1. I will be teaching a testing tutorial there. I also will be wandering around with my various testing games and challenges hoping to do them with anyone who wants to see what I mean by “testing skills.”

2. CAST is the only conference that is organized in the true spirit of the Context-Driven School of Testing. It’s kind of our home conference. If you find my thoughts interesting, or those of Cem Kaner, Michael Bolton, Ben Simo, etc. Then you’ll want to be there, if you can.

Wolfram/Alpha is the new search engine that isn’t so much a search engine as a find-interesting-ways-to-analyze-data-and-show-it-to-me engine. It’s a closed system, as far as I can tell. It does some cool things. But I don’t understand how they will keep up with the data quality problem.

This worries me because the output from Wolfram/Alpha looks authoritative. I want to be able to trust it. But look at this slightly disturbing problem. I searched for Francis Bacon, but instead of getting a page about the various Francis Bacons of history and having an opportunity to disambiguate, I got the output, below. As you see, it combines information from two different men: Francis Bacon, 1st Viscount St. Alban and Lord Chancellor of England under Elizabeth I, and Francis Bacon, the painter. Furthermore, there appears to be no way to focus the search. Adding search terms that should distinguish between the two men appears to do nothing.

This tells me that there isn’t a lot of data in the system, yet, and that the data that is there may be mangled in ways that I may not notice unless I already know the thing I asked to learn about.

At least with Google and Wikipedia, it’s a relatively open system where I get a variety of results. So, beware, folks.

That said, I’m going back to playing with Wolfram/Alpha some more… Because it’s cool.

Sometimes I get complaints about how I handle comments. I received a quite thoughtful and persuasive complaint just a few hours ago. There is a teeny-tiny link on the front page of my blog that goes to my policy on comments, but I suspect few people read it.

Look folks, you are participating in my little show, here. I’m the editorial director. If you make comments, I control whether they go on air. I reject about one in fifteen comments (not counting outright spam) because they violate my guidelines. Think about it like a radio show in text form, and my policy should make sense.

As long as it is not abusive and adds something to the conversation, I want you to have your say. But I WILL argue with you. That’s what I do. And I do that by interpolating my replies into each comment. If you think that’s not fun to see your comments festooned with my replies to you, you are free to do it differently on your own damn blog.

Remember, if you want to unpublish a comment, email me and I’m happy to remove it. If you feel I’m being a bad bad man who abuses people, then I urge you to email me privately and we’ll hash it out. I can’t promise to satisfy you, but I promise to reply to you in good faith.

Those of you with whom I have a working relationship or friendship, feel free to use that to exert influence over my editorial behavior. I am susceptible to charm as long as I feel I’m not being asked to tell lies or muzzle my own ideas.

Live Attractive Smiling Operator! Click Now!

Based on their website, and the high pressure salesman who called me without an invitation, they believe in an aggressive approach to sales. The salesman even used the word “aggressive” several times in his pitch.

The first time I encountered this technology was on a website for expert witnesses. I had trouble using the site and clicked on the “Live Operator” icon. A chat window opened, but everything that they said to me appeared to have come from a script, while seeming to ignore the gist of my questions. I was kind of offended, since this cyborg thing insisted it was a live operator (each time using exactly the same perfectly worded sentence to convey that) while continuing to answer a different question than the one that I asked. At one point I challenged it to type something instead of pasting a canned response, to which I got an obviously canned response that it was not allowed to engage in personal conversation.

(What? Isn’t that the point of a live operator? The ability to engage on a personal level, human-to-human, empathically? Do they think I want a live operator so that I can be ignored in person?)

I concluded that it was not human. But when I went to the WebGreeter website to learn about this weird chatbot technology, I found out it really HAD been a human. That human failed the Turing Test, by successfully declining to use human communication skills with me.

Folks, this is what I’m complaining about with scripting, scripted testing, scripted behavior of any kind. My situation required an appropriately trained and reasonably motivated human to listen to my questions and help me solve my problem. Instead, I meet someone’s idea of an efficient technology that creepily removed what’s good about humanity while being able, technically, to claim humanity. The human in that equation could hide behind rules, pretending to help me while rendering no assistance at all.

I don’t mind that they have scripts. I mind when they are followed instead of applied. This distinction is crucial. In applying, the human remains in charge. In following, the human actually lobotomizes himself in an effort to become animated furniture.

When we deal with people, we ought to be able to trust in certain fundamental human qualities. But just as this crazy WebGreeter company has thrown those out the window, so too have many “process” people torn them out of software projects. Or tried to. Instead they want us to perform rituals. Nice repeatable rituals.

This is just what our craft needs. This wonderful, simple service brought to us by Ben Simo (AKA QualityFrog) documents bugs found in the field. I can use this in training new testers.

There is a little problem with it: It’s biased toward reporting problems that are vividly depicted in still photographs. Lots of otherwise interesting bugs are not so photogenic, because they involve complex sequences, timings, or obscure oracles. That limits its value in training, but something is a whole lot better than nothing.

Anyway, I quit LinkedIn last August, after feeling fed up with complete strangers asking me to connect with them. But I’ve decided that the hassle is worth the reward.

So, if you were connected with me before and want to reconnect, go ahead. Sorry for the flip flopping!

