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…

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How did you find that bug? Are we sitting comfortably, then I'll begin.

How did you find that bug? - They asked with a sort of puzzled "he dun't thunk like uz" look on their faces. An expression that suggested they were unsure whether to commend the discovery or gather their pitchforks and organise a well overdue witch burning.

Likewise, I now knew why they needed me. The team members were genuinely hard working people trying to build something new and exciting. But they lacked one thing, someone exploring & asking questions - trying to find out new things about their application. Exploring is literally a step into the unknown, and that can be uncomfortable for those not experienced in how to do it well.
So how did I find that bug? It's easy to tell a story of how I tried that particular input value because... Paragraph 3 of v4.6 of the requirements document stated that the user shall indeed on occasion X given input Y in Chrome v62 do... Or spout some other overly verbose explanation of why that broken 'scenario' came to be…

investigating software

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