A List of Distorted Thinking

I own a piece of paper which came to me through the network of mindfulness classes, meet-ups and meditation sittings that exist in the Republic of California.

 

For today, I am posting it verbatim.  It is precious enough to me that I want it preserved forever on the internet.  If I have to type it up and post it for that to happen, so be it.  I just want it to be out there and I predict others will also see the truth in it.

 

There is also a reason for my timing.  Markus Gärtner, author of the newly published ATDD by Example (and tester of Amazon’s I18n encoding) has recently posted on some of the fallacies involved in contextual testing.  What he writes about seems awfully close to distorted thinking which is not surprising given the fact that we are all human.

Being human means that if you have a bad lunch or some cloud system goes down which keeps you from your testing, the physical reaction of frustration leaves you very open to distorted thinking.  In the case of testing, some of this distorted thinking seems useful for uncovering test ideas, and yet we also need to recognize when it’s time to stop catastrophizing and time to start collaborating with our teammates.  If we can recognize the distorted thinking we use for test heuristics, perhaps we can also recognize when it is time to leave the distorted thinking behind.  Polarization is for formal methods…not friends.

 

Without further ado:

 

Filtering:  You take the negative details and magnify them while filtering out all positive aspects of a situation.

 

Polarized Thinking:  Things are black or white, good or bad.  You have to be perfect or you’re a failure.  There is no middle ground.

 

Overgeneralization:  You come to a general conclusion based on  a single incident or piece of evidence. If something bad happens once, you expect it to happen over and over again.

 

Mind Reading: Without their saying so, you know what people are feeling and why they act the way they do. In particular, you are able to divine how people are feeling toward you.

 

Catastrophizing:  You expect disaster.  You notice or hear a problem and start, “what if’s: what if tragedy strikes? What if it happens to you?”

 

Personalization: Thinking that everything people do or say is some kind of reaction to you.  You also compare yourself to others, trying to determine who’s smarter, better looking, etc.

 

Control Fallacies:  If you feel externally controlled, you see yourself as helpless, a victim of fate.  The fallacy of internal control has you responsible for the pain and happiness of everyone around you.

 

Fallacy of fairness:  You feel resentful because you think you know what’s fair, but other people won’t agree with you.

Blaming: You hold other people responsible for your pain, or take the other tack and blame yourself for every problem or reversal.

 

Should:  You have a list of ironclad rules about how you and other people should act.  People who break the rules anger you and you feel guilty if you violate the rules.

 

Emotional reasoning:  You believe what you feel must be true automatically, If you feel stupid and boring then you must be stupid and boring.

 

Fallacy of Change: You expect that other people will change to suit you if you just pressure or cajole them enough.  You need to change people because your hopes for happiness seem to depend entirely upon them.

 

Global labeling:   You generalize one or two qualities into a negative global judgement.

 

Being right:  You are continually on trial to prove that your opinions and actions are correct.  Being wrong is unthinkable and you will go to any length to demonstrate your rightness.

 

Heaven’s reward Fallacy:  You expect all your sacrifice and self-denial to pay off, as if there were someone keeping score.  You feel bitter when the reward doesn’t come.

 

There are a few of these that I recognize a little to comfortably and I’m guessing that this didn’t quite make it into the Myers-Briggs.  Who are you?

 

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Credo Work: My Professional Credo Unveiled

I believe:

 

  • Writing will always be the thing I do first and best
  • At the crossroads of collaboration and craft stands an open well of deep creativity.  Great software emerges from those who gulp from and bathe themselves in the water of this well
  • Software thrives with transparency and reciprocity between its makers, its users and its surrounding community
  • Workplace safety is non-negotiable and includes emotional safety in the milieu of conferences, email lists, twitter and meet-ups.  If someone (a boss, peer, industry expert) says or does something that compromises my safety, I have the right to walk out whether it’s a conference presentation, workplace brown bag or one-on-one meeting
  • An open web, open information, open data and open source software are all critical for social justice on a global scale
  • Humans and their expressions are too complex to ever be completely definable by technology or labels.
  • Software is better when it is made by a team that functions not as a well-oiled machine but as a team of humans who respect each other and know how to collaborate
  • Focusing on the values in the Agile Manifesto means that software is built with heart and balance no matter what the process is called.
  • If safety and humility are a primary focus, confidence and risk-taking flow.

