How does a porn star pay for her speeding ticket?

With money of course...

And if you are a tester and you didn't thought of this idea then you did two things wrong:

1. You assumed something
2. You used a stereotype which was present in your head

As a tester your first question should have been:

"Well i'm curious... how?"

As a tester there is a rule of three that you always have to follow no matter how trivial the problem seems.:

1. Never assume anything
2. Always question everything
3. Never trust anybody

This is a good rule of thumb to follow and should be apply to your life as well. If somebody tells you that the apple you are going to buy at a store is really really good would you buy it on his opinion? Of course you would do that. Because you assume that the guy doesn't lie and has tasted the apple before. And then you bring it home and take a bite and immediately spit it out because it's damn sour. And when next time you meet the guy you ask:

- Hey that apple was pretty bad.

- Why?

- It was sour as hell.

- Yeah i like that a lot, i told you it's good.

Yes you see it was good from HIS point of view not yours. So never trust anybody unless all agree and never assume something before you didn't taste the damn thing.

Gergely.

Child parenting in the views of a tester

I want to write about something funny this time.

What is the biggest project you can imagine? Empire state building? Two towers? Pyramids?

Yeah there is something much more bigger. Parenting is almost the hardest and most impossible task that you can face in your life. It is easier to jump from a plane with a parachute. There are so many things that can go wrong...

So how about mapping some of the testing heuristics to child parenting.

Let's see...

In the first few months you got to build your framework you got to find out your user stories and do an initial test case identification. You do a basic exploratory testing and find that everything is okey, the child comes around pretty well. You begin to plan for the future, you develop tests and user stories like:

• As Amy, i would like to go to collage to be able to get a degree
• As Amy, i would like to get a breast implant so Joey finds me attractive
• As Mark i would like have my ears pierced so i could sleep with Amy
• As Amy i would like to have proper parenting so i don't sleep with Mark just because he has a cool ear piercing, and oh my god did you see that biceps?

So you then begin to run some more tests until you can no longer control the child's evolution. And then comes user acceptance testing. You get a lot of feedback from other people about your child's behavior and general working processes. She did sleep with Mark and you are disappointed that there was something wrong during the testing phase. Now you have to re-factor the child.

This is no longer easy since you are over the initial phases so you have to put in a LOT of effort. That costs time, money, nerves, and a new breast implants for Amy. Eventually you get around and can introduce some patch work on Amy and you are over running your User Stories again and again comes user acceptance testing. This time the feedback is good. Amy behaves and it seems everything is working fine.

And then at some point in time without any notice at all a user comes along and says that he saw Amy doing drugs in the ally. You rush to your child you try to reproduce this bug, but you find nothing. You go again to the user and say that could he specify a bit more what he saw and where. The user tries to describe the bug again, says Amy was there at 2010.05.15. And then you realize that it couldn't have been Amy because she was with you on a weekend vacation. So you reject the bug and say that it could not have been her.

After a while the project gets fully out of your hands into the final stage in which whatever you do, you can no longer perform a re-factor because it became to huge to mess with it. You can only provide some workarounds and good documentation to the user. Maybe hide some of the bugs that were found. Or try to introduce new functionality to hide the old faulty one. ( She get's that breast implant after all ).

So folks. Raising a child is like bringing a huge project to success or at least not to a failure. But don't worry, the feedback is pretty good and if you manage your time properly you don't even have to work overtimes...

Gergely.

No coding required.

hi!

Today i want to write about automation frameworks who try to sell them selfs by saying: "No coding required."

I don't like frameworks like these and i tell you why. Because it's bullshit. And it is dangerous too. Because it gives illusions. It gives false hope to managers it gives you an extra amount of work and extra amount of stress because of illusions.

Basically when there is a framework that tells you that there is no coding required it often means that it can generate code. This is great all in all, but.. It does not mean that it does not require code, because, let's face it. You REQUIRE a robust, working, expendable framework which will work for another one or two or twenty years. And you can have that without coding.

You require coding IF:

• You want an environment with which it is easy to work
• You want an environment which can be easily expanded
• You want an environment which wont fail if you add another test or 200.
• You want an environment which is portable
• You want an environment which is configurable
• You want an environment which can run on every kind of browser and op system
• etc.

So you don't get to work around coding. You don't get to skip that part. And why is it dangerous? Because your managers will be impressed and passioned about it and you got to suck it up. Because you won't be able to explain them why it is a lie or at least a partial truth.

What i would like to see is adds that say:

- We can generate code

- We can create a partial framework that needs revising

- We can create a framework skeleton

And so on and so fort. So be very careful what you show to your managers and operatives because they tend to believe in adds.

Gergely.

Learning

I know I've been quiet all this time, but is had a lot of stuff to do. I'm working on a selenium 2.0 framework.

It is really interesting and I'm working hard on making it as robust and extensible as possible.

I will post some info once it's completed.

