Category: Uncategorized

Nada Surf taught me all I need to know about being Popular

I wrote this blog for quite a while with the attitude of, “I know know that no one is reading my blog…whoopee!”   It’s a very special feeling, being able to post whatever you want and knowing that no one is reading.  My first posts were written as part of my independent study of the semantic web/web 2.0 and morphed into posts reviewing games as part of my summer semester video games class.  (Hell yeah, I know you’re jealous!)  After that the blog languished as I slogged through a project management class that nearly killed me.

Something happened in that semester of project management.  I attended GTAC, and the blog turned into something real.  I met David Burns who writes The Automated Tester and is doing great things with Selenium and .NET.  I was so impressed with how seriously he was involved with his blog.  It rubbed off and when I returned, I started thinking of how I could get more serious about my own blog.

I knew that I wanted a new job and not in the city where I was currently residing.  I also knew that, unfortunately, my school has negative street credibility outside of Atlanta, GA.  If you want to debate me on that point, just ask the people around you, if anyone has heard of Southern Polytechnic State University. You won’t see very many hands.

I decided to blog everything that I did in school.  At least I would be able to say, “Hi prospective employer x.  I’ve done really great things at school, here they are on my blog.”  As part of this whole, getting-more-serious-thing I moved my blog from blogger to wordpress. I still had that “whoopee” feeling that no one was reading my blog.  I just thought that people would be reading it later.

I kept working my way through classes, having fun with visualization and writing my thesis.   My advisor pushed me to submit my thesis to PNSQC.  I was very shocked when it was accepted.  I had no idea it would be chosen.  I honestly thought I would get the “thanks, but no thanks” email.  It made me nervous to think about presenting my work, but I figured I would just stand up in some tiny back, basement room filled with 2 people and stumble through some slides.  Then this post of Alan Page’s happened.

At this point, I had read most of Alan’s book, (no small feat considering I had classes requiring lots of attention) and decided it was my FAVE-O-RITE testing book.  I can’t tell you how many times I’ve used this book.  I actually did a report on Equivalence class partitioning as part of my Formal Methods class.  There is no way I can possibly overestimate how important this book was/is for me.  In fact, I was unable to post a review of it because the one I wrote was just so Fangirl it even made me want to barf.  To have one of the authors saying that he couldn’t wait to see MY presentation at PNSQC was enough to make me hyperventilate.  If your favorite tester called you up and told you how much they liked what you were doing, how would you feel?

I felt watched.  I couldn’t write for a week.  I jumped at every noise and kept turning around because I could feel someone behind me.  I was spooked.

Here’s the thing about knowing that people read your blog…you KNOW people are reading your blog.  I know that when I go into work tomorrow, my boss, several co-workers and my former neighbor will have read this post.

Disclosure: I wrote this in February, but never posted it.  It’s one of those pieces I just sort of coughed up in 10 minutes and forgot about.  This past week, I’ve been rolling around in semantic web concepts.  I feel like writing about them but don’t want to leave y’all wondering what I’m talking about.

Twitter has become such a part of my professional life. It’s also extremely difficult to filter. Everyone who uses twitter has some algorithm for deciding when to follow, not follow or unfollow someone.

Since my blog template now includes the nifty little blue button up there in the top left corner, I’ve been getting followers from my blog. If this is how you decided to follow me on twitter…welcome to the party :)

Currently, when someone follows me on twitter, I have to go through a really awful, dis-combobulated process of deciding 1) are they a spammer? 2)should I follow them back. The process of having to figure these 2 is one manifestation that our regularly scheduled internetz is not working anymore. We need the semantic web and we need it now. We need data visualization and we need it now. We need the two to work together like peanut butter and chocolate and we needed it yesterday.

The Semantic Web:

I always link to this youTube of Sir Tim Berners-Lee. It’s for a reason, so if you haven’t watched yet, please have a look (I just watched it again). It is the vision of the semantic web. The reason why this particular problem can, I believe, only be solved by a semantic search is because judging someone on twitter is so freaking hard. It’s not just who they know. It’s about their interests, it’s about what they are working on, it’s about how much they tweet and what they tweet about.

