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Just ban just!

Office meetings are interesting events. Seriously, even the most boring ones. There's usually an important reason for the meeting, even if that meeting has been lost in the sands of Outlook repeat-booking, or the present attendees feel strongly otherwise. There's usually some kind of agenda, although as the meeting progresses, you may suspect the real agenda is hidden. But none of that is what captures my imagination. What sticks in my mind is the perspectives of the people in the room, especially when they are talking about a subject close to my heart like testing. We can't help but give away our positions and perceived hierarchies when discussing what work we need to do, and how. For example have you heard someone utter, in a meeting, words to the effect of: "Just create a fully automated framework for our regression test pack, to test the future releases." Then continue on, as if they had asked to "borrow a pen", or if you could "just adjust t...

ID Skeptic

At a client site, a few years ago, I had an interesting discussion with a 'senior programmer'. Our discussion centred on a configurable home-page. A user could decide what news or other information etc, they wanted to display on their home page. They'd start off by being given a generic page - and the customer could add or remove certain types of content to customise their page. Once they saved the 'new look' site, their choices would be saved on the web-server. The company didn't want to force people to login, or even make them sign-up for an account. The goal was to keep it simple for the user. But they needed a way to uniquely identify the users, so they used an existing feature of the website. The first time a user came to the site, they were cookied with a 'unique' id 'code'. We could then use this identifier as a key in our database to store the details of what the users had configured their homepage to look like. The testers reading th...

Saving Time?

For those of you that don't know, I'm somewhat of an amateur horologist. I love clocks, watches and all sorts of time and date keeping gadgets. To feed my passion I've decided to invest in my own custom made timepiece. This device will be my first custom made high value item, in what I hope will one day be a great collection. To ensure I get what I want, I've taken some time and documented the following requirements for my new clock. They list what I want from the timepiece, and also what I don't want or need. Have a read through, and hopefully you'll see what it is I'm after. A new clock should be developed for my new home in London. The clock will need to: - Display the time. - Display in roman numerals and modern  'arabic' numerals . - Be accurate enough for household use - approx' to with in a few minutes. - Be ornamental - preferably with a intricately styled clock face. - Have a traditional square brass clock face - Be construct...

Serendipity

Recently, I was testing a new feature for a client, it had a known bug, that I'd found in prior testing, for which we'd figured-out a work-around. I was now performing further testing of the feature, hoping to discover more issues and figure out how it behaves a little better. Does not apply to testers. By this time, the work-around had become the norm - the expected mode of operation for the feature. Essentially this 'bug' had been found and was now fixed. Time had moved on. So what did I do? I ignored the work-around, applied my 'test load' to the system and activated the new feature. The failure was somewhat spectacular. A short while later the entire system was inoperable and a restart of several servers was required. This was interesting. If I'd had expectations of what would happen, then it would of been for something simpler, less severe and closer to what had happened when I first found the bug that required the workaround. After some invest...

Counting Strings

If you've done the Rapid Software Testing course , then you'll probably be familiar with the Perlclip tool, from James Bach . If not, its a useful tool for generating strings of test text. In particular I find the Perlclip Counter-string function to be pretty useful. Counterstring builds a string that indicates its own length. E.g.: "*3*5*7*10*" The last asterisk is the 10th character. Now available as a Firefox Add-on ! I've taken the counterstring functionality and implemented it in HTML and Javascript. While this form does not do everything the original [and the best] does, It might be useful for it to be accessible anywhere via a web page. All credit for the usefulness of this goes to James Bach, all the bugs are probably my doing. Thats right - its got bugs, like you don't have to enter a character for the 'mark' or it lets you use numbers for the 'mark'. Older versions did odd things in IE6 etc. There are no doubt many more bugs......

The Hunky-dory Hypothesis

"If we just run it with this data, and it looks Ok, we'll know it works" the architect says expectantly, "Right?" "You're right, We might see 'it work'", "How would that help?" I answer. "Well errh, it works, so we can put it live tomorrow." We've seen this situation before; it can arrive in conversation like the above, or from a review of Acceptance Test results or in a host of other forms. The premise is: everything is fine, we've done the work - we have evidence everything is done and working. But, how can demonstrating that the application can 'work' help? How will seeing the acceptance test results as 'green' help? That might sound nonsensical, but seriously: how does it help our customer make the decision to ship [or not]? Or help them distribute people and resources better? It may seem that telling them 'its all hunky-dory' is news and good news at that, but it isn't. It...

Conspicuous in their absence

If you're a tester then you'll no doubt of heard phrases to the effect of "That's pretty unlikely", "Our users don't do that" or "Thats a fairly minor browser". Its been blogged about before , and elsewhere. The argument is many users are niche, novice, confused or from different backgrounds / viewpoints / languages. These are realistic and probably correct hypotheses, for many situations. From my experience, thats often where the discussion ends, someone makes a judgement call, and the issue is fixed, mitigated or ignored. More often, than not, its ignored. That decision should probably be a business decision, its their money. But can they make such a decision safely? We are asking for consent to 'not operate' or 'operate' on their software. To come to the right decision, they need to be fully informed. i.e.: Are we sure that the issue is indeed rare? Are they making a properly informed decision? For example what if th...