Category: Learning

Agile Testing Days 2022

Conferences Feedback No Comments

It’s that season again: I attended the 2022 edition of the Agile Testing Days. There are already blog posts by Lisi Hocke ‘Agile Testing Days 2022 – The Unicorn Land We Build Together‘ and Stéphanie Desby ‘What I’ve learned at Agile Testing Days 2022‘. They already cover a lot of the remarkable sessions – and really, I think there’s no replacement to attend this conference in person. I’ll focus on the few things I find particularly noteworthy.

I arrived the day before the conference started and went to the gym & pool area first. After a 5½ hour drive through changing weather conditions (snow, fog, hail, sunshine, rain, more snow, sleet, and finally some more sunshine), this is just the right thing for me to shake off the stress.

Tutorial Day ‘Problem Solving with Agile Thinking and Practices‘ with Ben Linders

I very much enjoyed this well organised tutorial. Ben presented several way to find problems and then solve them. This included some role playing and games. What I appreciate: We got all the material needed to use the games in our projects as well as his ebook ‘Impediments – Problem? What Problem?’. That’s going to be so useful when applying the exercises in my projects – or playing the game with my teams (when I will meet teams in person).

The day was made even better, since I received the confirmation that I am booked for my next project. This is especially nice, since I have worked with the team already and like it a lot!

Day 1

I found Lily Higham’s talk ‘Testing the BBC World Service‘ exciting, since she explained how her team has to cover an incredibly large number of systems, languages and devices. One important insight: ‘Test with real devices’. Also remarkable: She noted how the BBC has to deal with being blocked in some countries and how, in some cases, professional smugglers help spreading the news anyway. No details about this were shared for a good reason. We were advised against trying the smuggling ourselves.

Dermot Canniffe presented ‘BDD And The Sleepy Developer‘, and made the point about the effects a sleep disorder can have during work incredibly well.

During the OpenSpace on this day we shared some information about Mastodon – and what to consider when joining it. My point of view: Two things are important:

  1. The server you chose
  2. The account name

While I didn’t use them in the Open Space, here are slides I prepared just in case:

For easy reference, here are the links used in the slides:

As is a tradition by now the first day ended with a themed costume party. This year the ‘dress code’ was ‘Fairytales’. This is also the Award Night to celebrate MIATPP (Most Influential Agile Testing Professional Person) of the year, this time won by Janet Gregory. Congratulations!

Day 2

On this day, I missed quite a few sessions I wanted to attend, since I held a workshop “Fast Feedback Using Ruby”. With about 10 people attending it was just the right size to help with the many things that can (and will) go wrong in a workshop where coding is a major part. Being (maybe over-) prepared helped a lot: While I had some material prepared to be downloaded, I knew (from experience in an earlier year) that conference WiFi may – or may not – work well. I now bring my own WiFi, so I have a back-up in case the conference one doesn’t work so well. I also had the downloadable material on a tiny small local web server – and a USB stick. Yes, I was over prepared, very likely.

In case you considered this workshop, but attended another session: There is an ebook(let) available on LeanPub, which covers the workshop. And there still are a few coupons let to grab it for free: https://leanpub.com/fastfeedbackusingruby/c/ATD-2022. Additionally there is a GitHub repository at https://github.com/s2k/fastfeedbackusingruby_workshop. The slides from the workshop are available as Fast Feedback Using Ruby slides.

The day ended with the first ‘AgileTD book fair‘ and the ‘Digesting Poets Society‘. I had the pleasure to present ‘Software People … Work From Home — Insights & Experiences From Planet Earth‘, a free ebook to which contributors from (so far) 28 countries and 33 authors provided text about life during the pandemic. Only while I was talking to some of the new readers, I realised that this wasn’t a writing task for me (I still have to add my contribution), but a project management job. Organising so many people from so many countries was – and still is – some work, but oh what a pleasure, too.