Cheers,

Gergely.

"Advanced" user opinion

Hi.

Today i want to talk about something important. Something i wanted to talk about for quite some time now.

About how the population and the end user is handled. How dumber and dumber it becomes with the passing of time.

What brought me to this conclusion? You only have to look around. The end user the end consumer is no longer handled as a thinking human being. He is handled as a baby. He is handled as a disabled baby.

Let's look at some examples in the software business.

At late times 1990-2000-ish softwares installer was not very user friendly. If you choose custom install you had endless possibilities. Of course it was all up to you. If you place some of the files necessary for the software somewhere else then it belonged then it was all your fault.

Now the install is of course more user friendly. But i'm sort of offended when i click on custom install and all i can see is defining the main path for the software. And that is not the worst part since it is custom only. Okey, i can live with that. But when i see the button labeled "Advanced" and i can only see the path again... Now that's is when i'm pissed of.

And it gets worse. The problem is that people no longer use there brains. This is partially our fault. Because we give them intuitive interfaces. That's okey, we gotta evolve, technology needs to be better. It needs to be more easier. But at what cost? Today i saw a guy asking the forums to describe to him how you can install and use Selenium RC. All he had to do is go to the website of Selenium and read the fuc... fine manual. But rather then using his brain and come up with the solution he wants others to do that for him. Either because he is lazy or he does not care OR he just didn't want to use his brain. Because he thought what for? Somebody already did it, why should i read how it should be done?

And... there is more. I played a game which was a port from a console to pc. The game had no video settings at all. It had aspect ratio, resolution and brightness. I figured there must be some other way to set it. Some files some config files or ini or whatever. I read a bunch of forums because i'm a guy who searches for information before asking anything. And found out that they didn't bother with it. One of the moderators of the forum of the games website said this:

"In general, my experience with computers is that everything is getting more and more automated with less options to tinker with for the non-advanced users. More people use them now, thus it has to become more user-friendly with less confusing terms and stuff. Everything gets streamlined and automated.

As far as advanced user configuration settings goes, they sure can be handy, but there can actually be a lot of extra work required in adding such features. Sometimes it also wont work, at all, 'cause of the fact that the game's audio/visual presentation depends on a lot of circumstances to be "just right" for things to be "right". (Dunno what you'd like to call that, but I guess it could be called preservation of artistic values or something)

In the future, you'll probably be seeing more and more games where only Resolution, Aspect Ratio and Gamma/Contrast/Brightness settings are the only adjustable pieces of visual functionality."

Do you know what i think when i read this? HELL NO! I don't want a future like this! This sounds like bullshit. I don't want the computer finding out what i want. I don't want bloom because it looks like shit. I don't want anti aliasing because my computer does not support it. I want options. We live in the 21st centure give me options because my brain deservse it.

"More people use them now, thus it has to become more user-friendly with less confusing terms and stuff."

That doesn't mean that only dumb fucks are using the game who just start it and can't barely find the "New Game" option.

I'm offended. My brain is offended. My culture is offended. My ability to find out how things work and alter them to my personal likings is offended.

Don't get me wrong. I'm all in for user friendly and intuitive behaviour. But i'll be damned if it is good and healthy if an iPhone user can't restart his/her iPhone because he is to dumb to read the manual. ( True story, the guy even went so far as bringing his back to the vendor... ).

And this goes for everything in our life. Politics... here in my country there was a voting over if we should pay when visiting a doctor or not. It was a really difficult decision. The far-right and far-left sides campaing sounded like this: "If you are with us you vote: Yes, Yes, Yes." and the left side said: "If you are with us you vote: No, No, No." There were three questions. And nobody cared to explain to the voters what they are voting on... They just told you what you should vote.

I really hope that at some point of time the people will want more. But i know that chances are that of a snowballs in hell. Well i guess that is what we are here for. At least we testers should have the guts and mind to question everything. And be explorers, Buccaneers rather then sheep in a heard.

(The term buccaneers came from James Bach. Check it out.)

Secret code

There is a secret code on the page of jQuery.

http://jquery.com

Let me know if you can figure it out.

I give you one hint. The codes origins lays in gaming...

Those who already know it, don't blow it for the others ;)

Have fun!

Skarlso / Gergely.

Google groups for Testing

I was browsing for some good groups on software testing under google groups...

I found many and began to go through them to find a fitting one.

I went over a dozen or so, or even more and all i could see were:

"Need X"

"Need Y"

"Need Z".

Okey don't get me wrong, it's very good that we are wanted and good people are wanted. But for Christs sake create your own damn group and don't spam a group which tries to talk about something. It messes it up. I don't want to read these letters. And what do you know.. These groups are all dead. No one writes something because no one reads them anymore because they are pissed about all the spam they are getting.

So if anybody knows a good google group about testing which is not spammed with job offers... Please tell me!

Thanks,

Gergely.