Testing And The Two Values of Software

The Two Values of Software

Sure enough: If your team’s software fails to provide value now (or in the near future), something’s gone badly wrong. You don’t like your software project to end up similar to this, right?

Smoking Remainders

Smoking remainders of a ‘Biikebrennen’ — don’t let your project end like this.

As Alistair Cockburn explained in “Agile Software Development” software development can be seen as a game played in rounds — and most teams prefer to stay in the game for many rounds.

To me it’s interesting (and a bit worrying) that most of the testing techniques and approaches are focussed on whether the current version of our software…

  1. is in fact the right software and
  2. if it works correctly.

In other words, testing focusses on validation and verification, it concentrates on a relatively short period of time: the next release.

Now, Uncle Bob Martin presented the idea of the primary and secondary value of software in episode 9 (‘The Single Responsibility Principle’) of his CleanCoders video series. He presents the secondary value first (which most people believe to be more important): ‘The secondary value of software is its behavior.’ He also explains the primary, more important value as: ‘The ability of software to tolerate and facilitate such ongoing change is the primary value of software. The primary value of software is that it’s soft.’

In Alistair Cockburn’s description the order is reversed (see Agile Software Development, 2nd edition p. 37 ff), but in my opinion the order isn’t always that important: I am worried that testing doesn’t consider one of the two values of software.

To my experience, essentially all projects focus on current or near-future behaviour of software, but rarely actively work to keep the software ready to deal with future requirements. I understand that YAGNI (You ain’t gonna need it) may play a role here. But mind you: YAGNI mostly applies to actually implemented features that are not needed. It may also be valid in order to prevent going overboard with too much abstraction and flexibility. In the end, you always need to find a balance between following and ignoring the SOLID principles (a good part of the Clean Coders videos covers this in detail).

Concerning the 1st value of software (according to Uncle Bob Martin), I’m convinced that testing needs to answer questions like this:

  • Is “the ability of software to tolerate and facilitate such ongoing change” a job purely for programmers?
  • Can software testers contribute to the primary value? Should they?
    • If yes, is this part of the job or should we keep out of this business?
    • How can we as testers contribute?
  • Can other disciplines help?

What do you think? Is this topic important for testing? Should we treat it in the way Michael Bolton advises testers with respect to “Quality Assurance Business” (spoiler alert/hint: He advises us to stay out of it)?

I personally think testers should get involved: A tester is somebody who knows that things can be different, as Jerry Weinberg says.

Also, I definitely want my clients, as well as their clients, to be happy with the software I help to develop, not only today, but also in the future, even when most original developers of a software system have left the team or company.

When your project (or product life cycle) comes to an end it should stay in your memory not like the smoking remainders of a fire, but with the bright colours of a great sunset.

Bright Sunset

Bright Sunset

5 Comments
by Stephan on Tue, March 12, 2013  •  Permalink
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Posted by Stephan on Tue, March 12, 2013

http://seasidetesting.com/2013/03/12/testing-and-the-two-values-of-software/

Tools for Testing — 1

I recently took the excellent Black Box Software Testing Foundation Course offered by the AST (Association for Software Testing).

The course came with a lot of extra material in addition to the primary deck of slides & videos: Articles published by a number of people, blog posts, exam guides. I used Papers, which helps to organise, well, papers. It manages meta information about the papers, such as publishing date, title and authors etc. and allows highlighting text, adding notes and more. I also liked using the iPad version of the program (there’s a way to sync your library on your computer and iPad), because I don’t always work at my desk.

The other tool I found useful is GraphViz, an extremely powerful program to describe and draw graphs. The graphs are described in a text file (there’s a complete language that describes graphs, but for many purposes you’ll only need a small set).

digraph example_path {
graph [ dpi = 150 ];
 rankdir = LR;
 fontname="DejaVu Sans";
 fontsize = 20;
 node[shape=circle,fontname="DejaVu Sans"];

 1 -> 2 -> 5 -> 6 -> 7;
 2 -> 4 -> 5;
 2 -> 3 -> 4;
 3 -> 6;
 6 -> 2;
 label = "\nBranches & Loops";
}

GraphViz comes with a command line tool dot. If in the same directory as the file that holds the description above, one can use

dot -Tpng file_name_here -O

to generate a 150 dpi PNG file, which looks like this:

An Example Path

An Example Path

GraphViz can create much more complex images (see the GraphViz Gallery for examples), however I find just a short text file and a simple terminal command covers a lot of ground and there’s no need to create ‘hand made’ images anymore.

Both programs Papers and GraphViz are available for Windows, OX S and the iPad/iPhone (GraphViz is called Instaviz on the iOS devices).

What non-typical tools do you use in testing?

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by Stephan on Sat, March 2, 2013  •  Permalink
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Posted by Stephan on Sat, March 2, 2013

http://seasidetesting.com/2013/03/02/tools-for-testing-1/

Anthropomorphism And Dehumanisation In Testing — How Does It Affect Us?