 

This is my professional credo which was included in my slide deck for Better Software West.  I will get around to uploading the slides although there is actually more information in the blog posts I wrote.
My presentation focused on the process I used to build my credo and why I think this type of thing can be valuable.

 

I had a great audience with lots of questions.  One person observed that some of my statements seem like a reaction, and that is absolutely correct.  There are some hard-learned life-lessons in that credo and publishing it on my blog is the equivalent of me showing off my battle scars.  I wear them proudly because I’ve fucking earned them.

 

Someone else pointed out that one time or another we all cave on our principles in order to earn a paycheck.  Let me emphasize that that these are areas where I am not likely to compromise very much, if at all.  I am also willing to put in the work on my skills, my career and my professional network so that I don’t have to worry about compromising these.  At the worst, things will shift around me and I will find myself in a place where I realize the compromise is happening, but that is the point of this whole exercise.  I will know that as the sands of my job, my career and my place in technology shift I’ve got my own values and priorities to steer my decisions.

 

Another person was asking how I plan to keep up with this credo.  This is an excellent question, because this is the point where I start living with my credo.  As I’ve watched my numerous posts in this project creep over my blog, I’ve come to realize that this is heavier than a few posts and needs more of an afterword than this one post.  The conference might be over, and my credo might be posted, but the project, itself is far from complete.

 

A few times during this process, I have been asked where the activities I’ve blogged originated.  It’s all from the workbook for a Unitarian Universalist religious education class called, “Building Your Own Theology” by Richard S. Gilbert.  (If you don’t know what Unitarian Universalist is, stayed tuned!  I will get around to posting about it.)

 

My current plan has two parts.  I’m working on putting together a short e-book of the posts I’ve written already (Don’t ask when it will be out. I don’t know).  That takes care of what I’ve written so far.  As for the afterward, I’m going to paste my credo into the about page of this blog and continue blogging about different pieces within the credo itself or link to posts I’ve already written that cover a part of the credo.  If Leanpub works the way I think it does, there will be a way for me to add those posts to the e-book as they happen.

 

Is it just me or have I made more work for myself with this?  Although my credo is up there, I don’t see an end.  I see a beginning.

 

Thanks to everyone who came to see my talk or who have posted comments, retweeted or sent me feedback about this.  It’s been one of my crazier blog jaunts and the feedback has reminded me that it is crazy AND worth doing.

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Writing bugs if you are not a tester (or if you are a tester and would like to review)

Software Bugs
Software Bugs (Photo credit: FastJack)

In the past month, I’ve had a few different people who are not testers ask me about filing bugs.  It always makes me happy when people ask me this question, because knowing how to write up a good bug is the first step towards getting it fixed.  The more effectively you write bugs, the closer you will be to getting your problem taken seriously and addressed.  Since computing is now so ubiquitous this goes for everyone from developers interacting to sales and marketing people or even end users interacting with support.

 

Write an effective title

In this day of scanning, bug titles turn into what everyone will look at the most in a bug.  In Tracker, they turn into story titles which is the most visible element of a story.  It’s worth taking extra time to make sure the title is as succinct yet as informationally dense as possible.

 

Take pains to write clear steps to reproduce the problem

While some bugs are worth capturing even if you cannot reproduce them, it always helps the person on the other end to understand your bug if you include clear steps to reproduce.  I make them painfully obvious, for example:

1.  Open the Firefox browser
2.  Open this URL:  <URL would go here>

3. Click on the big red button

If you can identify elements by their CSS class or ID, that is a great way to make things clearer, if not, do your best to describe what you see.

 

Include environment information

Which Browser, which Browser version and which Os?

If you are on a device, the name of the device (Asus Transformer) and operating system version will clarify what hardware you are using when you see the bug.

 

Expected Behavior vs. Actual Behavior

Explain what you thought you would see vs. what actually happened.  Often a feature works as the developer or product manager expected or you have uncovered an area of behavior that was not thought about when the feature was designed and coded.  For this reason, it is important to separate what you expect from what actually happens.

