Software Testers Eat Steak!

Fri, 19 Jan 2007 01:00:32 GMT

(From the Archive - 1/14/06)

Now that I’ve explained exactly what a Software Test Engineer does, the question burning in most minds is certainly “How could I learn to be a Software Test Engineer? I want to earn big money, play the piano, and eat steak!”

That’s a great question, Bob! By the way, how’s that sister of yours?

If you have the basic qualifications (equal parts left-and-right-brained, obsessive attention to detail, unbridled arrogance, and the ability to remain permanently dissatisfied) then you can learn testing in one simple and largely ineffective lesson.

(If you’d prefer 293 good lessons, then be sure to pick up a copy of the superlative Lessons Learned in Software Testing, by my good friend’s brother James Bach, et al.)

My non-patented and completely unwarranted single lesson method is as follows:

Before you look at anything, assume that you can find ways to make it better.

(Yes, I know what they say about assumptions making an ass out of you and umption, but, in reality, I can’t even get out of bed in the morning without making at least 84 assumptions.)

It sounds simple, like me, but I’ve seen it proven under near-scientific circumstances, time and . . . well, just the one time.

I was working with a friend of mine whom I’ll call Anne, since that is her name. She was curious about testing, so I was giving her a look at the sort of work that I do. As an experiment, I told her about an art asset (one of our aircraft visual models) in the product I was working on at the time, and went on and on about how good it looked. Then, I showed it to her, and asked her what she thought of it. She immediately, and quite accurately, listed a dozen or so great features, and agreed that it looked really good.

Then I told her that there was a similar object that was a real mess, needed a lot of work, and I asked her to look that over, and promptly showed her the same model from a different viewpoint. She found 5 or 6 bugs (flaws, anyway) per minute for 5 minutes, non-stop.

I eventually, begrudgingly told her the truth. At least, I think I did. If not, and she’s reading this . . .sorry, Anne.

The point of this anecdote is not that Anne is or was especially susceptible to the power of suggestion – that isn’t the case at all. The point is that the difference between the two evaluations, or test passes to use the vernacular of the cognoscenti, was that I helped her change her starting assumption.

When she assumed something was going to look good, she found the high points. When she assumed that something needed improvement, she was immediately transformed into some kind of unstoppable bug-finding machine.

You can try it yourself, with anything – books, movies, the way people talk, their personal and political beliefs – and you’ll find that, to some degree, if you approach it correctly, you can test anything.

Movies are full of continuity problems (hair that parts and unparts, props that appear and disappear, airplane changes), books are rife with spelling errors and misplaced words, advertising abounds with misused "quotation" marks and catchy aphorisms that don’t mean what somebody thought they were supposed to (“At Shorepoint assisted living, each day is better than the next.”) The list goes on, as I so often do.

Once you decide that nothing could possibly be good enough, you’ll be testing constantly, finding flaws in everything you see, even when you close your eyes! And, most importantly, while the other chumps are lined up at Skeezix’ Soup Kitchen taking whatever they can get, you’ll be eating steak! Steak that’s just a little overdone, and not exactly the cut you were promised, ordered from a misspelled menu, served by a waitress with a crooked name tag on a plate that really doesn’t go with that tablecloth while a Muzak version of In My Life plays in the background in the wrong time signature . . . but steak, nonetheless.

The only tricky part is learning when to stop.

For more on this, you can ask my wife.

(Not Such) A Hard Day's Night

Fri, 19 Jan 2007 00:58:51 GMT

(From the Archive - 1/13/06)

It occurred to me that I don’t spend a lot of time here talking about what I actually do for Microsoft on the Flight Simulator team. It has occurred to a number of people, especially my unbelievably dedicated and vaguely effluvial next door neighbor, self-appointed Blogstleutnant Jason, not to mention my patient-yet-eager audience of teeming several, that I don’t spend a lot of time here period.

Sorry about that, but I'm just thinking of the right words to say.

Anyway, I'll try to offer some more detail in upcoming posts, especially now that the cat we affectionately call FSX is officially out of the bag we call . . uhh . . . well, we don't have a name for it, and thus another metaphor dies.

My official job title is Software Test Engineer (not “Professional Blog Avoider” as some might suspect.) Well, that’s really just one of my titles – you can see two more here, thanks to my generous and patient friend and Flight Sim MVP Nick Whittome. Others include former police officer, raconteur, bon vivant, Renaissance man, Uncle Hal, Rubberhead, the Piffle, and cutey-pants.

Some people, even some pretty esteemed colleagues in the still nascent software testing industry, will tell you that what I do as a Test Engineer, or tester, is to break software.

I don’t agree, not even a little. I say it was broken when they gave it to me, and it was my job to point it out. I suppose I just don’t like the image of testers as a finite number of monkeys with a finite number of hammers, inelegantly bashing away, when, in reality, my job requires too much research, creativity, and peculiar expertise to be accomplished through brute force. To put it another way, I think I am a very special monkey, with a damn fine hammer.

I can write a little code here and there:

10 PRINT “Heckfire!”

20 GOTO 10

30 REM OR DON’T

but I’m not a developer. In fact, I’m not qualified to even say the word “code” in the presence of people like Susan, Tim, Steve, the rest of our development team, or the guy who restocks the famous free drinks in our office kitchen.

I can mess around a bit in Photoshop (see my self-portrait below) a little bit and use phrases like “bump mapping”, “anisotropic filtering”, and “that is so gauche - ooh, is my beret crooked? ” without sounding like a complete imbecile, but I am not an artist. I sit in awe of the work of people like Jason, Adrian, non-bloggers Aaron, Kevin, Pete, John, etc. Many of them are even proficient in multiple media, which blows my mind – one of our walls at home is proudly adorned with a Waskey original, in oil. (Jason, on the other hand, does not have a framed bug report of mine on his wall. As far as I know.)

In addition to Developers and Artists, we have writers like Brian and Mike, Designers like Paul and Justin, Geo-Data specialists like Bill and Travis, Marketing people like Jerret (seen sitting next to Amy Grant in MY episode of “Three Wishes”), Program Managers like Mike, Mike, Kevin, and Eric, business planners like Scott . . . I can’t do what any of them can do, at least not nearly as well as they can do it.

But I can take their work, the work of some of the smartest, most talented and creative people I’ve ever known, much less had the pleasure to work with, and I can . . . help them make it better.

And sometimes, I don’t even need a hammer.

Coincidental Floss: Testing

Software Testers Eat Steak!

(Not Such) A Hard Day's Night