Where it began

I find it interesting to keep track of where and when I run into new information relevant to software testing. This time it was an article in a German magazine for dog owners (issue 6 2012, to be precise). The topic was anthropomorphising dogs. And I think digging deeper into anthropomorphism can help us understand software development and testing better.

What is anthropomorphism?

This is the definition of anthropomorphism given on Wikipedia:

Anthropomorphism or personification is any attribution of human characteristics (or characteristics assumed to belong only to humans) to other animals, non-living things, phenomena, material states, objects or abstract concepts, such as organisations, governments, spirits or deities. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropomorphism)

Why is it worth thinking about?

The German magazine article mentioned Adam Waytz as the author of a study and that way I found “Social Cognition Unbound: Insights Into Anthropomorphism and Dehumanization” by Waytz et al. (citation see end of this article).

The authors of the paper (details see below) say that “computers … can seem to have minds of their own” and mention that people “…curse at unresponsive computers…” (at least I have). If similar situations happened to you, maybe while testing software, then anthropomorphism affects your work.

I’m convinced that this topic requires more than a single post. This post is an introduction to the topic.

A brief summary of the paper

The authors discuss reasons for anthropomorphism as well as dehumanization and present three “primary factors——elicited agent knowledge, sociality motivation, and effectance motivation” which determine whether someone is likely to anthropomorphise or not.

Let’s look at the three factors:

Elicited Agent Knowledge
Anthropocentric knowledge is accessible and/or applicable.
Social Motivation
This is the need to be accepted, part of society and to connect to others.
Effectance Motivation
The motivation derived from understanding, explaining and (being able to) change or influence the environment.

Some ways this affects software testing

I will not go into much detail in this introductory post, but will instead list some of the behaviours that can be explained through this model:

  1. Effectance motivation and scripted testing
    I will not add to the discussion of the pros and cons of scripted testing, but instead introduce a possible explanation why testing and testers are not well respected in environments where scripted testing is used.
    When a rather strict execution of scripted test cases is demanded, the testers can’t influence their environment much. It’s about following scripts, manually operating the system under test and checking whether given conditions are met or not. In some cases changing scripts is not allowed, just following them. To others this looks like manually executing source code, something a computer is much more suited for. In other words: Testers work like computers, they’re perceived less human-like than they are.
    That way effectance motivation is inhibited, leading to dehumanising of the testers (at least to a certain degree).
  2. Test versus development teams—and what they perceive of each other
    I’ve worked in an environment where testers and developers were separate from each other. The most important communication was though the artefacts we were exchanging: Installed software on the test system, defect reports in a bug tracking system and may be the source code.
    We couldn’t see each other as the humans we are, it was (mostly) artefacts, the ‘other side’ didn’t even look remotely human. Thus neither side felt much respect for each other.
  3. System complexity
    The tester assumes the system is more complex than it is or has an intention that’s not there.
    Software systems, at least today, do not have a human intent. If a system under test is subject to anthropomorphism the tester assumes the system is more complex (or complicated) than it actually is and therefore puts more effort into testing. This can lead to new ways of testing or new test ideas and therefore improve the testing.

Leaving thoughts

This post introduced the idea that anthropomorphism affects software testing and described some of the effects. As mentioned above, I think there’s much more to discover for testing, so stay tuned for more posts about the topic!

Do you have examples of anthropomorphism in software testing? Please share them.

Cited paper

Waytz, Adam, N. Epley and J. T. Cacioppo. 2010. Social cognition unbound: Psychological insights into anthropomorphism and dehumanization. Current Directions in Psychological Science. 19: 58-62.

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by Stephan on Tue, February 19, 2013  •  Permalink
Posted in Anthropomorphism, Testing
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Posted by Stephan on Tue, February 19, 2013

http://seasidetesting.com/2013/02/19/anthropomorphism-and-dehumanisation-in-testing-how-does-it-affect-us/

Word of The Year 2013

The general idea of the “word of the year” isn’t particularly new: It seems to be popular in many languages and countries, according to the English Wikipedia, the German Wikipedia entry (other languages at the time of this writing are: Česky, Dansk, Esperanto, Français and Nederlands).

However, I got the idea to pick a personal word of the year from my wife. This idea goes at least back to a blog post by Ali Edwards. The notion (as I understand it) is to pick one word to guide you thought that year. To me this is an interesting change to the more traditional new years resolutions, since it conveys the idea of having a guidance, or vision rather than setting (usually) unreachable high aims.

It seems to me that a personal word of the year helps to move into a chosen direction. In a way it’s very much like a good vision for Scrum (and other!) software development teams — vision condensed into a single word. For all your small and bigger assignments you can quickly check, if what you’re attempting matches the idea of your chosen word, and then consciously decide if or how to proceed.

My word of the year 2013 is:

Explore

My word of the year 2013: Explore

Do you pick a word of the year for 2013? Which one?

4 Comments
by Stephan on Tue, December 25, 2012  •  Permalink
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Posted by Stephan on Tue, December 25, 2012

http://seasidetesting.com/2012/12/25/word-of-the-year-2013/

Uses of Twitter

This post appeared fist at http://zenandtheartofautomatedtesting.eu/ on 18. Feb. 2012.
Since I’ll take that site down, I relocate it.

