Since Wikipedia these days is so easy to use and so useful to get information, I tend to spend time on it and I got over this part:

Weinberg’s Law of Twins states that most of the time, no matter how much effort one expends, no event of any great significance will result. Weinberg’s Law of Twins Inverted states that occasionally—particularly when one isn’t expecting it—a significant event occurs.

Gerald Weinberg invented the law and described it in his book The Secrets of Consulting (1986), in which he explains the origin of its name. He reported that, while riding a bus in New York City, he observed a mother with eight small children embark. She asked the driver the amount of the fare; he told her that the cost was thirty-five cents, but that children under the age of five could ride for free. When the woman deposited only thirty-five cents into the payment slot, the driver was incredulous. “Do you mean to tell me that all your children are under five years old?” The woman explained that she had four sets of twins. The driver replied, “Do you always have twins?” “No,” said the woman, “most of the time we don’t have any.”

I put this together with the focusing-defocusing need of a mental activity to become  efficient. You probably notice a lot when you try to resolve a problem, or find some keys in the house or keep thinking at something without any result initially. And when sometimes you get to another activity temporary: go to lunch, get fresh air, play a game etc, you suddenly find a solution to your problem.

Now I don’t know the Weinberg’s Law of Twins but my idea is that the two behaviors: 1)lack of productivity when trying too much 2)great results with small effort; happen in the same ecosystem(person). Who experienced the first will experience the second eventually.

Malcolm Gladwell has studied something similar. Read a description here:http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/30/books/review/Leonhardt-t.html?_r=1 He describes  the stories  of many known people, where it looked that only luck helped them, while before that they spend a lot of time working for free and following their passion.

The same is in testing. Is another reason while test case way of working cannot be very productive. Test cases were invented out of the need of justification and measurably and coverage. But there are new ways to make these needs fulfilled better. The focus in test cases is limited and gives a wrong sensation of self-fulfillment where improvement is much slower than ET.

As testers we must determine impossible assignments. Not just complaining and creating  discomfort. Most task can be partially impossible and this also has to be dissected.

You may have:

• A task that is reasonable regarding the project, but not regarding the imposed approach to do the testing.
• Lack of an oracle, where you don’t have the expected behavior defined properly to know what is a bug.
• You don’t have a proper environment or tools to perform the testing in a reliable way
• Misleading or improper documentation
• Lack of  a proper cycle in the project. Ex: whatever a developer has done is the correct behavior; the rest is misconfiguration or 3rd party issue
• Difficult environment of some sort in a team

There are a lot of other possible issues that make a project impossible to test or partially impossible. Some situations are resolved with common sense, some need experienced approach.

So before testing is good to determine situations like this and present it.

For testers is good to improve the ability to describe so I will use a short video of a device that I filmed in a Vienna museum. I don’t know what the device supposed to be btw. I don’t like the auto-resize of Youtube btw also.

I wont make a very detailed report on it but only a quick listing:

• Its a device with a certain dynamic in it, compared with the rest of surrounding objects
• The color green is  an important element that is striking when looking at it
• The fluid looks like it follows a cyclic transition going through the main recipient.
• It has 5 main parts: a cylinder, a support for this cylinder, a long tube, an engine, and a green fluid
• Apparently it looks self-sustaining but its supported by electric power
• It is in a room with artificial light
• Even if the fluid is constantly flowing in the cylinder there is a fluid volume half of the recipient inside
• It has a lot of similarities with blood flowing through human body
• The fluid on the bottom of the cylinder looks like is more dark-green than the rest
• It is also observable by the noise it makes

Here are 10 reasons why I find useful to write down what you test while you test. This doesn´t mean to write every detail but the main parts and the important parts need to be specified.

1) It keeps track of what you have been doing. You can find easily some details in your test. For example the path of some script, some database table etc.

2)You can use the text/ log of what you wrote as as report for testing. To give to your client for example.

3)You can better present your approach used by presenting the details of what you wrote.

4)You can improve your writing skills. Also you can improve the way you describe your actions, test etc

5)You can be more organised.

6)You can learn better the application to test, the details involving working with the application. When you write down something is easier to learn.

7)You have the sensation of continuity which can contribute a lot to your motivation.

8)It reduces a disadvantage compared to development, where written part (code) is ¨proof¨ of the work, for most part.

9) You can put more details to a bug report using what you already described.

10)The writing activity can be used as a paralel activity to the usual actions, like  de-focusing -very important for efficiency, but still useful as a whole (compared to browsing meaningful websites)

It it said that one picture  is worth a thousand words.

So:

1 picture = 1000 words

It is also studied that human eye can process 24 frames/second (there is context dependency though, read more http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frame_rate#How_many_frames_per_second_can_the_human_eye_see.3F

So:

1 second = 24 frames (pictures)

One movie for example has in average 90 minutes that means:

One movie=90*60=5400 seconds

One “good” book has in average 400 pages (rough estimation)

Book=400 pages

I see there are averages for number of words per page =275

One page = 275 words

It appears I can use number of words as a common measuring system.

For movie we have:

Movie = 5400 seconds = 5400 * 24 frames = 129600 frames = 129600000 words

For book we have:

Book = 400 pages = 400 * 275 words = 110000 words
Basically we have a movie values 1000 books

This “laborious” study of 30 minutes shows that people show wait for the movie before reading the book and not vice-versa

(Waiting for opinions on what is wrong with this “study”)