I am a tester, but I follow developers too. I enjoy following testers who are local but I also enjoy following testers who live in other parts of the world. I’ve got a few friends on twitter who I know in real life. The only celebrities I currently follow are celeb-u-testers, but I won’t embarrass them by calling them out here. In fact, there’s one guy I follow just because he’s an uber-nerd who is always tweeting about uber-nerd types of things. Much of it is over my head, but I find it’s a great way to keep my eye on the pulse of tech emanating San Francisco.

What do these people have in common? Maybe some of them have a few things in common, some of them have a lot in common and some of them have nothing in common with each other but there is something about them that interests me.

Data visualization

At this point a network visualization would really be helpful. If you’ve ever looked at a family tree, that is very similar to a network graph. Network graphs are all about showing and judging relationships.

A love match:

In this case, when I am notified of a new follower on twitter, I would really like to see that person’s network graph in relation to my own. However, and this is where it gets interesting, I don’t want the network graph to ONLY consist of people. I don’t just want to see who, I want to see why. Do people work in the same place? Do we share an interest in a computer language even if I am a tester and the other person is dev? Were we both residents of Haus Berlin in Wuerzburg, Germany from Fall 1994 to Summer 1995? Does this person tweet when their nose hairs grow an inch (which, btw, is a really gross thing to tweet ) or do they only ever tweet when they write a new blog post? (In which case they are probably already in my reader so I don’t need to follow them either.)

The 17 twitter visualizations summarized by Nathan Yau on his Flowing Data blog dance all around the big picture of visualizing twitter. Most of them show network relationships between people, some of them show locality, some show the volume of tweets per hashtag, but none of them has found a way to integrate all of this information. The team that accomplishes this will be making a huge breakthrough.

This is a new level of complexity for me, and I’m guessing, many others as well. Unfortunately, these are not problems that can be solved with an email and a pie chart.  I’ve started working on using pieces that go into a semantic web application.  I’ve done this partly because I feel there is promise for testing here.  If you see me posting about non-testy stuff like REST or RDF or data.gov.uk, it’s because these are my attempts to fully understand how I can engage semantic web concepts for testing.  Exploratory testing through exploratory data analysis:  bring it!

It’s been nearly a month since my post on testing in Australia.  I’ve settled into my job at Atlassian (who are still looking for testers), moved into an apartment that I suspect was once a stable and with the help of others, put together a Weekend Testing Chapter for Australia and New Zealand.

Uh-huh.  That’s right…

!!!@@@WEEKEND TESTING IN AUSTRALIA AND NEW ZEALAND@@@!!!

No longer will testers in these time zones have to ponder whether they should participate with Bangalore on Saturday night or Europe at um…2:30 am Sundays.

The first Weekend Testing session will take place this Sunday, April 18 at 4:30 Sydney time/6:30 New Zealand time.  The first session will be jointly facilitated by New Zealand’s Oliver Erlewein and Bangalore’s Parimala Shankaraiah.

In recognition of the respect held by Australians and New Zealander’s for work-life balance, WTANZ will be held every other week instead of every week.

For those who are curious:  each meeting takes place online and lasts 2 hours.  In the first hour, the system-under-test is revealed and you are given a mission.  You test until the hour is up.  At the end of the hour, the group has a facilitated discussion about was learned, etc.

How to participate:

1.    Register at the Weekend Testing web-site

2.     Register for the Weekend Testing Bug Repository at bugrepository.com

3.    Send an email with your Skype ID to   weekendtestinganz@gmail.com with WTANZ Session 01 in the subject.

4.     If you have a googlewave account, let us know.  We have plans ;)

I used to hate math. I could feel it stalking me whenever I had to look at percentages or do arithmetic in my head. (Think fast: 7 x 8). Binary numbers? You want me to remember converting from decimal to binary and binary to hex? What about logarithms and big-o?

