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Showing posts from December, 2017

The Obscure One

Heraclitus wrote these words 2500 years ago: "Ever-newer waters flow on those who step into the same rivers." or paraphrased in more colloquial English: You never stand in the same river twice. Known as the "The obscure one" to some of his contemporaries, he was known to make statements that were considered paradoxical and sometimes unhelpfully contradictory. I don't know about you  - but sometimes when discussing testing feedback - I feel like I am channeling the ghost of Heraclitus. His comments regarding walking through rivers are an apt description of our work with software and its versioning. Do we ever play with the same app twice? On a trivial level, we do. When we widen our view we can see that the waters have moved on. For example,  The time has changed. It may even have gone back to a previous date and time.  The code is probably located in a different memory location.  The app and operating system are probably facing different types of

Pick a card...

Take a pack of cards, shuffle them well, and place them on the desk in front of you. Could you accurately tell me what the order of the cards would be, without looking?   By Rosapicci - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0 Now spend 2 weeks in a software development team, writing code & using services, and deploy that code to your cloud server environments. Could you tell me where the bugs would be, before looking? In both cases we have a rough idea of what’s in the product at the end. But the detail, how its actually going to play out? we have no realistic idea. Skeptical? Take the playing cards… If we lay the cards out one card at a time. Then the order in which they are laid out, has probably never been seen before. Ever.The number of permutations of the well-known 52 playing card pack is 80,658,175,170,943,878,571,660,636,856,403,766,975,289,505,440,883,277,824,000,000,000,000. OK, now let’s get back to our code. Even trivial apps, include dozens of code libr