 

Screenshots

It is good to include screenshots if something is noticeably wrong.  Personally, I prefer a carefully written description as it gives me insight into what the author of the bug was thinking.

 

Manage your tone of voice – don’t write mean bugs

It can be easy to sound irate or self-righteous in a bug.  Testers know this.  After you’ve completed writing it up, read for and remove any overly emotional language.  This goes for obvious phrases such as, “THIS MAKES ME WANT TO SLIT MY WRISTS,”  “WTF” or “Really????????” and also more subtle language.  Such language will not get your bug fixed any sooner and will only alienate you from those who can fix the problem.  (I have learned this lesson from experience and have written a few mean bugs in my time.)

 

Don’t assign priority if you can help it

There is a difference between the severity with which a bug impacts your usage of a system versus the priority with which a developer will be able to fix the bug.  While it’s well withing range for you to right about how a bug has impacted the application you are using, you are not the one in charge of the development schedule.

 

Anyone who works on finding and writing better bugs deserves a pat on the back so, here, let me give you a virtual one: <Marlena pats you on the back/>

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Credo Work: The ‘So What?’ Test

I have wandered into an oasis in the middle of a desert…

An Oasis in the Desert
Water!!!!

 

O wait. I’m at The Mirage in Las Vegas. I’m presenting tomorrow at the Better Software Conference in Ceasar’s Palace.

 

The Mirage in Las Vegas
The Mirage in Las Vegas

I’m here to wrap up my credo series by presenting my credo and the steps others can use to create their own at the Better Software West/Agile Development Practices Conference.

 

But first, it’s time to really shake out my credo. I’ve been adding to it for quite a while now and it’s been good to see it grow. Writing down things that I believe has been a great confidence builder. Now it is time to go through each part of it and edit.

 

As a nomad in the desert can pack up all of their belongings and carry them from place to place, my credo is supposed to suggest ideas and values that are so core to who I am that I can take that they survive even among the shifting sands of the tech industry. They should be succinct and easy to remember. In fact, Bret Victor in his talk, “Inventing on Principle” suggests paring it down to one and only one guiding principle. (His talk is worth setting aside an hour and contains some amazing UX technology guided by his one principle).

 

This editing down of the credo is the “so what?” test and it involves looking at the credo through the lens of clarifying values.  I really like the list of clarifying values listed in “Building Your Own Theology” and found them to be a great guide.  After all, if I am willing to say I believe something, I should be willing to affirm it in public in front of my peers, act upon it and practice it consistently.

 

“Values, meanings and convictions are:

1. Freely chosen
2. chosen from among alternatives
3. chosen reflectively and deliberately
4. prized and cherished (you feel good about them)
5. willingly and publicly affirmed
6. acted upon
7. part of a consistent pattern of behavior”

 

It is also worth asking for each statement in a credo if “you practice what you preach” and rating that on a scale from 1 to 7.

 

I’ve written about the concept of congruence before.  This is matching what you think and feel on the inside with what you do and say on the outside.  Going through your beliefs and asking yourself if you practice what you preach is a great way to assess your congruence.  If something is out of whack, maybe there are some changes you can make to bring yourself more in line.  I realize that this is much easier said than done, but following through on that is necessary for building self-worth and confidence.

 

Here are a few more questions that round out the so what test:

 

How do the statements in your credo interfere with your career today?
What are the main obstacles for living your professional values?
What plans can you make to bring your professional life more in line with your values?
What will you do differently after today?

 

If you’ve been reading my blog, you may have noticed that I made a rather big change recently when I switched jobs from Software Engineer in Test at Mozilla to Support/QA for Pivotal Tracker. That was a direct result of noticing that I wasn’t living out my beliefs and values.  My life has been fairly nomadic in the past few years and if there is one thing I have learned it is that life is too short,  too precious and too wonderful for me to spend even a minute of it with my values out of whack with the way I live.

 

Tomorrow, I’ll post my credo here after I have unveiled it in my session.  If you are at Better Software West/Agile Development Practices, you can catch my session at 4:00pm in Florentine Ballroom III.