Is your heart racing? Do you feel like less of a nerd? You shouldn’t.

Math used to scare the hell out of me on a daily basis. It began in the third grade when a really awful substitute teacher felt compelled to teach me division with remainders. At this point, it’s obvious to me that she didn’t know what she was doing. All I remember is being screamed at for hours and told how stupid I was. My math grades were never the same after that.

This is just one way that a math phobia can start. It typically has very little to do with your actual ability and everything to do with anxiety and confidence. At this point, I divide people into two groups when it comes to math: those who are scared of their own shadow, and those who are not. Those of you who absolutely love numbers and have never had a problem working with them…good for you! I hope you love, cherish, and appreciate your gift while also having tolerance for those of us intimidated into doing without.

It has taken me years, to live with and even find enjoyment in math. Much of this is because I eventually found a calculus teacher who showed me that I am, indeed, not stupid when it comes to math. How did she do this? She taught me a few tricks that have helped me feel more confident:

1. Review is the key. It is math. You will forget things. You will forget things you have studied several times. When you come across something like the Pythagorean theorem, for example, there is a very good chance that you won’t remember it. Not if, but when that happens, it’s ok to say, “It’s been a while since I used this so it’s time to review.” This is normal and perfectly acceptable.

2. The best mathematicians SUCK at arithmetic. I didn’t just hear this from my calculus teacher but also from my discrete math teacher. When was the last time your life depended on 15223 / 48? Does it pay your bills? I mean, let’s keep life in perspective. My feeling is, as long as you can make change and count your money…WHO CARES! (Good for the people that do…it’s time to quit worrying if you don’t.)

3. There are people who are born not sucking at arithmetic. I admire them, but I don’t beat myself up because I can’t do what they do. To extend this, I don’t beat myself up when I have to use the calculator or excel for decimal to binary or hex. Life’s too short for me to care.

4. Pictures and colors are your best friend. Math class never came alive for me until my calculus teacher drew graphs and equations on the board in color. She wouldn’t work without it. I found myself understanding concepts that had confounded me in my previous 2 (yes, TWO) attempts at calculus. It was as if I was learning a different subject entirely.

This is not to diminish the importance of math skills. I’ve just seen too many people get upset with themselves for something that a) is not their fault b) is insignificant in the grand scheme of things.

Testers need to know math. In particular, testers need to be familiar with statistical concepts. I’ve seen rampant mis-use of percentages (and testers aren’t alone in this, devs do it too. Saw it at work last week). My personal theory, based on no science whatever, is that not all, but many testers like using bug counts because they don’t know anything else.

Are you feeling scared? Don’t worry. We’re all in this together. I have to review my statistics as well, and I plan on doing it here. The book I’ll be using is Head First Statistics. Another good book that I had to give away before my move was the Manga Guide to Statistics. You see, learning math isn’t the same as it used to be. There’s no need to be scared anymore.

When I was cleaning out a bunch of old papers in my file cabinet before the move to Oz, I came across an old IQ test that I took in the third grade. My math skills were rated “superior.” I chucked it with a bunch of other crap I just didn’t need anymore.

My plane landed on Friday and I’m finally over the jet lag. The past month or so has been nothing but packing, packing, PACKING. I’m over it and ready do some testing.

In the brief survey of the OZ testing landscape I’ve been able make, I’m finding that Australia has a really great testing community.

Before I arrived, I’d been having some great fun conversing with testers and developers in OZ including @erik_petersen (Melbourne) ,@alisterscott (Brisbane), @jmajma (Sydney), @deancornish (Melbourne) and @sherifmansour (Sydney). They made me feel welcome before I even showed up for work.

When I wrote up my predictions for this year, one of them was that Weekend Testing would spread. It’s been my intention all year to participate in Weekend Testing as much as possible, and with my move out of the way, I’m ready to step up my commitment. Since I’m now located in Australia, I’d like to see what the testers here, including myself, can put together.

