Google testing blog comment...

I recently read a post on the Google Testing blog titled: How Google Tests Software - Part Three. I added a comment to the post, but that comment has yet to appear. I thought I'd add post my comment here in the mean time. (I've added some links here, for the curious)

“I agree that 'quality' can not be 'tested in'. But the approach you describe appears to go-ahead and attempt to do something just, if not more, difficult. You suggest that a programmer will produce quality work by just coding 'better'. While a skilled and experienced programmer is capable of producing high quality software, who will tell them when they don't or can't? We are all potentially victims of the Dunning–Kruger effect, and as such we need co-workers to help.

There are a host of biases that stop a programmer, product owner or project manager from questioning their work. The confirmation and congruence bias to name just two. These are magnified by group-think, and without the input of a more independent, experienced and skilled critical thinker, soon allow mistakes to occur.

Think of it this way, how do you know your products are good enough? how do you know they are not plagued by flaws? Flaws like: a message that tells me my payment method is invalid - before I've entered one or the absence of a scale on the iPhone maps app.”

Comments

Can Gen-AI understand Payments?

When it comes to rolling out updates to large complex banking systems, things can get messy quickly. Of course, the holy grail is to have each subsystem work well independently and to do some form of Pact or contract testing – reducing the complex and painful integration work. But nonetheless – at some point you are going to need to see if the dog and the pony can do their show together – and its generally better to do that in a way that doesn’t make millions of pounds of transactions fail – in a highly public manner, in production. (This post is based on my recent lightning talk at PyData London ) For the last few years, I’ve worked in the world of high value, real time and cross border payments, And one of the sticking points in bank [software] integration is message generation. A lot of time is spent dreaming up and creating those messages, then maintaining what you have just built. The world of payments runs on messages, these days they are often XML messages – and they ...

Text to SWIFT - making data from prose (What possible use could Gen AI be to me? - Part 2)

As I write this, my dog is grumpily moving around the room pausing intermittently to give me disappointed looks - looks that only my elderly mother could compete with. She (my dog) is annoyed by the robot vacuum cleaner. Its not been run for a while in that room - and its making a noisy foray into dark corners in a valiant effort to cleanse the mess. Its grinding gears and the cloud of dust in its wake is not helping to ease the dogs nerves. The dog's pleading puppy dog eyes & emotions have of course been anthropomorphised - at least a bit - by me (My dog is 7 years old and weighs over 20kg - so has little to fear). That is - I've taken human feelings and mapped them onto my dog. I know she has emotions - but she lacks language - or at least a language that (1) we humans understand, (2) maps to the same phrases or concepts I'm using. But I'm human, That's how I think and how I interact with people and sometimes - machines. Deciphering the problem and representi...

Don't be a Vogon, make it easy to access your test data!

The beginning of the hitch-hikers guide to the galaxy leads with an alien ship about to destroy the Earth, and the aliens saying we (mankind) should have been more prepared – as a notice had been on display quite clearly – on Alpha Centauri the nearby star system, for 50 years. Seriously, people - what are you moaning about – get with the program? The book then continues with the theme of bureaucratic rigidity and shallow interpretations of limited data. E.g. The titular guide’s description of the entire Earth is one word: “Harmless”, but after extensive review the new edition will state: “Mostly harmless”. Arthur Dent argues with the Vogons about poor data access This rings true for many software testing work, especially those with externally developed software, be that external to the team or external to the company. The same approaches that teams use to develop their locally developed usually don’t work well. This leads to a large suite of shallow tests that are usually h...

investigating software

Search This Blog