 

 

Credo Work: At the end of the world

“In my dream I was drowning my sorrows
But my sorrows, they learned to swim
Surrounding me, going down on me
Spilling over the brim
Waves of regret and waves of joy
I reached out for the one I tried to destroy
You…you said you’d wait
’til the end of the world”

 

-U2
Until the end of the world

 

This credo work is nearly over.  Next week I will be presenting the whole of the journey at Better Software West which includes the unveiling of my own Credo.  There is still, however, a bit of work to be done.  In this post, I explore the meaning and purpose of professional life.  If we were hiking through the desert, this would be the point in the trip where we reach the edge of a great precipice and, peer over the side, pondering our next move.

Road Follows the Twists and Turns of Island in the Sky, a Mesa in the Northern Section of the Canyonlands, 05/1972
Island in the Sky - U.S. National Archives

This photo is from a cliff I stood atop years ago with my husband.  It is in an area called, “Island in the Sky” in Canyonlands National Park, Utah.  I remember standing at the edge, my husband politely suggesting in a louder-than-normal voice that I step back.  It was exhilarating because I was staring at the end of the world.

 

This is the raw place I have written about where everything is stripped away and all you can see is your own bare reality.  All of the activities I have blogged about are levels of stripping away bullshit until you get to this moment and the meaning of your life is staring you in the face, intertwined with your physical mortality.

 

All of our careers have a shelf life, and before that day comes, it’s worth asking questions about the meaning of our careers and what we intend to leave behind.  If this seems too abstract and distant in terms of your current context, never fear!  There is a “purpose in life” quiz you can take!  It is not a magical cure for anything, but if you have lost your way and are too caught up in a daily grind (which happens to everyone at one time or another) this test will make it fairly obvious.

 

I took this test and managed to squeak over the edge of having a clear purpose.  I’m sure there are improvements I can make, but I’m in a pretty good place with what I’m doing.

 

Here are a few open-ended  sentences you can complete.  Some are from the book, “Building your own theology,” by Richard S. Gilbert.  Some of them I adapted to those of us working in software.  Don’t overthink them, but rather, jot down the first thing that pops into your head:

I most want:

My career is:

I hope I can:

I have achieved:

My highest professional aspiration:

The most hopeless thing:

The whole purpose of my career:

My day-to-day job:

My role in software:

To me software is:

I am accomplishing:

This should get your writing juices flowing.  Now try writing a paragraph about your professional aims, ambitions and goals.

 

In writing my paragraph, there were no surprises, but then, I’m nearly at the end of this journey.  At this point, it’s all about distilling the most important bits out of all of the work that I’ve done.  Whenever I find myself standing at the edge of a cliff, faced with my own physical mortality, the important stuff typically finds its way to the surface.  Who cares about stand ups or the commute or the fact that the office I work in is always so freaking chilly!  Whatever I want to accomplish most unfurls itself and hangs over the earth as I gaze out into the distance.

 

To end this chapter in the credo work, I’ve written a cinquaine which is a variant of the haiku.  Here is the structure if you would like to write your own:

 

start with a noun
two words modifying the noun
3 “ing” words related to the noun
a related 4 word phrase
a synonym of the noun

 

Here is mine:
data
messy unparsed
illuminating, clarifying, expanding
now you see it
information

Credo Work: A few bits from Software History

The Cathedral & The Bazaar
The Cathedral & The Bazaar (Photo credit: Hades2k)

Even though the software credo I am writing is a personal thing, I’m not writing it in a vacuum.  We are all writing the history of software and, at this point, the history of computers and software is big enough and old enough to have it’s own corners and back alleys.

 

In this post, I’ve researched into some questions about computer & software history. I’ll be writing about some events that were important in my corner of computers, some of moments which were not the best, and the event I would most like to have witnessed.
Who are some of the important people or events in your particular area of software and what did they contribute.

I’ve already blogged about The Ultimate Nerd and my ultimate nerds so I’ll be focusing mainly on the events in computer and software history that has meant the most to me.

 

The fight between Internet Explorer and Mozilla
I may have just left Mozilla as a corporate employee, but Mozilla and its mission are still very much alive to me.  If you don’t understand what the whole fight for the open web is about, it is worth Investing 40 minutes of your time to watch Mitchell Baker talk about the history of Mozilla.

