TEDxNASA – Steve Shapiro from Stephen Shapiro on Vimeo.

Looking too much only on testing and testers and forums related to testing, I felt the need to change the area of my focus. I wanted something different but didn’t really know why and in which way was that. Well focus-defocusing is an important necesity in any intellectual activity.

It didn’t take too long to get on this video that explains very well the simplicity of things. The story that I liked most in this presentation was about the oil pipe line problem that affected the industry (leaks) and the way that was solved. A Scottish engineer once cut his finger and connected this to the cracks in pipelines making a start point for a solution, based on coagulation.

And how testing can be improved by reading about something else? Well testing is not just merely a technical problem, like doing some manual or automatic activity and everything stops there. Testing is also about efficiency. Reading psychology could help how a testing team can become better, maybe pairings of two testers is more efficient, maybe weekly workshops is better, maybe team buildings, or on the contrary, privacy. Reading about this, which is not actually testing related, even if it doesn’t solve the problem, could help.

Logic and statistics education can help show patterns, how many spam is expected to go through a filter, what are the top sources of spam, what percentage in the analysis of an email could be considered spam. This could be helpful in testing an application that prevents spamming.

Learning about food, what type of food is good and what type is not. Is it good to drink coffee every day, is it healthy?

Maybe sport and biology, what and how much physical activity is optimal? Does it affect in any way?

More close are the technical areas, what type of scripting is it good? Is it better to program every test automation or use scripting only for data generation in a situation. Having practical knowledge will help to get a better estimation.

Look also at the next video that shows the huge impact that sound has on human productivity:

Its very scary how simple things can affect us, that’s what I though when looking at it.

Also the work place interior is affecting us. Architects have long known that the places we inhabit can affect our thoughts, feelings and behaviors. When do you feel better, when you have a blank wall in your face, you are in an isolated gray cubical or when you have nicely designed office, pictures ,colors?
How about light in the equation? Some studies show that light, brightness, and sound affects introverts and extroverts differently. Depending on your personality , the surrounding can either motivate or demotivate someone at work.

Also the team structure. Would you put as Test Lead someone with not relevant experience as a tester to lead a team of testers? Combination and details are very important.

The weather for example can be a factor that affects mood.

The need for relative freedom in the work is affecting productivity. If you work on something that motivates you will be much more productive than someone who just needs the job.

Balancing activities helps. In some cases you will find experts in some fields doing as a hobby totally different activities. For example the MMA fighter Fedor Emelianenko loves painting, chess and religion. This looks apparently unconnected, doesn’t it? Or at least a little bit.

This all helps but some stuff need to remain at some priority. I don’t believe personally when companies put as leads in testing people that were leads to something unrelated. Secondary means secondary. A secondary skill helps but should not be a 100 % replacement.

Testing I believe is an activity with its own body which can be improved by learning other stuff but it should be respected as a craft.

Sometimes testing is about finding patterns. You have the functionality there, you have the requirements, but sometimes something is not in place, like an exception. You noticed that it does happen from time to time, it is quite important as impact on product, but you don’t have all the details to know whats going on and raise an issue or a bug. It is always I guess an option to give up and ignore it, and may seem reasonable to do in some context of risk/occurrence. However as testers we should not give up in situations like this simply because it should be our duty. I don’t say we should follow like crazy everything with low priority and loose time, but in critical situation we should try and enjoy it.

So I was thinking to select something quite bizarre, relative, maybe a little stupid and crazy. And I made my mind to find patterns in blogs, blogs that were with some relevant content to software testing and are relatively popular.

I started thinking about words count in latest blog posts. I found this tool at http://www.wordcounttool.com/ which counts words. I selected the last 7 blog posts from James Bach’s blog. ( it started to become boring to do for more posts) and this are the results(although I am not sure I pasted it right):

2323 words

423 words

572 words

554 words

627 words

732 words

320 words

The first items are also the counts for more recent posts btw. But it didn’t seem to me to be a particular pattern. I suppose it will work with selenium to count all the words in all the posts. Because the relevant post is between a title with different color and font and it ends just before the following text “This entry was posted on…” . But in a real testing environment you would probably have access to the database with all the posts and extract in a more reliable way the information from there. I guess I should test it on my own blog because I have access to my wordpress database , but I want to check also other patterns. I remain however in my mind that the blogs posts on James Bach’s blog may have an average of 500 words per post.