So what is weekend testing? It’s a bottom-up way of bettering yourself as a tester. A weekend testing session lasts for 2 hours. The first hour is spent testing something, sometime in pairs. The second hour is spent discussing what you learned while you were testing. Yes, it really is that simple.

Why do I love this concept so much? This is an empowering way to learn. So much time in testing is spent in justifying our choices and double-checking that what we have found really is broken. If we don’t find something, we’ve got customers to whom we must answer. The weekend testing approach removes these high stakes, in essence, unburdening the tester and placing an emphasis on just trying to break stuff. I know that I need to learn more of this. I suspect that there are other testers in Australia who feel the same way I do.

The first goal I’ve set for myself here in Sydney is to work on my own testing skills through Weekend Testing and to see what I can do about getting others here interested.

Here is the WT web-site. I encourage testers in Australia or elsewhere who are unfamiliar with WT to do some exploring and look over some of the experience reports to get an idea of what happens. This is not about hubris, it’s about having a safe space to try stuff in testing without fear of reprimand or backstabbing.

If you’re in Australia, and you would like to participate in either a European or Indian weekend testing session, Europe testing sessions occur on Saturdays from 3-5 pm…in Europe. For Sydneysiders, this means Sundays from 2:00 am to 4:00 am. Indian testing sessions are a bit more realistic. If you are in Australia these happen from approximately 8:00 pm to 10:00 pm.

I plan to be in touch with the Weekend Testers over the next few weeks to see what we can get together for Australia. Please check out the web-site and see what you think.

Btw…the US is seriously lagging behind in the adoption of WT. What up with that??

[Hat Tip: Chris McMahon for pointing out this awesome video.]

The response I’ve gotten from the tiny bit of work I’ve done with software testing and visualization has changed the direction of my life and shown me that I am not the only visual thinker in software/software testing.  We don’t want to look at tables any more…we want pictures!  We want line and color!  We don’t want to be limited by text in our exploration and creation of software.

So where’s our visual jet-pack?  I mean, I might do crazy viz stuff at home, but at work, I’m still analyzing tables, bug counts and raw data every day.  What gives?

Unfortunately, the only answer I have to this question is another question.  Where is your data?  How do you access information about your tests?  In my experience, most of the data I’ve seen has been in a spreadsheet or on a screen, as in, “Hey you!  You want a piece of me, girlie, you gotta copy and paste!”

In his recent interview on the blog, Indirect Collaboration, Shawn Allen of Stamen Design was asked about the challenges of working with data.  His response rang so true, that it’s the main point of this blog post.  For Mr. Allen, “just getting the data in the first place is the most difficult part of the process, regardless of the source.”

Amen!  Hosannah!  Bravo! and Thx, dude!!!

Every visualization I’ve worked on has included significant challenge in just the beginning step of gathering the data.  If you are working with one table or with tables that play nice, u r lucky. More often than not, the interesting stories are teased from disparate sources in disparate formats.  In general, there is nothing pretty at all about the raw data used in some of the most intriguing visualizations.

Mr. Allen goes on to say that in the case of Stamen’s Crimespotting project, this challenge was overcome by being provided with a KML feed.  The keyword here is feed.

Do you have a feed for your defects?  I know I didn’t have one at my last job, and wouldn’t have known what to do if one had hit me on the head.  This is, however, the world we live in.  When I gave my talk on “Visualizing Software Quality” at Microsoft, one of the comments I got was that my work did not include any type of real-time feed.  It was a wake-up call for me and a challenge I’m working on.

Part of this challenge lies in learning to work with standard formats for data.  Allen mentions KML.  There is also XML and JSON.  I have heard testers bemoaning the “pointy things” of XML, and I hope that we’re past the kvetching.  I’ll admit that I’ve mostly used tab or comma delimited data for my work, but I’m REALLY over them.  Just because I know enough about regular expressions to wear the XKCD t-shirt doesn’t mean I want to spend my life parsing data with them.

