How do you do, Head of Testing? Vol. 2

by | Syndicated

Thanks for asking. Still tired but I made some good progress on a project I’ve been working on for about 6 months. I actually slept better after finishing this draft. But that’s not today’s topic… Today I want to reflect on jam and systems. Jam systems. Jammed systems. Systemed jam. Systems of jam. I need […]

Debugging Selenium code with IRB

by | Syndicated

Occasionally something will change in our system under test that breaks our Selenium test. Most of the time we can walk through the failure, make some tweaks and run it again – repeating the process until it passes. Depending on how long it’s been since we last worked with the code, or how deeply buried the code is […]

Understanding Testing Understanding

by | Syndicated

Andrew Morton tweeted at me the other day:

Does being able to make a joke about something show that you understand it? Maybe a question for @qahiccupps

— Andrew Morton (@TestingChef) August 9, 2016

I ran an on-the-spot thought experiment, trying to find a counterexample to the assertion “In order to make a joke about something you have to understand it.”

I thought of a few things that I don’t pretend to understand, such as special relativity, and tried to make a joke out of one of them. Which I did, and so I think I can safely say this:

@TestingChef Wouldn’t have thought so. For example …

Einstein’s law of special relativity says you /can/ have a favourite child.

— James Thomas (@qahiccupps) August 9, 2016

Now this isn’t a side-splitting, snot shower-inducing, self-suffocating-with-laughter kind of a joke. But it is a joke and the humour comes from the resolution of the cognitive dissonance that it sets up: the idea that special relativity could have anything to do with special relatives. (As such, for anyone who doesn’t know that the two things are unrelated, this joke doesn’t work.)

And I think that set up is a key point with respect to Andrew’s question. If I want to deliberately set up a joke then I need to be aware of the potential for that dissonance:

@TestingChef To intentionally make a joke, you need to know about some aspect of the thing. (e.g. Special Relativity is not about family)

— James Thomas (@qahiccupps) August 9, 2016

@TestingChef If you’re prepared to accept that intention is not required then all bets are off.

— James Thomas (@qahiccupps) August 9, 2016

Reading it back now I’m still comfortable with that initial analysis although I have more thoughts that I intentionally left alone on the Twitter thread. Thoughts like:

  • What do we mean by understand in this context?
  • I don’t understand special relativity in depth, but I have an idea about roughly what it is. Does that invalidate my thought experiment?
  • What about the other direction: does understanding something enable you to make a joke about it?
  • What constitutes a joke?
  • Do we mean a joke that makes someone laugh?
  • If so, who?
  • Or is it enough for the author to assert that it’s a joke?
  • …
All things it might be illuminating to pursue at some point. But the thought that I’ve been coming back to since tweeting that quick reply is this: in my EuroSTAR 2015 talk, Your Testing is a Joke, I made an analogy between joking and testing. So what happens if we recast Andrew’s original in terms of testing?

Does being able to test something show that you understand it?

And now the questions start again…
Image: https://flic.kr/p/i6Zqba

CAST – day 1

by | Syndicated

(conference report, no Hebrew)Day 1 of CAST is over, and it has been a while since I was in such an intensive day.Starting the day with lean coffee was as exciting as it was the day before, with no less interesting discussions. I actually got a couple …