Category Archives: insight - Page 4

In search of perfection

Posted by on January 4, 2011 2 comments

I knew Flynn was in trouble the moment he created a program Clu 2 as his doppleganger. You see, the purpose of Clu 2 was to create the perfect system.

Flynn, a programmer failed to understand the struggle between perfection and quality. I’m guessing he didn’t spend a lot of time in the test team!

Of course, none of this makes any sense unless you have watched TRON the Legacy.

Warning!  I’m giving a bit of the plot away below…

In Tron Legacy, Flynn a programmer realises that he can’t spend all of his time in(yes in) his computer, so he creates Clu 2, a program that will create the perfect system for him. Unfortunately, the perfect system starts to wipe out everything that it sees as imperfect and pretty soon our world as we know it is being threatened. I know, its a pretty silly storyline, still the effects were great and it got the thumbs up from the 7 & 9 yr old critics.

What is perfection? Perfection, as I understand it, is  to be without fault or defect. A pretty tall ask for software. And Quality? Well, that is value to some person.¹

Both Quality and Perfection are subjective if you think about it. For example, art critics describe the Mona Lisa smile as the perfect smile. But in my mind, that small measly semi grin is far from perfect.

So, what is the difference between Quality and Perfection? Perhaps quality is more realistic, more humane?  They appear to be related in some way. When  some-one says something is perfect, are they perhaps saying that the quality is perfect?

Maybe perfection is a state in the quality model? A Utopian ideal that perhaps is something to aspire to as opposed to achieve?

At the end of the movie, Fynn realises that perfection(his son) was in front of him all the time (I told you the storyline was dodgy). I guess at that moment in time, blinded by emotion, his son was perfection to him. I suspect though, like any parent with inattentional blindness that moment quickly passes.

So perfection and quality  are dependent on time too. I think Markus Gärtner tweeted about that once.

How do we deal with these concepts in software testing? Here’s how I think about it:

Perfection is a great goal to aspire to, but my expectation is quality.²

I think this is a healthy way to look at it. For one thing, it stops me from asking for unrealistic demands from myself and others.

I do this by expecting good enough testing³.

I guess we all fall into this trap of perfection sometimes. its easy to demand perfection in other or systems yet excuse the imperfect in ourselves. In software testing, we expect perfection from developers yet don’t accept or recognise our own  failures.

“What do you mean its not a bug? Of course it is!”.

Expecting perfection in yourself is another trap and can set you up for some major life disappointments. A more realistic approach I think is to aspire for perfection but try to expect something a bit more realistic?Well, I try anyhow!

We need to combine this reality with a good dose of humility about our own failures and failures in others.

Then we will begin  treating  people with respect, a little more understanding, and perhaps then, our software will be more about the people, less about ourselves.

Maybe.

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¹ Weinberg: “Quality is value to some person(s)”

² Read Secrets of a Buccaneer Scholar” for more on this.

³“Good Enough testing is the process of developing a sufficient assessment of quality, at a reasonable cost, to enable wise and timely decisions to be made concerning the product..

Battleships Ahoy

Posted by on September 17, 2010 Comments Off

I had a great day today.

My youngest son, Alex (7) persuaded me to buy him a new game today. Its not hard. I’m easily persuaded. But the game of choice was interesting. It was Battleships.

Now, I remember this game. I played it (and loved it) when I was little.

Battleships requires a good strategy, not different to a testing strategy in fact.

You have to guess where the  ships/bugs are. Sure there are some strategies that are effective, (I confused my kids by placing all but one of my battleships on the outer perimeter).  You might have some idea of where they might be based on experience, but as one of my kids put it.

You basically have to guess first, and then after that start thinking.

sometimes I perform exploratory  testing like that.  I just have a go!

But that doesn’t mean I perform ET without thought.

Whatt my son was trying to say (and incidentally what lots of testers try to say) is that sometimes we have to suspend observation and inference.

Sometimes, what gets us going is a best guess.

Lets not ignore our best guess, because just  like in  battleships,  even if the first decision …A/9 is a random suggestion, after that you will  need a strategy.

What the hell, the kids loved the game. I loved playing the game.

We all had fun.

From Little Things Big Things Grow

Posted by on September 3, 2010 7 comments

One thing that I get occasionally complemented on is my writing. People write and let me know how they appreciate my writing style.

Tree Seedling

Initially this suprised me, because I do not consider myself a naturally gifted writer. In fact, quite the opposite.

Reading and Writing was always a bit of a nightmare for me. I had an elder sister who was extremely talented when it came to English. She naturally ‘ate’ her way through literature and flew through reading the Famous Five whilst I plodded through the Secret Seven. Its not that I couldn’t do it, but I could never do it as well as my older sister and that pained me.

Come secondary school, though proficient in English, I still had this niggling sense of inferiority, exacerbated by the teachers at school who consistently expected more from me, “because my sister is so good….”.

Then, the thought of writing a school essay on any topic terrified me. I did not feel I was incompetent, I knew I was incompetent.

Funnily enough, my essays reflected this skewed view of my own ability.

So I did what I normally do when faced with that type of scenario.

I gave up.

Its a strange old world, and the clock turns around and for one reason or another I started blogging about testing.

Me? Writing? My totally creative family were to say, slightly suprised.

But, I’ve been blogging for about 3 years now and it looks like I’m not that bad at writing after all.

And I am proud of this turnaround, in both my writing skill, and my awareness of my ability. Its demonstrates to me, what I can do if I just give something a go.

In fact, I have been asked and I’m in the process of contributing  to a book on testing, as well as collaborating with James Bach on a book on IM Coaching.

Its a little victory, but I think an important one.

From Little Things Big Things Grow is based on the story of The Gurindji Strike and Vincent Lingiari. It describes how the Gurindji people‘s claim sparked the Indigenous land rights movement. The protest led to the Commonwealth Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act 1976.

The Act gave Indigenous people freehold title to traditional lands in the Northern Territory and the power of veto over mining and development on those lands. In 1975, 3,236 km² of land was handed back to the Gurindji people.