If we are ever to be successful at visualizing software quality, we must have feeds from our tests, defects and even the code we are testing.  I don’t want to spend my time figuring out how to get my testing meta-data to play nice.  I would much rather spend my time figuring out which data belongs together and understanding the story it tells.  After all, that is the real value in visualization, no matter what type of picture we create at the end.

Today was my last day at my job.  I have de-badged. When I showed up yesterday, I found that some friends of mine decided to send me off in grand style.  Green and yellow are Australia’s team colors.  In addition to the lovely draperies, my cube was filled with green & yellow balloons.  My boss took me to lunch and gave me some survival items for Australia, among them was a snake bite kit (Thanks Mark!)

I planned for my last day to be Thursday because Friday is the start of Pycon!  As Adam Goucher said to me on twitter, Pycon is THE Python conference.  I see this as the opportunity I’ve been looking for to spend some quality time with this language, break away from Java for a bit and take advantage of this transition-heavy period in my life.  There are some great talks scheduled, and I’ll have a few tough choices to make.

Here are some of the sessions I’m considering attending:
The Mighty Dictionary
VisTrails
Creating Restful Web Services with restish
Deconstruction of an Object
Powerful Pythonic Patterns

There are many more because this schedule is stacked with interesting sessions. If you are planning on attending Pycon, drop me a note or a tweet and enjoy :)

For the past 5 years I have worked at a company that is over 100 years old.  My business group has been ordered to use the waterfall software development process.  Although my current boss along with everyone else in my group impresses the hell out of me on a daily basis, I’ve known for a while that I would be looking for a job when I finished my masters degree.  (A note to CEO’s everywhere:  asking great employees, especially the geeky ones, to innovate with tools from 1995 is a WASTE of everyone’s time.)

In the time that I’ve worked for my current employer, my husband and I have developed an ongoing love affair with America’s Pacific Northwest.  We’ve traveled there many times for business and for fun.  One of the reasons why I submitted my presentation to PNSQC was its locality.  My primary goal was to make as many contacts as possible for the job search I was planning to begin this January.  I had plans to quit my job once New Years arrived, and move to Seattle so I could look for a job.

So I’ve graduated.  This was supposed to be my need-a-tester? post.  Last year, I made a short list of a few places whose employment prospects really made me drool.  Here are the requirements I had:

1. location must be Portland, Oregon or Seattle, Washington metro areas
2. MUST be agile
3. must have a pro-testing culture
4. product must have web 2.0 or semantic web features
5. I must love the product I test so much that I giggle with delight when I use it.
6. testing must include a pragmatic approach to manual testing and test automation
7. company must be a place where I can make a significant contribution

The reason why this was supposed to be my need-a-tester post is because I already found a job.  Yes…it IS possible to get a job in this economy.  Not only is it possible, but the job I found fits almost every requirement I had.

The interview process was incredibly rigorous and there were more than a few times when I thought to myself, “there is NO WAY I will get this job.”  I’m not just saying this because I know my new boss reads my blog (Hiiiiii!!)  I’m going from testing a command-line interface to a full-on, Web 2.0, check-this-api-byatch application of epic proportions.  Let’s just say I know a lot more about TestNG and Selenium than I did before my interview.  For those of you on twitter who remember me talking about my “bugs on a plane” testing session, that was part of my job interview.  Not only was I finding bugs on the plane ride home from PNSQC as the power faded on my Mac, but there was a screaming, pretzel-throwing 3-year-old in the seat next to me who did not stop screaming for a full 4.5 hours.

Which requirement in my list was not met?  Unfortunately, I will not be moving to Portland or Seattle, although I still LOVE them both.  I will be moving to Sydney, Australia.

Say what?!

Yes.

That Sydney, Australia.

I’ve been hired by Atlassian Software.  Although I applied when they began their campaign to hire 32 engineers for their Sydney office, I was already planning to send them an application.  I did not feel the need to look further because they were already tops on my list, regardless of however much of a longshot I felt it was.

I discovered Atlassian in Spring 2008, during my independant study of Web 2.0/Semantic web concepts when I was studying code coverage tools.  Their tool, Clover, not only shows code coverage, but also creates visualizations based on your source code.  And so it was that yours truly was truly hooked and Atlassian became my top choice for employment.