 

Back in the nineties, I remember listening to NPR every day for news about how the lawsuit between Microsoft and Mozilla was proceeding.  I hope that, at some point, a book is written about the history of Mozilla and some of its projects.  I had chills more than once as I watched Mitchell Baker give this talk on the history of Mozilla.  A lesson she learned from the Mozilla project and her most memorable quote from this talk is something I will carry around with me until I die, “Leadership depends on who will follow you.”  (It’s at 11:30 if you wish to listen for yourself)

In fact, the fight isn’t over.

 

The blossoming of the open source software movement
The theology of the open web and open source software is deep water which I’m not expecting to plumb in a couple of paragraphs, but if you give yourself the time to really dive into the history and its ideas, you will be rewarded.

 

If you wish to wade into these waters, I highly recommend reading through The Cathedral and The Bazaar by Eric Raymond.  It is beautifully written and I think I must have highlighted half of it.  Although there are frequent references to the creation of Linux, the paper itself is timeless like K&R or Unix Shell Scripting.

 

Reading through this paper, I could see some of the groundwork for agile being laid.  There is a spirit of egalitarianism coupled with a “need for speed.”  Raymond mentions in a few places that it is important to “release early, release often.”  He also writes about the very inclusive development philosophy of Linus Torvalds which was counter to the more exclusive “cathedral” model of isolating a few geniuses and letting them polish the software creating a longer release cycle.

 

This actually deserves a longer post and critique in the context of what we know about open source today.

 

The signing of the Agile Manifesto

Looking at the number of people who were present for this event, I will never understand how they were all able to agree on the document itself.  It appears to me to be one of the greater examples of consensus.  The fact that what’s in the manifesto meant enough to these guys to get together and agree on it sends a strong message.  I consider myself lucky to swim in this every day at Pivotal Labs and I hope my blog helps you push further with it in your own professional life.

 

Historical Software Defects
These are the moments in software history that are not the greatest but they have valuable lessons to teach.

Therac-25
The, “primary reason should be attributed to the bad software design and development practices, and not explicitly to several coding errors that were found. In particular, the software was designed so that it was realistically impossible to test it in a clean automated way.”

 

The Therac 25 was designed to automate the delivery of radiation therapy to cancer patients.  Tragically, it sometimes injected patients with levels that were too high, even tragically high.

My software engineering teacher, Dr. Susan Duggins, first introduced me to this in our software engineering class. It’s important because it highlights that testing should be involved earlier in the software process and that building software is not just about typing out the code.  I am in love with the idea of ecosystems as they apply in software and in open source.  This legal case points the way towards software occurring in an ecosystem.

 

The Mars Rover
Imagine that you’ve spent months working on a small vehicle that will land on Mars.  Imagine the pressure of knowing that many millions of dollars has been spent for you to do this work.  It’s a crowning achievement involving your team and other teams as well.

 

Imagine that the Rover lands and doesn’t work because you’ve been programming in standard measurement units, but an external team you’ve been working with has used the metric system.  I would have cried for days.

 

The failing of the Mars Rover demonstrates the power of good communication and how major defects can occur without it.  If you are a tester and you sometimes feel like the team therapist because you’re trying to get developers to talk with each other, I have news:  You are not alone in feeling like a therapist.  If you ever wonder if you are doing the right thing or sticking your nose where it doesn’t belong, think of the Mars rover team.

 

If you could only witness one moment in computer or software history, what would it be and why?
For this question I am brazenly cheating.  I’d like to watch one of the great visualizations being drawn just to see the tools that were used and the place where it was being drawn.  These had to be hand drawn as there was no machinery to produce them.  I’d like have a look at the instruments used to make the measurements and the drawing implements.  I’d like sit in the chair that William Playfair sat in or watch Charles Joseph Minard explain his visualization of Napoleon’s March.

 

This concludes my look at software history for my blog post, but it’s brought up some threads I’d like to push further.  I’m not quite finished reading and writing about “The Cathedral and the Bazaar.”  I’m also not finished with “Leadership depends on who will follow you.”  It’s a funny thing about these credo posts.  They tend to open more doors and windows than I have time to close.  I don’t mind leaving them open, however, as this is letting in some fresh air.  Wherever you are, I hope that when you get to the end of my post, you take a minute and just…breathe.

