All posts by Mindful tester

Communication, Testers conferring

That Feeling a Lone

After my talk about a performance test I spotted two other speakers. I just joined their conversation: “How did your talks go?” A moment later I heard Rik Marselis asking behind me: “Han Toan, how did your talk go?”

The other speakers turned their attention to me and I talked about testing. Then I remembered Rik. I turned my head, but he was gone. That evening I did not spot him anymore.

Later that week I mailed him a 20 line mail about my talk.
Did I do this, because he is a known tester in the Netherlands?
No.
Did I do this, because he was the president of TestNet, the Dutch Special Interest Group in Software Testing?
No.
I wrote him, because he was really interested in my experiences. I just sent him a Reverse Polished Notice.

@ Conf Alone

A few weekends ago a speaker reflected on a test conference. It was good, but it was difficult to make real contact. There were only 2 tweets which lead to a massive discussion. The second tweet touched the members of the test community. People were suggesting solutions and sent words of support. In turn this lead to strange reactions like “It was a great conf and I felt inclusive.”

It all boiled down to the question: what would happen, if I join a conversation? To be more precisely, if I join a conversation midstream.

Suppose you are the chairman of a meeting. All participants are people you can talk with freely. At one moment two people want to say something. You pick Cecilia and John has to wait. After Cecilia had her say, what would you do?

When I come home, my kids really want to share some stories with me. I hear the first sentences of different stories from different kids. So I have to pick. What would I do after one story has been told?

I am not really super human. Luckily, my wife is taking care that I am taking care of …

Finding testers

Getting Personal

Suppose I have a good friend. She is already dating a man for a month. She is still hesitating And sure I want to help her.

Suppose that evening I shook hands with a good looking man. His flow of words muted me. He had a Porsche, he had a good job and he would fly to Spain just for fun. And ..
It was like a salesman selling himself.

Suppose my friend expected an honest advice after an one directional overwhelming monologue.
What was I supposed to say?

“And here’s to you, Mrs. Recruiter
Testers love you more than you will know
Wo wo wo
We need you, please, Mrs. Recruiter
Office holds a place for those who say
Hey hey hey, hey hey hey”
[On the melody of Mrs. Robinson]

Let me get this straight: I am not looking for a job.
Another straight thing: I am badly surprised the way recruiters approach me.

It goes like this:
Hi Han,

We noticed your profile on AllConnectedNow.com. And we are looking for someone with your background.

Our customer is a well-known international company. It is number 1 in medical software in EMEA. A new product will be developed in the coming years. You can be in this team.

The candidate must have
At least 5 years of experience in software testing
4 character Test certificates
Seniority to help junior testers
At least 5 years of experience in automated testing
A background in medical software is preferred.

If you are interested about this job, please call us at 123weneedatester or send us a mail.

Regards,

Mrs. Recruiter

Some people would enjoy this mail. I don’t. Apart from the fact that my profile had not been checked properly, it is not really personalised.
Let’s say Cecilia has the same background I have in juggling. She can juggle the devilstick, pass 6 clubs, and has an act of 3 minutes. Excuse me. It was about software testing, but I only read the word background.

Let me start again. Cecilia has the same experience in software testing I have. I could start the mail with “Hi Cecilia”. And it still make sense. Another straight thing I want to share: I do not know a Cecilia with this profile. I just made it up to make my point. So if you did not find Cecilia, that’s why. By the way AllConnectedNow.com does not exist for the same reason.
I like recruiters who can spot senior testers, but I have some suggestions to connect. That’s fine with me and hopefully you.

Last months I got several friendly requests to exchange thoughts about a new job. The mails looked like the one I described. Why me? So I politely asked why they would have me in their team. The answers were .. Let me put it this way: I did not receive an answer on this question.

I felt like a number. It could be 8 or 754. So if a junior peer would ask me about this company. I am not jumping up and down for her or him. It’s just another company.

Of course some recruiters might like numbers: “I sent 100 invitations to interesting candidates this morning.”
But a company is not happy, if they get 40 junior people who are willing to do the job. But it was actually looking for senior or expert or whatever you call her or him.

In marketing Unique Selling Points are used. E.g. a company is number 1 in medical software in EMEA. Let me turn this around. As a recruiter I would look for someone with Unique Buying Points. “I noticed you have experience with medical information systems on a Windows platform.” Or even better “I noticed you tested a Dutch medical information system on a Windows platform a few years ago.” My guess is there are about several hundreds. And it is easy to reduce the scope using “information system for house doctors”. This might lead to a number close to 60 on the Whole Wide World. I would feel appreciated as a tester.

Today the world is moving fast. I ignore commercials or invitations, if they do not resonate with me. But I do remember companies which felt right or wrong to me.

“We’d like to help you learn to help yourself
Look around you all you see are sympathetic eyes”
Mrs. Robinson sung by Simon & Garfunkel

Psychology, Reconstruction

Backtracking for testers

“I cannot reproduce it.”, I admitted to my scrum master. He replied with:
“You can do exploratory testing, but you have to note down the steps, which led to this situation.”

How did I get in this mess?

I sanitised this story BTW.

On my screen were some filters and buttons. It was not possible to use the action button any more. That was NOK. I made a partial screen shot and put it into my test charter. I would later come back to reproduce it.

Somewhat later I looked at the screen shot. I thought it would be easy to reproduce the situation. After three attempts I gave up. That was NOK.

My scrum master had a point though. I had lame excuses like no recording tools and extra bureaucratic steps. Back to The Bug. If I could find it.

A little bit of theory

Backtracking is a term I picked up during my study. It took me years to understand the principles.

It is basically solving a labyrinth: continuously pick a direction and walk, until a dead end is encountered. Then go back to the place where the last wrong decision was taken and take a new direction.
Rinse and repeat.

This tactic can be applied to find the toilet or to solve a puzzle.

Sorry for this theory interruption. I will now continue with my blog post.

A lot of practice

The first thing was to examine the screen shot again. I realised I was on the wrong screen. So I switched screens.

Then I rebuilt the situation. I added the filters with the same values. I pressed the action button. That went right. I kept my mouse on the button. It could be used again.

I used the other buttons on the screen. After a few presses I returned to the action button, which was still completely functional.

I did a reset and started to rebuild the situation. If I pressed the other buttons before the action button, then it might become insensitive. After adding the last filter I pressed on one of the other buttons and clicked on the action button. It was still functional. Business as usual.

It was time for my visual memory. The adding of the filters went from left to right. It felt great. Every time the set of available filters became smaller. It was like dealing cards. The stack became smaller and the cards were put from left to right.

I looked to the most left filter. It was a date filter. I already had filed some bug reports on that one. Wait a sec. This was my starting point for bugs. I might have set it to a wrong value and quickly checked the side effects.

The word quickly triggered my mind. I was so used to this filter, that all date filter related actions were absolutely normal for me. It became natural and therefore easy to forget. Because I moved my mouse so fast, the movement was not stored in my memory. That made sense to me.

So another attempt to reproduce my bug began. I set the date filter to a single bad number and added the other filters from left to right. And I pressed the action button. It worked. Then I tried to use it again, but that was not possible. Bug reproduced.

Now I wanted to reduce the number of steps. My assumption was that the invalid value in the date filter triggered the bug. Time for a short cut.

I reset the screen and only added the bad date filter. The second push on the action button was useless as expected. I was able to backtrack my steps and reduce them afterwards. That was OK.

At the end of business day my scrum master groaned, when I showed him the bug.
“What else did you find?”