I want to measure and check what are the most used words in a blog post(s). First I will use another tool Google to help me find a helpful tool (and free) for that. I spend only 2-3 min and found this wonderful tool at http://www.wordcounter.com. I selected the latest post from Michal Bolton’s blog (to the date I wrote this post) http://www.developsense.com/blog/2010/06/doing-development-work-vs-doing-quality-assurance/. The tool is great and has some options like including small words or not. I tried first with include option on and here are the results:

I was expecting “a” to be on top to be honest. However I want to check the statistic for the other words maybe it will be more relevant. So here are the results:

Why is the word “extent” doing in top and why is before word “tester”? Is it random or Michael Bolton likes this word a lot?

<<At this moment I was getting hungry and put some pizza in micro. Defocusing is a normal need and should be followed for better performance>>

I looked for the word “extent” in the blog post to check the context of using it and it appears to be in a special situation. But I wanted to check for sure other posts. And the previous post broke my dreams in finding a pattern for the most used word. “Extent” was not in the top 5 and neither that the previous top words.

What next?

<<Defocusing again>>

I was thinking of checking in Cem Kaner’s blog how many sentences tend to be in a post in average by searching for “.” but I gave up quickly.

But I started to realize that I am doing wrong something. Like some bad ideas in testing for example unnecessary automation. With evolution of man people tent to loose common sense and when they do they re-learn it and get more trust in it. The same in society when growing up, a lot of good ideas, talent, is fading away because of constrains.

But going back to the “test platform”,it was interesting to try, that’s why I tried it because I satisfied in this way a curiosity.

I have to say about blogging that is something quite useful. I wasn’t very open to this before because when I heard the word blog I instantly though about some celebrities or teens posting stuff that usually doesn’t raise my interest. But also with the help of Google Reader, which I find it as an amazing tool, I am constantly fed with some quality posts from top rated testing blogs.

Some posts are more technical, some have nice stories, some are very good written, some deal with controversy in testing world, some give advices and a lot of different views. I found out also that even if its seems apparently easy its actually hard to create quality posts, that are able to raise interest and I think practice could help.

Saying this I would like one day to have my own blog so full of quality posts as some I love reading now.

I think there is a connection between two things: over-planning and just not caring. Is when you try to desperately do a thing , you encounter problems or you get tired and then just not care. Because sometimes planning just reduces the pleasure of doing something that should be exciting. Like plan to go in some trip, plan everything including when going to toilet, and then tell friends that can afford similar trip what nice it was. But in testing are also similar situations, we plan to test some product in some way, but as we evolve on it everything may change. We encounter new problems, or new context that drives us away from the initial planed path.

Separately taken over-planning and not caring shouldn’t happen. But sometimes it does.

Over-planning

I read this blog post http://thesocialtester.posterous.com/planning-for-when-cows-attack where there is the nice story of a person that was used to over-plan. Sometimes Test Managers are pushed and try to over plan stuff, especially when they are not experienced or pushed by higher management. Of course the result is pretty bad usually and leads to the exasperation of the rest of the team.

The human mind tries to balance things in a weird way and because the over-planning is actually the result of a unpleasant forced action the tendency can be not-caring.

Not-caring

Not caring brings with it a lot of excuses. Like the picture I borrowed (with his permission) from Andy Glover’s blog.

There are too many bugs to capture, need for break, personal excuses, not enough payment and so on.

My opinion that the best way to avoid that is to get the relative independence to test and keep the passion fueling the actions.

I saw on few blogs this flag counter to measure visitors. I though it might be helpful to get some statistics at least for a while.

Extra: I am adding to this post token 9UBX2GNU26ZQ so I should hopefully get recognized by Technorati.