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Lady Lego Pirates or Why My Mom is AWESOME

Pirate Legos

My sister and I opened our Lego gifts and were delighted!  What kid wouldn’t be excited to get a huge box of Lego pirates!  After we’d opened the boxes, Mom told us she was not happy that all of the pirates were men and that she’d written Lego a letter and received a response back.  “They actually do have lady pirates, they just hadn’t started making them yet.”  She showed us a letter she had received on Lego corporate stationary.  “They are sending us some lady pirates, but they won’t be here for a few days.  You two are getting some of the first lady pirates.”

Photo by Mom

We did, indeed, receive the lady lego pirates and enjoyed the pirate lego set.  In fact, we entered a Lego contest at the Kmart down the road and my sister won!!

 

This would certainly make a happy end to the story, but life is not a fairy tale and moments like these feed into what happens to us later in life.  At the time, I did not know that I would eventually be getting a BS in Computer Science or that I would spend a lot of time questioning why I was one of 5 women in the BS program at my school.

 

After listening to presentations and reading research papers passed around the Vancouver Grace Hopper conference, the conclusion I reached is that, at least in the U.S., girls are trained and messaged away from math and science at a very young age. The message is that we don’t want to play with erector sets or to take apart our computers.  According to the marketing, the only thing we’re supposed to want is an E-Z bake oven and a birthday party at the American girl store.  Don’t mistake what I say as a 100% rejection of those things.  I think it’s fine to learn how to bake or play with dolls. I do, however, reject the way it’s shoved down our throats as “what girls like to do.”

 

When I hear people say girls don’t stick around in math and science because they are not interested, I’d like to point them to the commercials that play on Saturday morning cartoons or to the faces they see on the boxes in the toy aisles.  If you have kids, take a minute to look around the next time you are buying toys. You might find it eye-opening.  Although I haven’t seen it, I hear the documentary “Miss Representation” deals with this topic.

 

I was prompted to write this post after reading Legos, Spaceships and Breasts by Kate Bachus.  Kate appears to be a mom who shares some of the frustrations my own mother experienced years ago and so I decided it was time to share my family’s story.  These types of choices and voiced frustrations reverberate long after the legos are put away.

 

I do think that there has been some progress although I feel extremely conflicted about some of the progress. While I understand on some level it’s good that lego is trying the “girl” lego thing (kind of like Barbie made a “Computer Engineer” Barbie), I also think it’s great that there are moms out there wanting to know why the girl legos aren’t better, and encouraging their kids not to care about whether their legos come from the pink aisle or the blue one.  My mom gave me the same encouragement and this is part of the reason why MY MOM IS AWESOME.

 

(With the Barbie…does anybody seriously wear pink cat eye glasses or carry a pink laptop?  I better change my vim color scheme to Flamingo or the Barbie police will arrest me.)

 

 

Sketch it Out with Thelma and Louise

A Sketchnote of Thelma and Louise

 

Vacation is always such a great unraveling of the mind.  Usually, it takes me a few days, but I inevitably come to a place where I’ve sloughed off enough dead weight in terms of daily bullshit to really get down to it — that mossy dark place of, “so tell me how you really feel.”

 

When I get to this place, it reveals itself through some type of artistic expression.  I tend to go in phases with painting, drawing, writing or playing guitar.  This time it’s drawing, or more precisely, sketch noting.

 

The designers at Atlassian are completely and utterly to blame for this.  I follow some of them on twitter and whenever they go to a conference, they post the sketch notes they make.  If you have a look, you might also find some inspiration in them.

 

When I’ve gone to conferences or listened to brown bag talks, lately, I’ve been sketching things out.  In school, I chalked up a lot of success to the fact that I would take notes the old-fashioned way — I wrote them out.  There was something to do with the physicality of writing things as I listened that helped me process information, make connections and remember it all later.  Sketching has a similar result which I learned about when I watched this brief you tube from Jeannel King called Visual Notetaking: Why What You Draw is Good Enough!

 

Flashback to this past Winter: every Monday, I would sneak out of the office and drive up to San Francisco where I would take a fiction writing class.  We discussed a lot of fiction, but none of it was the stuff I read in high school.  In one class, we watched scenes from Pulp Fiction.  In another class, we talked about how the opening chapter of a book or the opening scene of a movie sets the stage and, if done well, is a microcosm of the plot.