Day 3

What I remember from this day most of all, is what Stéphanie Desby shared with me about her break from – and return to working in tech. I find it super interesting what leads people to leave tech, at least for a while, and then come back. As I had to leave tech for while myself, that’s probably no too surprising.

An Afterthought

I remember that in some (pre-pandemic) years, the conference covered the whole week, either with 2 tutorial days, or 4 conference days. While I thought the conference should move back to this longer format, now I’m not so convinced anymore. 4 full days with a LOT of input, talking and, yes, having fun, is demanding.

That said: I am already looking forward to the Agile Testing Days 2023! 🦄🌈

Another Way to Write Ruby Code

Experiment Learning Ruby Uncategorized No Comments

Disclaimer: I am not suggesting to change the Ruby style guide.

At a workshop I was giving a few years ago, someone not used to writing Ruby code found an interesting way, that you can write Ruby code.

First let’s assume a class Thingy, that doesn’t do anything useful. It’s just needed to demonstrate the way to write Ruby.

Assume this is in file ‘thingy.rb’:

# frozen_string_literal: true

# Thingy is only used to demonstrate
# a way of writing Ruby code
class Thingy
  def initialize(*args)
    @args = args
  end

  def this(other)
    @args << other
    self
  end

  def that(*other)
    @args << other
    self
  end

  def content
    @args
  end
end

Now, let’s use this class in another script, that’s showing the alternative way to write Ruby code (in file use_thingy.rb):

# frozen_string_literal: true

(require_relative 'thingy')

part = (Thingy.new 'String', :symbol, Math::PI)

(p ((part.this 'Wahoodie?!').that :huh, Math::E).content)

Notice that rather LISP-like way to parenthesise, in line 7 in particular. I still am surprised that this is possible in Ruby and actually behaves the way I’d expect.

Running that script yields the following output:

> ruby use_thingy.rb
["String", :symbol, 3.141592653589793, "Wahoodie?!", [:huh, 2.718281828459045]]

It’s also entertaining that Rubocop does not complain about this code:

> ls
thingy.rb     use_thingy.rb
> rubocop .
Inspecting 2 files
..

2 files inspected, no offenses detected

This is one of the reasons I like programming in Ruby so much: One can discover new ways (even if probably not very useful ones, sometimes) even after years of using it.

In case you’d like to experiment with this code: It’s on GitHub: https://github.com/s2k/alternative_way_to_parenthesise_in_ruby

Processing a Number of Image Files

Learning Note To Self Ruby shell No Comments

This is, again, is mostly a note to my future self. 🙂

Occasionally, I need to process a bunch of image files in a batch. Most often it’s about resizing them, so they fit into a given format of at most x ⨉ y pixels, or precisely into, say a square format. Here’s how I do it using ImageMagick and a bit of Ruby code:

Processing a single file

ImageMagick comes with convert (it’s linked to …/bin/magick on my machine), as command line tool for processing image files in a whole lot of ways. In order to resize a single file so that it ends up as a square image in a given number of pixels one can use the following on the command line (I use zsh on macOS):

convert input_file.jpg -resize 1200x1200 -background White -gravity center -extent 1200x1200 output_file.jpg

This command

  • reads ‘input_file.jpg’,
  • creates a new image with 1200⨉1200 pixels,
  • a white background,
  • resizes the input image as needed,
  • puts it in the center of the new image
  • and saves it as ‘output_file.jpg’.

Batch processing files

For this step, I use a Ruby script (of course this can also be done in zsh, bash, Python etc.):

images = Dir['file_pattern*.jpg']
images.each do |fn|
  `convert #{fn} -resize 1200x1200 -background White -gravity center -extent 1200x1200  #{fn.gsub(/\./, '_res.')}`
end

Tip: Be sure to use different names for the input and output file names.

Reviewing Submissions for the Agile Testing Days

Conferences Feedback Uncategorized 2 Comments

Other reviewers have also blogged about this topic:

The other day a discussion about the review process of the Agile Testing Days developed:

Since I contributed to this thread and was a reviewer for this years programme, here’s my take. It’s my personal view and other reviewers may well have other aspects they focus on.

