Adam White

I did some exploring on their site and liked their premise “Get fast, honest, feedback from people you trust” 3 easy steps 1) Ask a question of people you trust  2) Get honest, private feedback 3) Use their feedback to improve. Sounds easy enough. I noticed that they are in beta so I thought I would sign up and try their product out.

I got a note saying it would be a few days before my account was set up. I sent them a note stating that I’d like to test their product for two reasons. I’m a Director of Software Testing who would like to get back in touch with hands on testing during vacation and secondly I really like the idea behind the product since I’m a Director of Testing and enjoy feedback. I got my activation within about an hour Sometimes it pays to ask.

I’ve been watching James Bach and Michael Bolton’s blog threads on their testing of IMVU. They have uncovered some things I find very interesting. Most of the items pointed out in IMVUs software turned out to be not important by IMVU’s standards and their impression of what end users want (and I got the impression that it wasn’t important to IMVU as a business either).

One thing I would like to see James and Michael blog about is how they could provide information to IMVU that was useful and important to them. What is that IMVU actually cares about in regards to its software? How does one go about discovering this information?

I decided I could demonstrate my process for discovering this type of information. I’ve been heavily influenced by James and Michael throughout my career and this seems like a great way to showcase those learnings applied to products most people can access.

What I will be posting over the next few days is my interpretation of the heuristic test strategy model and the principles of Rapid Software Testing applied to two applications I have been exploring. The first one is called TinEye from Idee and the second one is a product called Rypple 

I’m still forming notes – so stay tuned for my findings.

P.S – Thanks to those who wrote to give me a kick in the butt to remind me to write

Warning – 3/4 finished thought.

In the event of an unknown or unexpected system behavior in the software world – the test plan documents mean nothing.

When we develop our testing strategy we do two things – outline what we WILL  test AND what we are NOT going to test. The latter is always one of the hardest to figure out, explain and do effectively.  A close relationship with development is required. Trust from both sides is crucial. Expert knowledge of the system and how changes affect it is required. 95% of the time this process works but other times it backfires. It is usually the unknowns that screw us.

For project X a lead tester wrote a test plan document to satisfy project stakeholders. The document brought up lots of good questions and discussion. The one section that got a fair amount of discussion was the “Not going to test” section. We explicitly stated that PERFFORMANCE would NOT be TESTED. We would eyeball the performance (web based UI connected to our 4 year old core server technology) and not provide a formal analysis of request/response times. Why take this approach? We had done load testing with a shipping release build 1 month prior. We got benchmarks, provided this info to development and discussed the risks. Everything looked good. There was no reason for any of us to suspect performance problems.  Everyone agreed “There should be no reason we would have performance problems”. All project stakeholders “signed off” on the test plan. 

What do you think the single biggest problem found while testing?

(more…)

I was playing around with a visual method of designing test – classification trees. I was bored of the same ole’ same ole’ you know. RazorCat is the only software that I know of that visually depicts classification trees. (although I haven’t looked that hard)

As I was signing up I got this error message. What would you do in this case?

There is no hardware id in the form – ahhhh – I’m going insane It’s almost like the error message that said “Press the any key”

Here is a bug that didn’t impact me very much but I can easily think of a situation when it might.

I was looking for job descriptions to use as an example for a task I was doing. My search of QA had returned 504 results which was fine….until I couldn’t see them all.

In this context that’s fine – but what if I was filtering resumes here. The last 4 candidates wouldn’t get seen. They might be my ideal candidates!!

Video here

As I was writing this post I decided to see if I could reproduce this. I couldn’t get it with the “QA” query as it appears that there are only 495 postings related to that.

I tried another generic term “Analyst” – it returned 1821 hits and I could only get to 1000 of these. I used the go to page function – page 40 is the final page and there is no next button so now i’m either missing 821 potential jobs or the stats being displayed are wrong. Take your pick

I was featured in a Globe and Mail article last week on surviving the tech meltdown.

Check it out here

The print edition had a picture of me as well.

