Notes on testing, automation, and software craft.
We wind the clock back to November 2019 and investigate the failure of voting machines in Northampton County, Pa., USA. We break down what went wrong, what caused the problem and what we can learn about the risks of software development from this high profile incident. The show… more »
When I’m debugging a complex system, I’m constantly looking for patterns. I just ran this test code... What did I see in the log? I just processed a metric $^&\ load of data, did our memory footprint blip? I’m probably using every freedom unit of screen space to tail logs, run a… more »
There's no such thing as a small bug. Customers, be they people or businesses, do not measure Software bugs in metres, feet or miles or kilograms. They use measures like time wasted, life lost and money. Take a recent bug from Facebook. It affected thousands, maybe millions of… more »
A long time ago, in a country far away, a cunning politician suggested a way to reduce crime. He stated that a simple test that could be used to catch all the criminals. When tested, all the criminals would fail the test and be locked up. There’d be no need for expensive courts… more »
Sometimes finding out why something is broken is a long and painful process. You might have to trawl through a tonne of data, logs or equipment. Filtering out what looks OK from what looks, suspect. These laborious investigative tasks are in the back of our mind when we’re asked… more »
“Muggins! 2 for 15. My points!” My son shouts in my face. I frown and re examine my cards, sure enough, I’ve missed a card combination. I scramble for a response… “Err... ACC Rule 10 sub section 1 part (b) states I have to be informed prior to the game that the rule is in… more »
Most of my recent work has been with DevOps teams. While in one sense DevOps is another evolution in software development. It also introduces some new skill requirements and responsibilities into the daily routine of a tester. These diagrams tend to confuse people, hence the… more »
I've written about the joys of Unicode and software development before. Using unexpected data in your testing is usually a good way to test for text encoding issues. Finding and fixing these those bugs early could save your team from a host of other related issues and hackery.… more »
It's 1982 and there's a bull market in the western stock exchanges. After being in the doldrums for 6 years the Dow Jones Industrial Average index is climbing steeply. In London, the FTSE 100 index is also witnessing a steady climb, despite the ongoing war in the South Atlantic.… more »
“I figured it was just a jumbo jet.” My son and I shake our heads & then adopt blank stares as if a non body snatcher has been exposed in our midst. “Twin engine,” I utter, as I glance skyward again. “Single decker” My son adds as an explanation. “It’s a plane”, she retorts… more »