 

One such movie that accomplishes this is a favorite of mine, Thelma and Louise.  In the opening scene, you see Louise waiting on tables. She gets the eat-shit-and-die look after she tells a table of young girls that they shouldn’t smoke.  She then goes to the back and takes a smoke break.  Thelma’s husband, makes his entrance by screaming, “Goddammit Thelma! Don’t holler like that!”  If you can’t tell, this movie is all about the voicelessness of women.  It is also one of the ultimate road trip movies of all time (up there with The Endless Summer)  If you haven’t seen it, I highly suggest checking it out.

 

Since my writing classes have ended, I’ve been reading the books and watching the movies that we talked about.  For some of them, I’ve even done some of my own literary analysis.  In the case of Thelma and Louise, I got out my sketchbook, and did some drawing.  Note that for some of these, I paused the movie to capture some extra detail.  This is, after all, vacation!

 

I’ve always liked this movie, but after paying some attention and tracing what happens along with what is said and the song lyrics that come out, I like it even more.  Learning how to speak up for yourself can be messy, and this film takes us through that mess for these two women.  For some reason, I’m reminded of the Weekend Testing session I hosted on close reading.  I guess this counts as close watching, and is certainly more fun than reading through java stack traces.

 

Excuse me while I go find some Wild Turkey.

 

 

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Webinar with me: Using Firefox Add-ons for testing

As a tester of web applications, I’ve become familiar with how web pages are constructed and rendered through the browser.  Firefox Add-ons provide a great set of tools for doing this and have been a mainstay of my testers toolbox for quite a while.  One of my jobs as a Mozilla employee was to show others how to use some of these addons.

 

Below is a chat I had a while back with a contributor (name anonymized for privacy) about Firebug and Firepath, 2 addons that I use all the time for getting information about the elements, called locators, on a webpage.  We use these all the time in Selenium testing and it is a taste of what I’ll be talking about in a free webinar I’ll be giving for the Software Association of Oregon on Tuesday, May 15 from 12:00pm to 1:00pm.  Registration is free :o)

 

In addition to Firebug and Firepath, I’ll be talking about an add-on developed at Mozilla, Mem Chaser and some browser functionality that started as an add-on but has made its way into the Firefox browser, Tilt.

 

marlenac  Have you used Firebug before?
olivier No i have heard of it
olivier  Its a firefox extension
marlenac  You’ll want to install 2 addons: Firebug and Firepath into firefox
marlenac  I use both of these all the time to help with the locators.  I’m also looking up a good link on CSS for you.
marlenac  This blog post explains some of it and has a bunch of other links for working with Selenium and CSS:  http://blog.reallysimplethoughts.com/2010/10/12/a-quick-introduction-to-css-locators-in-selenium/
olivier How does firebug help with locators?
olivier  Does it generate the expression?
marlenac  It allows you to inspect web pages so you can see what the locators are.
marlenac  If you’ve got it installed, choose an element on a web-page, right click and choose “inspect element”
olivier  Kk
marlenac  As an example, I’m on the homepage for addons: https://addons-dev.allizom.org/en-US/firefox/
marlenac  If I hover the mouse over the big “ADD-ONS”, right click, and choose inspect element
marlenac  It will split the window of the browser and show me the html of the page at the bottom.
olivier  Kk
marlenac  the line starting with “<a title=”Return to the Firefox…” is highlighted.
marlenac  Just above that is a css class “site-title”
olivier  Right
marlenac  If I want to select the link at “ADD-ONS”, the selector will be “.site-title > a”
marlenac  We can check that this is correct with Firepath.
marlenac  In the Firebug pane, there are several tabs at the top.  “HTML”, “CSS” and further over is “Firepath”
olivier  Kk
marlenac  If you paste in “.site-title > a” without the quotes, it will highlight the element for you.
marlenac  It’s pretty great!
olivier  Thx so much u just made my life easier
marlenac  I know!!!!!!  We’d all be suffering without Firebug and Firepath!!
marlenac  A couple of tips.
marlenac  Use .blah to specify a class name
marlenac  Use #blah to specify an id.
marlenac  Use the “>” to get to a child element.
olivier  What if there are many child element?
marlenac  You can keep going with it.
marlenac  or if there is a list, you can use “nth” to specify the 1st, 2nd, 3rd.
marlenac  This post has a great explanation of that:  http://saucelabs.com/blog/index.php/2010/01/selenium-totw-css-selectors-in-selenium-demystified/
marlenac  I’m just finding an example in our code as well.
olivier  I think i get it
marlenac  Cool!
olivier  I will ask i get stuck
olivier  Thx again
marlenac  You’re welcome :)

Pivot!