There are many advantages of speaking, coaching, and training face to face, but this option is clean and inexpensive compared to having me fly out to do a single talk and leave again.

My specialty is studying the skills of software testing, understanding how to think like a tester, and explaining how to test in an agile manner using concise documentation and an exploratory approach.

Tobbe is a context-driven thinker who has a lot to say about test design tactics. He also innovates with tester training exercises and with developing community among testers.

Have I mentioned lately that Sweden seems to be a hotbed of good testing? I guess those long dark nights drive irritable people to their computers moreso than in other nations.

(BTW, looks like I’ll be going back to Sweden in April to do another couple of classes. I’d like to teach my Rapid Testing Management class, this time, if anyone’s interested.)

Each lesson is numbered as per the original, but rather than ‘lesson’, they use the word tessoku, which means ‘Inviolable Rule’ or ‘Ironclad Regulation’

Ben goes on to say that it was probably a marketing decision on the publisher’s part to make that change. Apparently, Japanese testers want ironclad rules.

Interesting, but that’s a little like spicing up a film about Gandhi by having him carry an M60 machine gun and chomp on a cigar. The “lessons” in Lessons Learned are heuristics worth considering, not ironclad anythings.

This article has turned me around. The big deal is the present moment, the zeitgeist of the infinitesimal now. Instant reactions and the emergence of ideas. That’s what Twitter is about.

I just joined Twitter under the name JamesMarcusBach. I will use the account to tweet about my learning activities, mostly. A little bit about testing, too.

Well, my dear little children, I’ve got bad news for you. It is your precious context that is holding you back. It is your C-level Exeuctives and high-level managers who can’t delegate real responsibility and authority to their people. It is your product people who are too busy to explain what really needs to be done. It is your facilities people who can’t make a workspace fit to work in. It is your programmers who won’t learn the techniques necessary to succeed. It is your managers and product owners who keep increasing pressure until any focus on quality is driven out of the project.

There is an absolute minimum of practice that must be in place in order for Scrum or XP or any fom of Agile to succeed. There are many other elements of practice that will need to be put in place. And yes, the context will matter … and most commonly, if you really want to be successful, it is the context that has to change.

Wow, he even addresses us as children! That completes the picture nicely. (The context-imperial approach to process generally involves appeals to authority, or a presumption of authority.) This is why I’m proud to be a part of the small “a” agile community, which is not about bowing to priests, but rather each of us developing our own judgment about agility.

Context-imperial methodology means changing problems to fit your favorite solutions. We are all a bit context-imperial (for instance, I prefer not to work in an environment where I’m expected dodge bullets).  We are all a bit context-driven, too.

The interesting question is when should we change the problem and when should we try different solutions? For me, the starting point for an answer is skill. To develop skill is to develop both the judgment about context variables and ability to craft solutions for them.

It would help if Ron could explain the dynamics of project, as he sees them. It would help if he offered experience reports. It does NOT help for him to ridicule the notion that competent practitioners ought to evaluate and respond to what’s there and what’s happening on a project.

When Ron says there is an “absolute minimum of practice” that must be in for an agile project to succeed, I want to reply that I believe there is an absolute minimum of practice needed to have a competent opinion about things that are needed– and that in his post he does not achieve that minimum. I think part of that minimum is to understand what words like “practice” and “agile” and “success” can mean (recognizing they are malleable ideas). Part of it is to recognize that people can and have behaved in agile ways without any concept of agile or ability to explain what they do.

My style of development and testing is highly agile. I am agile in that I am prepared to question and rethink anything. I change and develop my methods. I may learn from packaged ideas like Extreme Programming, but I never follow them. Following is for novices who are under active supervision. Instead, I craft methods on a project by project basis, and I encourage other people to do that, as well. I take responsibility for my choices. That’s engineering for adults like us.

Sarah - PayPal :
Hello, I’m Sarah and I’m here to answer your questions about PayPal. Even though I’d like to be a real person, I’m not. I’m programmed to answer your questions. How can I help you?
You :
How do I change my security questions?
Sarah - PayPal :
I’m sorry but I’m unavailable right now. Please try again in a few minutes.
You :
what the hell??
Sarah - PayPal :
I’m sorry but I’m unavailable right now. Please try again in a few minutes.
You :
You just ASKED ME how you can help!
Sarah - PayPal :
I’m sorry but I’m unavailable right now. Please try again in a few minutes.
You :
You’re talking to me right now. How can you be unavailable?
Sarah - PayPal :
Et oui,… Mais c’est comme ça. Et sinon ?
You :
what?
Sarah - PayPal :
I’m sorry but I’m unavailable right now. Please try again in a few minutes.

I’d almost rather talk to Sarah Palin than Sarah Paypal.

Now, I will be a bit harder to hack. But there may be a few glitches still to work out. For instance, during the move strange characters somehow became sprinkled here and there through my blog and comments. Strange bug!

Please alert me if you see weird things on my blog or website.

Kevin’s work (which was done on very short notice) reminds me that quality is all about people who wish to serve people. Kevin saved my server, and now I’m his loyal customer.

In other words, developers create systems that even they don’t understand. Testers know this. Hackers know it, too. I guess hackers (the bad kind) are just testers who exploit bugs instead of reporting them.