investigating software

 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...

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 customers and the bottom line of companies (seemingly) unconnected with Facebook such as Spotify, Tik-Tok and SoundCloud, and probably countless smaller companies. So why did the journalist seem to think it was small? Too often we judge the systems we create by how likely they are to fail, given our narrow view of the world. A better measure is our exposure when the systems fail . The exposure for Facebook is a greater motivation for other companies to disentangle themselves from Facebook's SDK, or promote a rival platform. It doesn't matter if our bug is one tiny assumption or one character out of place, if it stops a million people from using or buying an app then it's a huge bug.  ...