Testing Thoughts

The style on this post is like no other I wrote. But it’s great fun.

Last month I visited the STAR East conference. It was over two weeks ago, which on the internet age makes it old news.
I follow my own clock, however, and will start posting about STAR East only now. Scott Rosenberg would call this type of blogging ‘history’ instead of ‘journalism’ (link), and it sounds just as fine.

In next blog posts, I’ll write about what happened at STAR. What happens in Orlando doesn’t stay there.
But on this one, it’s a bit about what happened in the way there.

For some time before travelling, I’ve been thinking about physical problems that resemble computer bugs. “Spirits in the material world”. For example:

In this picture you can (barely) see a water bottle that was forgotten by a worker on my neighbors’ roof. Just like a programmer would forget a temporary variable she invented to get some refreshment from the code inherent limitations, a worker will forget his own refreshment once it isn’t needed anymore.

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Back on December, Pradeep Soundararajan set a challenge up in his blog.
He built an application with the description below:

This was an interesting exercise.
What took my interest in this one?
- First of all, I liked Pradeep’s post about learning to code.
Learning to code is an important skill for a tester. I can relate to it because I am trying to learn PowerShell. I program in some languages (C#, C++, PHP, VbScript…) and have a programming background (after my Computer Systems Engineer degree, the ‘natural’ path was to code, and I worked as a programmer for many years before finding Software Testing), but PowerShell has different approach and paradigms and learning it will definitely be fun.
- Second, I had an impromptu vacation day, and I thought it would be educational to use it for a peer testing puzzle. I thought I could win this one quickly (I was mistaken, it took me long).

So I downloaded Pradeep’s application, and got to work!
Rather than just trying to solve the puzzle, I looked at it as if the mission was:
“This is commercial 'roulette' style game. Stakeholders want to know it the game logic can be broken/learnt, which could mean a substantial loss of money when people start winning every time.”

Testing Hint: Cem Kaner says “Testing is an empirical, technical investigation of a product, done on behalf of stakeholders, with the intention of revealing quality-related information of the kind that they seek“. So it is important to set straight what is the information to seek. Which kind of bugs to look for?

In this blog I describe my attemp to answer this question in an exploratory way. (more…)

Demetri Martin

One best friend of mine introduced me to Mitch Hedberg and Demetri Martin, great one-liner comedians. They are/were two funny men!! Three, actually, if you count my friend which is also funny. 

After hearing the disks for over a year, not only the jokes aren’t any less funny, but I’ve started to find subliminal testing messages in them .
I’m writing down these “insights” because I find value in them. And even if they fail to teach you something… Hey! At least the jokes are pretty funny!
So here go some favorite quotes, and their parallel in testing: 

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(Disclosure: I am not a lawyer!) (Request: Are you a lawyer? Please send me corrections )

Matters related to law, and all the discussions around it, interest me much — especially when related to Software.
This made me read about the subject and keep contact with the legal representatives within the company I work for. This also motivated me to learn and lecture about the legal guidelines in software development adopted by our company, and to lecture about legal matters on software in general at the last Israeli SIGiST conference.
Most important than all, this made people share with me a lot of comments, questions and stories pertaining to the law.

For example, one colleague brought to my attention a case in which he and some friends had bought a PlayStation 3 in the local Office Depot website for 220NIS – when the normal price is almost tenfold! They believed it was some special sale promotion, but at the end Office Depot announced it as a typing mistake and cancelled the sale after it had been acknowledged (sale confirmation by email).
(There is an article about the episode in Hebrew here if you want to see it).

What is my opinion on the legal aspects of the story? I was asked.
I don’t have one, as I am not a legal professional, I answered. I am, though, a Testing professional, and here is the tester rambling I sent by mail commenting the occurrence:

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I was reading a job position offering these days for a “QA engineer“.
There was the usual mumbo jumbo of the required traits (“BSC in computer science or equivalent“, “Worked directly with R&D department“) and advantage points (“General knowledge of at least one mainstream (programming) language“), and one of the requirements lines said “Testing methodologies: STD, STP“.
I got curious to know what these methodologies are and what the TLA mean, so I called the company offering the job: (more…)

I like the SQE.
SQE brings columns by Michael Bolton almost monthly on the Better Magazine. They also arrange the nice STAR conferences (hadn’t the opportunity to participate yet, but I will eventually) and store a large number of articles online of all testing flavors.

