Provenance & Profiling

Is your car German or Japanese? Are your chocolates from Belgium? And your wine, which country might that be from? There's a good chance you know the answer to some of those questions. Our culture places value on provenance. That is, we care where our possessions originate. It's something we tend to notice.

Warning label?

Furthermore, we ascribe, often without our notice, characteristics to things because of their provenance. For example, that's a Japanese radio - its reliable but not cheap, etc. I often do this un-empirically, without measurement or examination. (that's a flaw)

For software testing, our automatic identification of provenance can be both a useful tool and a distraction.

Noticing where or from whom a feature originated can be enlightening. You may learn over time that a particular team or person tends to implement certain things well, and others things not so well.

This has a tendency to help me to find some bugs relatively easily with individual teams. The first time it may have been time-consuming to see an issue. On subsequent releases, annoyingly easy.

That emotion is useful. Its an indication that you have, maybe subconsciously, profiled the team. You can direct your response to that feeling, in constructive ways. For example, searching for a route cause or suggesting the addition of some unit tests.

It can be useful to think and deliberate over how you may have profiled the teams or people. Again, this is valuable 'intelligence,' the profile can help with planning your time and focusing test automation efforts. Though, the pattern also embodies a form of bias. You should be aware that you are subject to this bias, and routinely double check your assumptions.

It would be easy to concentrate too long on easy to find - known unknowns that were easy to spot thanks to your biased view. To increase our opportunities for discovering new types of issues, set aside time for investigating the app in other ways.

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The gamification of Software Testing

A while back, I sat in on a planning meeting. Many planning meetings slide awkwardly into a sort of ad-hoc technical analysis discussion, and this was no exception. With a little prompting, the team started to draw up what they wanted to build on a whiteboard.

The picture spoke its thousand words, and I could feel that the team now understood what needed to be done. The right questions were being asked, and initial development guesstimates were approaching common sense levels.

The discussion came around to testing, skipping over how they might test the feature, the team focused immediately on how long testing would take.

When probed as to how the testing would be performed? How we might find out what the team did wrong? Confused faces stared back at me. During our ensuing chat, I realised that they had been using BDD scenarios [only] as a metric of what testing needs to be done and when they are ready to ship. (Now I knew why I was hired to help)

There is nothing wrong with checking t…

Manumation, the worst best practice.

There is a pattern I see with many clients, often enough that I sought out a word to describe it: Manumation, A sort of well-meaning automation that usually requires frequent, extensive and expensive intervention to keep it 'working'.

You have probably seen it, the build server that needs a prod and a restart 'when things get a bit busy'. Or a deployment tool that, 'gets confused' and a 'test suite' that just needs another run or three.

The cause can be any number of the usual suspects - a corporate standard tool warped 5 ways to make it fit what your team needs. A one-off script 'that manager' decided was an investment and needed to be re-used... A well-intended attempt to 'automate all the things' that achieved the opposite.

They result in a manually intensive - automated process, where your team is like a character in the movie Metropolis, fighting with levers all day, just to keep the lights on upstairs. Manual-automation, manumatio…

Scatter guns and muskets.

Many, Many years ago I worked at a startup called Lastminute.com (a European online travel company, back when a travel company didn't have to be online). For a while, I worked in what would now be described as a 'DevOps' team. A group of technical people with both programming and operational skills.

I was in a hybrid development/operations role, where I spent my time investigating and remedying production issues using my development, investigative and still nascent testing skills. It was a hectic job working long hours away from home. Finding myself overloaded with work, I quickly learned to be a little ruthless with my time when trying to figure out what was broken and what needed to be fixed.
One skill I picked up, was being able to distinguish whether I was researching a bug or trying to find a new bug. When researching, I would be changing one thing or removing something (etc) and seeing if that made the issue better or worse. When looking for bugs, I'd be casting…

investigating software

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