Hey so wow, it’s been awhile since I’ve posted. I wanted to let you guys know what I’ve been up to instead of posting here: Focusing on building my business at archdevops.com Producing lots of content on LinkedIn, both posts and videos Also producing content on testproject.io and techbeacon.com Upcoming events: Hosting the first #LinkedInLocal event here in St. Louis on January 16th Participating in the Funky Thinkers podcast on January 18th Also giving a short talk at the next AgileLINC meetup on January 18th (the 18th is gonna be a busy day) Writing articles on Medium Pursuing paid articl ..read more

About a week ago, a question was posed on LinkedIn: Why do we hear of Coaches for Agile but not for Traditional/Waterfall? My question for the day. I think the answer has to do with what feels natural to humans. It’s more natural for us to focus on our piece of work, do it, and then pass it on to the next set of hands. It’s less natural for us to work on something together, each bringing our expertise to bear at the right time, and have far-sighted goals for getting the product into the hands of the customer. Since it’s less natural, it’s more difficult, hence why we need coaching to do ..read more

So I bought around 40 pounds of Lego. They were a great price and I couldn’t pass them up. I guess I can let our 4 girls play with them too The first thing I did was to get all of them out and sort out all the non-Lego pieces. Now, I can remember my (modest by comparison) collection, and what pieces I had. It was possible for me to think about what I wanted to build, and kinda figure out what all would be involved, before I dumped out my bucket of Lego. But after looking through 40 pounds worth of Lego I realized: holy decision fatigue, Batman, there’s, like, 20 different sets worth of these ..read more

I put together a quick and dirty example of what I’ve been talking about in the last two posts. This example shows how you can brute-force a bunch of random attempts of creating code based on a set of tests you want to have pass. It also demonstrates how to use a basic grammar to randomly pick a little more intelligently, so there’s less chance of picking a completely drunk string of tokens. I’m going to show it here with comments embedded so you can see how it works, and explain how it can be used to make simple arithmetic methods: # generate.rb # token_hash is a list of tokens and what ..read more

At the end of the first post, I mentioned reading another post, which talked about how AI is going to change testing forever. It might seem like AI may dismantle testing soon, but it won’t. You won’t come to the office tomorrow and see a robot doing your job. Here’s why. What’s Changing? When we ask the question about what’s changing in the testing world, we’re really asking: will I still be relevant? And my answer is: yes, as long as you keep learning.  We’re all evolving. I wouldn’t expect anyone’s skillset today to still be relevant 10 years from now. As long as we’re wi ..read more

I often joke with other testers that every bug comes from the system doing what we said instead of what we wanted. “And if someone would just come up with a way to get a computer to do what we actually meant, instead of what we told it to do, that person would be a trillionaire.” It usually elicits a few laughs. But you know what… I wonder if we could pull this off today? And if so, how would that look? The Theory Behind the Madness All programs, no matter how complex, eventually reduce down to small pieces of logic. We usually don’t deal at those low levels, because it’d take too mu ..read more

So I kind of want to deviate from talking directly about testing or automation for this post. As testers, we’re often expected and called on, to speak the hard truth about the software we’re testing. But as humans working with other humans, many times we’re driven by emotion. For the people we’re talking to, possibly anger. But for us, possibly fear. One big thing that causes testers to hesitate to give the “bad news” that software’s not up to par is the fear of saying the wrong thing and losing a job. And that fear largely comes from having enough financial debt that we fall into th ..read more

Ever heard of hyperbolic discounting? Given two similar rewards, humans show a preference for one that arrives sooner rather than later. Humans are said to discount the value of the later reward, by a factor that increases with the length of the delay.  Most people, if offered the choice of $1 right now, or $100 in three months, would pick the $1. We’re wired up to think that the delay makes the $100 less valuable than the $1 simply because it takes longer to get it. Looks kinda goofy when it’s written out. I mean, haha, who does that? And yet, every day, all of us–m ..read more

Tribal knowledge is certain pieces of obscure information you “just have to know” as part of your job. Technical debt is any information, code or otherwise, that we know we should fix because it’s causing people to not be able to work as efficiently as they can. So basically: Tech debt is tribal knowledge that we plan to do something about. I wonder how many companies are up to their eyeballs in tribal knowledge just because they decided to accept it since it seems easier? What if they decided to get rid of it–pay it off–as the technical debt that it is ..read more

When faced with the prospect of starting a new job, it’s common to get a little freaked out. Losing the stuff you’ve accrued at the current place might feel like you’re starting over. But: For QA to be successful, we have to move around a little bit. There are all kinds of things we learn in current roles, that when combined with knowledge gained elsewhere, makes for a powerful force of testers. Are you in this situation? Are there interesting roles that look like fun growth opportunities, and turning them down hits you in the feels because of everything you’d be leaving behind? Well, tod ..read more