Today morning I was greeted by an Email from SQE: The subject read “Are you certifiable?“.
My first reaction was to discuss the term. If I am certifiable? I? In my mind, I was arguing whether a person can be considered certifiable or maybe the topic of certification is the one certifiable.
As in “Software Testing is (or not) a certifiable topic” against “Johnny is a certifiable (or not) software tester”.

I was puzzled over the confusing choice of words:

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I’ve recently heard The Graphing Calculator Story, a ~54:00 min long Google Tech video on YouTube. On it, Ron Avitzur tells the story of the development of his (and Greg’s) Graphing Calculator, an impressive mathematical software that shipped with Mac computers for years.
What’s special about the story? Well, he did it at Apple, but for free (his contract was already closed), and in secret (Apple had cancelled the project). As he says, sneaking into the building and volunteering for an eight billion dollar corporation.

I enjoyed the story very much. It is very exciting to see the passion he had (has) for his software and how he was committed to it. Plus, Ron is a great story teller.
The graphing calculator had all the ingredients of a cool app. It scratched a developer’s personal itch, and is a great example of NeoVictorian computing: built for people, built by people, crafted in workshop, inspired.
Actually, if we’re commenting on NeoVictorianism, Ron was one that really “woke up one day to find himself living in the software factory“. The night got very cold, they said the factory is going to close and he should move somewhere else. The cool part? He kept doing his individual craftsmanship inside the corporation. Secretly.

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Hi.

Writing the Fitnesse posts turned to be harder than I thought.
I do have a bit of tests ready for the triangle case, but not enough text to make an interesting post. As I’m not using Fitnesse in my day-to-day work, it makes it harder to bring cool insights or to explore on the framework.

But I just discovered someone who not only uses Fitnesse at work, but also writes articles about Fitnesse that give the Fitnese feeling:

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We all are told constantly not to think like a programmers.
We’ve told other people dozens of times “Don’t you think like a programmer. We don’t care why the software does it – it is still wrong”.

For testers, thinking like developers is evil. If you think like a programmer, you’ll start excusing the software and will forgive the system’s bugs.

I am reading the very cool book “Dreaming in Code” by Scott Rosenberg, and I just understood a little bit more on why’s so bad sharing the developers mindset.

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I’ve started a quote collection. Many times I want to quote someone but I just don’t remember how exactly the phrase was. Or remember the quote but am not certain on the source…

I am fond of quoting.
Not sure why, but I like to quote. I guess it gives some legitimating to what I am saying.

So, the quote collection is available at this address: http://testing.gershon.info/quote-collection/. It will grow slowly, please check it regularly.

Do you use MS Office 2007?
Well, then you probably noticed that Excel multiplies “850 x 77.1″ as “100,000″ instead of “65,535″.

Uh, you didn’t notice? Well neither did I until I read it all over the internet.
See the post on SlashDot for scoop, and see its comments for some good laughs.

There are explanations all around about how this bug came to appear in Excel.
The best one is probably Joel’s one (you may remember Joel from this post). (more…)

• Which came first, the chicken or the egg? And after all, why would any of them cross the road?
  That question is as old as time.
• How would you test a program which can return the type of a triangle based on the side widths?
  That question is as old as me.

In 1979 (yes, I am that young ), Glenford J. Myers wrote what was to be the first classic book on Software Testing.
Called “The Art of Software Testing“, this book is very old, and written with old software in mind – most technologies and methodologies existing today were not dreamed of back then.
Well, it turns out the principles of software – from writing it to testing it - are still pretty much the same. Software is still written on sort of punchcards, the punchcards just got more complex and flexible… The book content is surprisingly relevant for today’s testers – so much, that it was updated only once in almost 30 years.
If you haven’t, read the book. Unfortunately, I have read it only partially meanwhile.

Maybe the most known contribution of Mr. Glenford in this book is the testing self-assessment challenge in the introduction.

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Do you FitNesse?

I’ll (as soon as I get to do a lot of things I want to get done) post some impressions and examples on FitNesse, the cool tool for cool testers.

What I plan to do:

1. Install and set a FitNesse setup;
2. Make a simple standard easy program – the System Under Test!
3. Start testing and making the program better with FitNesse.
4. And all this, with screenshot goodness!

When will that be?

• Ouch. It may take a long time. Let’s talk about this again on July…

Meanwhile: “FitNesse is designed to support acceptance testing rather than unit testing in that it facilitates detailed readable description of system function”. More information can be read in FitNesse’s website.