  1. On the conference page there are blog posts covering how to write a good proposal. I suggest to read them. This blog contains some tips as well:
  2. The conference offers a list of ‘hot topics’ which changes each year. If a proposal fits to this list it’s a plus, since this is a step towards a consistent conference programme.
  3. I prefer proposals that catch my interest, without telling too much about the topic. – If a proposal already expels everything well, time may be better spent in another session.
  4. A well written abstract text, that is easy to understand (for me) is a plus, too. This includes avoiding typos and grammatical mistakes. We all make them, and even the best spell checkers can’t catch all issues. But still, some proposals are really hard to understand due to language problems. Don’t let that get in your way of getting accepted. My tip: Get feedback by a native English speaker before (!) submitting. Many well known testers and speakers offer help and it is worthwhile accepting this help.
  5. Understand what the fields in the proposal form are meant for. Fill them to provided the information that is asked for,
    Avoid repeating the same text in different parts for the form. Change the wording at least a bit. In some cases the title, sub headline, main statement and key learning(s) contained exactly the same or very similar text. To me as the reviewer this is a little bit boring, and doesn’t help me understand what the session is about.
  6. Sometimes, repeating is worthwhile: It helps to understand what is important. Use this tool carefully.

Some questions may guide to writing a good proposal:

  • Will this help the reviewer to give me a high rating?
  • Am I giving enough information to inform a potential attendees decision to come to my session?
  • Am I giving too much information?
  • Is this a good fit for the conference this year?

A leaving personal note: It took me years to get accepted at the Agile Testing Days, even for what was then called a ‘consensus talk’. In the very early years the proposals weren’t very well written, in some years I failed to match the overall conference theme. And then it clicked, I asked for help, gave workshops, a tutorial and, in 2019 even a keynote. For me it was worth the effort.

Good luck and may your proposals be accepted!

Expressing Expectations

Experiment Feedback Learning Pattern Testing No Comments

Long long ago, while preparing experiments for my diploma thesis in physics, my tutor taught me to express my expectation of the outcome of experiments before actually running them. I was to not only to express them in my head, but speak them out loudly, may be even make a note.

This helped a lot, when figuring out where my thinking didn’t match the experimental evidence. There was no denying when my expectation differed from the empirical result. Typically, there were two sources for the differences:

  1. My mental model wasn’t good enough to match the result of an experiment.
  2. The experimental setup wasn’t designed well enough to show the effect I was trying to measure.

I find that this is still working well in software development (both the coding part as well as testing). A related article about this is Peter Naurs seminal paper ‘Programming as Theory Building’.

When doing TDD (test driven development), explicitly expressing the outcome before running a test may not always lead to a surprise. In the very beginning, when a test tries to create an object, without having a class definition, it will cause an error message that is easy to predict.

However, when work has progressed a bit, I regularly run into situation where I expect the next new test to fail in a certain way, but when running the test, the actual error message is a surprise to me. These are situations where learning can happen, by figuring out why the actual behaviour does occur, instead of what I predicted.

Near the end, the surprise is caused differently: I’ll write a new test and expect it to fail. – It doesn’t. Again, this is a good reason to explore why exactly I thought the test would fail.

Particularly in a pair (or ensemble) programming setup, the inability to come up with a new failing test is a sign, that the implementation is good enough … for now.

Recently, I did a programming exercise as part of a technical interview, and expressing my thoughts and expectations while working on the code helped me to find a solution. Additionally, the interviewer didn’t only see what I was typing, but could follow my way of thinking. This relates to Naur’s paper mentioned above: The testing and tested code I wrote isn’t everything there is to my mental model of the given problem or its solution. The way of thinking is important too. This is why I find vocally expressing my expectations & thinking while actually doing the work.

What are your preferred way to actually do the work you’re doing? I’d love to hear about it.

© 2012-2023 Stephan Kämper — Mastodon

MENU

Navigation

%d bloggers like this: