• How to Sabotage Quality: No Shortcuts

  IN 1944 the organization that would later become the CIA sent a manual to their operatives working in the underground resistance in Europe. The manual was called the Simple Sabotage Field Manual. It contained advice on how people could quietly sabotage enemy operations. Let’s see what we can learn from it. Much of it has to do with physical equipment, but for those of us in knowledge work the section on General Interference with Organizations and Production is instructive. Insist on doing everything through “channels.” Never permit short-cuts to be taken in order to expedite decisions. This is an interesting one for software testers to consider. Shortcuts can get a bad rap in our part of the industry. We tell people to do things the right way and to not take shortcuts in their design, development and testing. But are all short-cuts bad? If a short-cut gets you to the desired outcome more quickly is it bad? Part of quality is consistency and some of the “channels” in our companies help keep things consistent. Sometimes shortcuts are bad, but if we never allow them, we won’t learn new and better ways to do things. We don’t need to embrace “cowboy coding” but we can still have flexibility about how tightly we follow procedures. Part of producing good quality code is having the wisdom to know what kind of shortcuts will get you to the destination faster and which ones will leave you lost in the forest calling for help. Don’t[…]

  12.08.2022 | 9:04 קרא עוד...

• My first and most memorable defect!

  As test engineers, we fondly remember the defects that we found in our careers – the first one, the most memorable one, the nastiest one, and so on. Well, in my case, there have been several nasty ones, and they are countless – core dumps and such. But I fondly remember the first one and that happens to be the most memorable defect too. This also happened to be my first Software Testing project that I worked in. I was working on a C compiler as part of the development team, maintaining some modules that need to be rewritten for new requirements. A team member was working on a new casting requirement for a new data type, and another one was working on optimization of target code generated out of the DAG. As these two people didn’t have a bandwidth to test their modules with an ‘out-of-the-box’ thinking, and since they were focusing on their own individual modules and no one was looking at the product from an integration perspective, I was asked to do some ‘sanity’ checks to make sure that the modules worked fine with each other when integrated. So, I sat thinking about what would comprehensively test these two modules together. On one side, I got to test the new data type, and on the other side, I need to make sure that the output assembly is fine. I figured that the only way to do that would be to execute each and every data type along[…]

  12.08.2022 | 2:53 קרא עוד...

• The Agile Manifesto is a poor introduction to Agile

  Last week Elizabeth Zagroba asked on Twitter: If someone was completely new to working on software on an Agile team, what would you want them to read about Agile first? My first thought was: "The Agile Manifesto!" After a second thought, though, I reconsidered and replied: And I would recommend against reading the Agile Manifesto without consulting any secondary sources, except if you read it in the same way as you would visit a historical site "just to see where it all happened". As I wrote this, I could not really put my finger on why exactly I felt this way. The best I could come up with was that the Agile Manifesto is hard to understand on its own. You need some historical context and practical experience to make sense of it. Serendipity came to the rescue, though, as I'm currently reading Seeing Like a State by James C. Scott. Chapter 9 of the book focuses on the Greek concept of mētis (μῆτις) and how it relates to rules of thumb. Turns out that this explains why the Agile Manifesto is a poor introduction to Agile. Read more… (6 min remaining to read)

  12.08.2022 | 2:37 קרא עוד...

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