^(testing yet)(!|?)$

Yesterday I overheard part of a conversation of two egineers in cafeteria.

Engineer Tim had a problem with the software running on one of his production lines. "... it fails sometimes when reading the tags. It doesn't seem to be connected to any particular set of tags, or time. I don't know what else I could try." Egineer Todd asked about five to eight questions "have you tried x, y or z" and Tim's answer was always "yes, been there, done that".

That made me think about who he was talking to. Todd was basically doing the same job, with the same background and roughly the same amount of time of experience on the job. Their thinking seemed to be aligned.

In a situation like this a colleague sometimes turns out to be a "rubber duck", but in cases like the one above it might not lead anywhere. If you find yourself in that position try talking to someone with a different mindset, a programmer, some who tests another part of the system, a hardware guy - chose from who is available.


This way you can keep the focus on your problem but get unfocused input.

I just watched Clay Shitky's TED talk on cognitive surplus and was really surprised by the second part (from about 06:50) where he describes a research done in daycare centers.

It showed that introducing a (small) fine for picking up your child late, was followed by an increase (double) in the rate of late pickups during a 12 week period. What is also interesting is, that after the fine was discontinued, the numbers of late pick ups stayed high.

Putting on the tester-hat, could this mean that regular punishment will grow a feeling that doing bad work is acceptable because you will get punished for it? Is it possible that this feeling grows when some kind of metric is used to present "hard facts for bad testing"?

By presenting metrics and dealing out punishment based on it, we might take away the little social pressure that might exist between prorgammers and testers which normally leads to small, well-meant and encouraging teases pushing us to do better work.


The same might of course be relevant for developers and other parts of an organization, I just wanted to limit the scope a bit.

Today I signed up for an account on Twitter.

I'm not that much of an extrovert or expert in a certain field, that I need to proclaim everything I do or report breakthrough research results so my own tweets will be rather limited.

I just want to see if it can help me learn things faster and get me on the road to better information.

The decision was very much influenced by point numer 23 of Jeffrey Way's post 30 HTML Best Practices for Beginners which I stumbled on a few days ago.

To quote Jeff:

"If a web dev writer that I admire posts a link to an article he found interesting, you better believe that I’m going to check it out as well – and you should too!"

This is one possible solution to Lynn McKee's triangle flip quiz.
Starting point


Result


How I got there
After drawing the starting situation and the expected result on paper it took me about 15 seconds to figure out the "rotation" that was necessary.
Without the result view beneath the original, though, my first impuls was to tak the top three Xs and move them down, which obviously doesn't work.

Drawings make your life a lot easier.

Here are some possible solutions to Lynn McKee's riddle "A man leaves home ...":

1. The man travels around the world in 80 days. There are no limitations to the number of right turns he can take and thus he's allowed to replace as many left turns with a set of right turns as he wants. There is no time limit, I chose the number in honor of the book. Since the uniform also has no closer description I guess it's the mayor of his hometown to welcome him back.
   
2. The man walks a single round in the jail yard, assuming that the door through which he leaves is in a corner. However the man in uniform is not present when he leaves.
   
3. The man leaves his home, gets in the car, drives around town when he commits a hit and run. Police is already awaiting him, since someone caught the numberplate.
   
4. The man leaves home walks around town since he's disoriented. When he returns a nurse is waiting at the entrance out of pure coincidence.
   

Feel free to extend the list in the comments.