Uses of Twitter

First of all: Why discuss ways to use Twitter as a tester?

Well, almost all software is used in ways not anticipated by its creators. There are a lot of possibilities for a user to interact with the software — not caring about the system creators intentions.

And this is something a tester should practice: Find new ways to use given things.

I learned about a few more uses of Twitter at the conference and thus suggested the topic “How do you use Twitter (or other social networks)” for the Open Space session at the Agile Testing Days 2011 in Potsdam.

Thankfully enough people were interested in this, so here’s the result of this session in just one shot:

open_space_photo

In the following sections I’ll comment on the items in the same order as we collected them on the flip chart.

Uses of Twitter

  1. Collect Haikus

    For a start I put up this one, still impressed by Liz Keogh’s Keynote about Hypnosis & Haikus.

    To generalise, I think Twitter can be used to share & collect about everything — given an account or hash tag to group it in some way.

  2. “Learn stuff” & “Solve problems”

    This one boils down to ask a question using relevant hash tags (e.g. #Ruby, #testing, #quality) and getting help quickly. At other times you get very interesting input you didn’t knew you needed before actually getting it.

  3. “Stay connected to people”

    In my opinion staying connected to people I met/meet at conferences (or local gatherings) is extremely valuable. According to Neal Ford’s article Twitter Matters: Keeping Up with Weak Social Links, closely related people (family, friends or colleagues we see every day) often have the same information sources as we do, so their information isn’t new to us, while people we don’t know at all, tend not to share enough common interests, so their information isn’t as relevant to us. However, people we don’t meet too often (say once a year) have the most relevant and new (for us) information to share.

  4. “Virtually attend conferences”

    I haven’t done this (yet), but I imagine it to be fun. One of these conferences is the “ALE Bathtub Conf”, which you can attend in the bathtub, because no one would notice. See Bathtub Conferences

  5. “Mine opinions about products”

    This is an interesting one I hadn’t thought of before, but was immediately obvious when explained: Search tweets about a product and attributes people typically use when tweeting about it: #great, #FTW, #fantastic, but also #FAIL, #WTF, #isitjustme.

  6. “Inspiration”

    Read what others think about a topic and follow shared links… This can yield entirely unexpected results/connections between topics.

  7. “Making friends”

    Sometimes the Good Thing ‘just’ happens. An example Lisa Crispin shared with us: She tweeted about being stuck at home without a plan for the weekend (since the original plan to go to a conference in London fell victim to the Ejafjällajökull eruption in 2010). She read a tweet by someone from England who could not fly home due to the volcano, tweeting from a bookstore in Denver, CO. Result: They met, did some sightseeing and became friends.

  8. “Production monitoring”

    Someone mentioned they’d monitor performance of their web application, by monitoring the tweet rate about certain words (I assume company-name, #slow, #down could be a start…) The more tweets (per time unit) they’d see, the slower the web application would perform.

    To me, that’s fascinating, even though it’s more a (very good) heuristic, rather than a definite measure: Your users might come from a single time zone, so a performance drop during the night isn’t noticed immediately, or there is a problem — but no increase in the number of tweets because of another significant issue, e.g. a network outage in the wider area.

  9. “Get customer/tech support”

    Some companies are very good at listening to tweets about their product, and answer with helpful tips and/or explanations.

  10. “Support for personal/professional growth”

    This seems to be similar to “Learn stuff” & “Solve problems”.

  11. “Find a new job/project”

    This happened to me: After the end of a recent project I tweeted about my availability, got contacted, had a short interview and found a great new project. Excellent!

  12. “Overload of tweets”

    Obviously this entry isn’t a use of twitter, but rather a (possible) problem: There are only so many tweets you can read per day. Tweeting about almost everything in your life might result in people unfollowing you.

  13. “Get to know people”

    By following people, you get to know (a certain aspect of) them: How/What they think about a topic, how they react, whether they’re looking for someone to join for dinner at a conference.

  14. “Twitter: For friends or colleagues”

    We also briefly discussed the use of different accounts for different purposes or groups of people: friends, colleagues, profession, (programming) languages… Depending on the number of tweets about a certain topic it can be worthwhile to create an account for it: This way you can filter out (or focus on) this particular topic.

  15. “Entaggle”

    This last but not least entry is about the “other social networks” part of the sessions title. Entaggle was created by Elizabeth Hendrickson after a discussion about the value and sense (or lack thereof) of certificates for developers in general and testers in particular. On Entaggle you’d create a profile, be tagged and tag others using tags you (or others) create. That way a network of trust/respect is created.

    The reasoning behind this: People seem to trust the opinion of a real (and probably well-known) person more than an anonymous certification handed out by some institution or company. Opinions of real people matter, especially if you can get in touch with these people and ask for more information (or reasons for a tag they used).

If you’re using Twitter in yet another way, I’d like to hear about it.

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by Stephan on Tue, December 11, 2012  •  Permalink
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Posted by Stephan on Tue, December 11, 2012

http://seasidetesting.com/2012/12/11/uses-of-twitter/

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