If you look at Atlassian’s products (most of which are $10 for 10 users, except for Clover. tsk, tsk people.) and read through some of their blogposts, you will see that they meet all of my other requirements.  Atlassian has something special going on, and I’m not the only one to have noticed.  It starts with, of all things, their core values and shows up in the quality of the products they create and their almost fanatical user base.  They have the most holistic approach to software I think I have ever seen and, although I haven’t seen their numbers because they aren’t public, they seem to have some pretty good profit margins.  So far, they appear to be winning with integrity. I’m being a bit cheeky here because this is my blog, but if I were running a company, this is how I would approach it.

I’m taking my well-planned out map of a future in the Pacific Northwest and tossing it out for an opportunity to work at a company who’s software made me reconsider what I thought was even possible for software development and also for testing.  It’s a place where I feel the best of my many crazy ideas will be encouraged.

Over the next month, I’ll be selling my stuff, filling out more paperwork and tieing things up in the States.  Working for a company as great as Atlassian and living in a city where everyone, including my new boss, runs around in flip-flops will be challenging, but I will try to manage.  Not to say that this won’t be the most challenging job EVAR, and I won’t totally be working my toucas off in the coming year…but, excuse me while I go look for my 50+ sunscreen…

When you think of art that was produced in 1917, the heyday of Renoir and Monet, a men’s urinal is probably the last thing to come to mind. Yet, Marcel Duchamp submitted this “masterpiece” called “Fountain” as his statement about the quality of a certain art show. (Read more about him here and here.)

Is this great art?  Is it art at all?  What about it is or is not art?  Duchamp did not make this himself.  He bought it.  What I love about the whole episode is that it was so incendiary that people still argue about it.  People argue about this in much the same way the software testing community will be arguing about the meaning of quality until we’re all dead and the aliens are trying to decide if a McDonald’s hamburger wrapper should be catologued as that-which-the-strange-creatures-called-“art”.

This is why I love languages, writing, art and music.  They deepen the meaning of context.  They find the core of our humanity and our attempts to relate to one another.

There was a lively discussion on twitter today about art and quality:

@chris_mcmahon was asking if this is a high quality painting.  @lanettecream doesn’t think so.  @shrinik pointed out that quality is personal.  @michaelbolton thinks that it’s impossible to mention quality without also connecting the quality to someone specific (an idea of Jerry Weinberg’s in Intro to General Systems Thinking.  I guess I should read that.)  I said:  is that a trick question or what? That’s like asking someone to define art.

When I asked @lanettecream why she didn’t like the painting @chris_mcmahon linked to, she said it looked, “boring and too male.” It’s obviously not of high quality for her.

@chris_mcmahon followed up with:

it’s a painting by Franz Kline that sold for $5,122,500 in Nov 2008. does that change your mind?

Note that this is exactly the type of question and argument that goes on in any art history class.

So if quality is subjective and perception is reality, where does this leave Duchamp’s “Fountain.”  Duchamp obviously didn’t think it was of high quality.  In fact, he submitted it under the name “R.Mutt” because he didn’t want it permanently associated as his art (haha). While it was accepted for the art show, it was never displayed.  The art world is divided.  People pay millions for reproductions of it…what does that say?    How do we define quality at all?  How do we define art?

Although it is easy enough to say “context,” I question whether that is an oversimplification.  What happens when the context is shared by hundreds, thousands or millions of people over time?  My honest opinion of defining quality is that there is no one definition.  Even in defining quality and art, any levels that we give them such as high or low will eventually become superfluous much in the way that “with a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.”

Here is a youTube of a performance by the performance art group, Survivial Research Labs.  They build robots and unleash them upon each other until everything is completely destroyed.  I find it oddly hypnotic and comforting. I think I’ll watch it again while I ponder the meaning of testing vs. checking.

Update: Michael Bolton left a really great comment.  Those of you using a reader might want to click through.