In retrospective – if I hadn’t been laid off in 2001 – I probably wouldn’t have become a software tester or if I did it would have been a very different path.

It’s pretty cool to be in a national newspaper. I’ve already had a linked in request and a friend from university, who resides in Bermuda, get in touch with me. I didn’t expect either of these things to happen. It’s all about the network!!!

I’ve got a problem I’m trying to solve and I need your input. We have a lab of 150 servers and are about to double the size. We need a tool to help with the scheduling of the servers to projects and people. We can’t seem to locate such a tool even though I’m sure we aren’t the first ones with this problem.

We haven’t been able to find any tool that solves this problem. Do you know of something handles this? Maybe there is an existing tool that is used for project management that could be adapted to this use? I just don’t know of any.

Perhaps my Google searches need refining “hardware resource scheduling”, “hardware tracking” turned up nothing of use.

Do you know of anyone who might know someone who has experience with solving this type of problem? If you do – I’d love to hear from you

My fiance gave me a 3rd generation ipod for christmas. Its pretty sweet. I like the coverflow feature. I spent waaaay too much time download covers and updating album names.

Today was the first day I took the ipod out for a run. One thing I love about the old is one hand navigation. I had no reason to believe this one would be different. But….it is.

Let’s do a little usability experiment. If you have a new ipod then hold it in your right hand and toggle the position of the lock.

Now switch it to you left hand and toggle the position of the lock.

Is there a difference? Yup.

Is it harder to do with your left hand than your right? Definitely

Does it make one handed operation of the ipod impossible? Yes – unless you employ both hands or do some fancy manipulating with your left hand.

You might have guessed that I’m left-handed. I can hear all the right handers saying in their sympathetic tone – suck it up.

Normally I do but this little quirk seems silly coming from a company that is supposed to be leading edge in design and usability.

From my vantage point this is a huge usability bug. I can no longer operate my nano with one hand.

I wonder if apple has any left handers on their design/usability/test team

I like to do testing exercises with my team. Below is a list of links to various activities I have done with the team at some point in time. I usually turn these things into an interactive session. I thought I would share my list with you in case you want to do some of them with your team (or by yourself)

Observation skills
Which way is she spinning?

A similar picture

Cartoon
Powers of Observation

Activity – watch videos and answer questions at the end
New TV Show

Observation – General Link
http://www.smart-kit.com/scategory/brain-art/>Brain Art

Are the two blocks different colors?

How many differences can you find?
Spot the Differences

Activity for Team
How many F’s?

Activity
Optical Illusion

Cartoon
Perception

Video
The Amazing Color Changing Card trick

Where  possible with these exercises I get the team write out their observations before we go into discussions about what they see. This is to help prevent certain biases from showing up – mainly confirmation and hindsight biases

Confirmation bias, according to wikipedia, is a tendency to search for or interpret new information in a way that confirms one’s preconceptions and avoid information and interpretations which contradict prior beliefs.

Hindsight bias, sometimes called the I-knew-it-all-along effect, is the inclination to see events that have occurred as more predictable than they in fact were before they took place. Hindsight bias has been demonstrated experimentally in a variety of settings, including politics, games and medicine. In psychological experiments of hindsight bias, subjects also tend to remember their predictions of future events as having been stronger than they actually were, in those cases where those predictions turn out correct.”

When we did these exercises it made for some really interesting discussions – especiallly the spinning dancer and the different color blocks.  Doing these exercises can help you become aware of (and possibly manage) confirmation and hindsight bias.