PIvotal Tracker Icon for Fluid

In a few weeks, I’ll be joining Pivotal Labs to work on the Pivotal Tracker team.  I’ll be mainly handling support requests and helping with some testing as well.

What drew me to Pivotal?  After all, I’ve got a job as a Software Engineer in Test at Mozilla working with Selenium tests all day every day, what more could one possibly want?  Judging by the number of recruiter emails I get, a Software Engineer in Test working with Selenium all day can pretty much right their own ticket, can’t they?
Well, yeah, and I <3 Selenium, but it’s just one part of testing.  In fact, writing Selenium tests is just one aspect of making software.  I’m ready to own up to being a specialist who knows a lot about testing and automation, but I’m also a generalist who helps make software.  At one point, I thought I only wanted to work on test automation infrastructure, but I’ve since learned that I prefer working with a product team.
This all came about while writing the credo posts that have pre-occupied me since January.  I’ve learned that I love writing more than any other occupation and that participating on a team making software is more important to me than identifying as a tester.
This change will move me into a world where I toss out my own self-imposed label of “tester” or “automator” and throw my bucket of skills at a highly collaborative software team.  In letting go of being “the tester,” there will be other skills that I now get to exercise:
  • Being a great teammate.  While this is important at Mozilla, I expect even more emphasis on this in the tightly coupled, rabidly agile environment of Pivotal Labs.
  • Since Tracker support is 100% email (plus whatever y’all throw me on twitter), I get to use my communication & writing skills as a primary part of my job.
  • The x-factor skill which isn’t an obvious skill in software, but will be crucial for support is having a developed sense of “mindfulness” or non-judgmental awareness.
  • This is all in addition to flexing my technical skills at bug isolation.
Despite leaving Mozilla, I still have quite a fondness for the company, its mission and my teammates there.  As a parting gift to them, I have stolen the following anonymized excerpt from deep within the bowels of irc.  I hope it gives you a chuckle and some encouragement to, “whisper to the fox:
FirefoxLvr404: come to think of it sweatsbac0n, I’ve seen you blogging, but I haven’t seen you blogging about how opensource html5 makes you opensmile
FirefoxLvr404: how much more delightful canvas web technology do you fucking need?
sweatsbac0n: *laughs*
sweatsbac0n: what the hell are you talking about?
FirefoxLvr404: I’m talking about firefox enriching your happiness & defending your freedom by exposing webgl & websockets APIs on top of a lightning-fast javascript engine
FirefoxLvr404: and all you do in return is treat their animonsters like DIRT
FirefoxLvr404: I hope you feel <yourself proud=”true”/>
sweatsbac0n: a little bit
sweatsbac0n: <yourself proud=”true” proudness=”15%”/>
FirefoxLvr404: I bet you assumed that blue mass was the world
sweatsbac0n: You mean it’s not?
sweatsbac0n: Is it an egg of some kind?
FirefoxLvr404: it’s the cold lonely heart within all of us
FirefoxLvr404: that can only be warmed by having a fox wrapped around it
sweatsbac0n: *laughs*
FirefoxLvr404: a firefox, warming your chest cavity.
FirefoxLvr404: making you whole again.
FirefoxLvr404: whisper to the fox, sweatsbac0n
FirefoxLvr404: wind your arteries gently through its fur
sweatsbac0n: Wow. I’ve never felt closer to a browser before.
FirefoxLvr404: I should hope not.
FirefoxLvr404: You deserve better than any other browser
sweatsbac0n: it feels so wrong. and yet….so right.
Enhanced by ZemantaIndeed…don’t forget to update your Firefox today and did you know that Pivotal Tracker let’s you have as many public projects as you want and 5 private ones as an individual for free?