skills. While I welcome the increasing testing prowess of software developers, their testing focus is on automation, whether at the unit level or something more closely approximating an end user’s interaction. I have started thinking of my automation test suite as my zombie horde: persistent but plodding on unthinking, repeatedly running into obstacles, requiring tending. It really want some brains to interpret the results, maintain its eccentricities, and perhaps play some games in the backyard shed. As Michael Bolton stated at CAST 2011, lots of automated checks versus doing human-observed testing is one of the hard problems of testing. “A computer executing automated tests only makes one kind of observation, it lacks human judgement.”

Even these fast zombies are not a replacement for the thinking mind of a tester, though how to think about testing is a question of much debate. Testers from different schools seem to regard one another with a bit of hostility. Each successive school of thought seems to bury the preceding one with great ceremony, including the departed’s whole entourage for the journey to the afterlife. Those thus interred seem like mummies, desiring a terrible vengeance on the ones disturbing their eternal rest or even grave-robbing their ideas. At CAST 2011, Michael Bolton encouraged us to take a more measured tone with people who disagree with us, referencing Cem Kaner’s sentiment that “reasonable people can disagree reasonably.”

Memento Mori

With the Day of the Dead celebration occurring this week, it seems fitting to ponder our own demise as testers. Those celebrating this holiday want to encourage visits by the dead, so the living can talk to them, remembering funny events and anecdotes about the departed, perhaps even dressing up as them. Some create short poems, called calaveras (“skulls”), as mocking epitaphs of friends, describing interesting habits and attitudes or funny anecdotes.

So here is a calavera for me:

Here lies our dear departed Claire Moss
We miss her because she could test like a boss.
When a defect appeared before her eyes,
Her lilting voice would intone “Hey guys…?”
At best, she was a code monkey,
but her sense of humor was always funky.
Though she claimed her heart was in her test,
we always know she loved us best.

I encourage you, the living, to visit me with events, anecdotes, or funny poems. Whatever undead creature your tester persona most identifies with, keep on pursuing excellence and have a happy Halloween!

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