Places you might find more information and exercises
Inattentional Blindness
Selective Attention

Michael Hunter, of Braidy Tester fame, posted a challenge on his blog. He showed a parking sign photo and asked how many different ways it could be interpreted. I decided to take 45 minutes during one of our weekly test team meetings and try it out. What the hell does this have to do with testing you might ask? Well - thanks for asking. Here is how it relates for me

• Idea generation – we always need to generate new ideas for testing
• Clarification – requirements are mostly ambiguous and this was practice at clarifying them.
• Sharing and discussion of ideas – “It could be interpreted this way” which lead to someone else saying “Yes and this way too” - Team work, supportive attitude with a focus on sharing.
• Time boxing so we don’t get carried away - Important in testing and just about anything else
• Coming up with alternate solutions/problem solving – It’s good to be seen as a problem solver instead of “Bearer of Bad News”

Needless to say we had a great time doing this activity. I time boxed the idea generation to 15 minutes and then had about 15 minutes of discussion.  We used index cards to write down our ideas. We went around the room and each person read an idea from their card. We ran into some duplicate ideas but that was ok – we weren’t focused on having every idea be unique. The puprose was to put on our “thinking caps”

Now it’s easy to take an idea and tear it to shreds.  To quote Edward De Bono in The Thinking Course “..critical destuction of one hypothesis has never produced a better one. It is creativity that produce the better hypothesis.” As a follow up challenge I asked the team to come with a sign that wasn’t ambigous. We explored some great ideas and had a great discussion. A few of the ideas and designs came out to be really clear and (mostly) unambiguous (I’ll have to get them and post it with this article.) The discussion was going so well that it actually went over time and into lunch.

Here are the results which were summarized by Aqiqul Hoda and Michael Hetmanczuk. The participants were Adam White, Alan Walker, Ali Khan, Aqiqul Hoda, Christy Gnanapragasam, Herb Bal, Joseph Kubik, Michael Hetmanczuk, Mortaza Abhari, Thomas Yook and Zhe Chen

1. Can park for 2 hrs from Mon to Sat between 7AM to 6PM.
2. If you have Zone 4 Permit you could park as long as you want.
3. No Limits of parking on Sundays and Holidays.
4. No Parking for Zone 4 permit vehicles.
5. No parking on Sun and holidays.
6. No parking in the Night.
7. Zone 4 permit vehicles parking only between 6 PM to 7 AM and Sun and
holidays.
8. 2 hr parking this side of street.
9. 2 hr parking both side of street.
10. 2 hr parking from this sign onward.
11. Parking at 6PM allowed can go past 6 PM for 2 hrs.
12. Parking once a day only.
13. Zone permits vehicles parking only after hrs but not on sun and
holidays.
14. Zone permit sign maynot be related to parking.
15. 2 hours limit parking between 7am and 6pm on days except Sunday and
Holiday.  Above has exception by Zone 4 permit means Zone 4 permit could
park at anytime
16. Board number 2: hour parking
17. Is the #2 the sign ID or does it indicate 2 hours?
18. Can we park during other ours or only 7 AM – 6 PM
19. Where is the sign?
20. Does it mean I can park from 6 AM – 7 PM?
21. Hol?  What qualifies as a holiday?
22. Does this apply to bikes?
23. Except sun/holiday means on Sunday and holidays – no parking at all
24. On sunday/holiday you can park all day
25. On sunday/holiday the 2 hour limit is lifted, but parking is only
allowed from 7 AM to 6 PM.
26. Zone 4 permit means you can park all the time.
27. Zone 4 permit means you can park 7 AM – 6 PM.
28. Except Zone 4 permit means you can’t park at all if you have a zone
4 permit.
29. Except Sun/Holiday: means only those with a zone 4 permit can park
on sun/holiday.
30. Could be interpreted as 1 hour parking.  The #2 could be something
else, i.e. street number, parking spot.
31. Except sun-holiday: starts on sunday, ends on a holiday.
32. What is a zone 4 permit?  Do I automatically get one?
33. Does that mean I can park long on sunday-holiday?
34.  Maximum of 2 hour parking allowed between 7 AM and 6 PM except
sunday or holiday.
35. If you have zone 4 permit pass you can park the car anytime.
36. Within this zone, a maximum of 4 vehicles are permitted to park.
37. The #2 indicates it is a second sign that indicates “hour parking”
zone between 7 AM and 6 PM except on sundays, holidays.