two months down, ten to go

The past two months have been surprisingly busy.

• Took in a mentee at work that's based in Latin America, we talk once every two weeks. It's mostly an open conversation but we've solved two testing problems together so far.
• Established a working relationship with two other groups at work with the aim of helping them solve their testing problems.
• Demo's and lots of conversations with other groups about how engaged and skillful testing can help their current projects. This has resulted in three more groups that have expressed interest in how we test.
• Wrote a chapter for +David Greenlees' book, Software Testing as a Martial Art. That book is already out as of last friday. You should read it. It's unlike most testing books I've read and I'm very glad to have been a part of that project. My full review of that book is forthcoming.
• I was also interviewed by +Joe Colantonio for his Test Talks Podcast, Episode 92. That came out yesterday. I will probably write about that experience. I was so nervous and had to do a bunch of repeats in the beginning. That does show Joe's skill and maturity as a host and an interviewer.
• I'm currently working with +Matt Heusser, +Justin Rohrman, +Michael Larsen and +Brian Van Stone for an upcoming Testing Podcast. That first episode should be out very soon. That's another blog post that needs to be written.
• The biggest surprise I've had so far was being invited to speak +Anna Royzman's Test Leadership Congress in NYC, scheduled on April 27, 2016. What was going through my head when Anna asked me is probably worth more than a blogpost, so watch out for that.
• Volunteered for the +Association for Software Testing as part of the technology team. I have the pleasure of being able to help, assist, and annoy +Eric Proegler on a daily basis. We've solved some interesting problems so far and I do have a coming blog post for this that should be out soon. 

The thing is that only ONE of the above eight bullet points are part of my new year's resolutions this year. Let's play a game and tell me which among the above bullet points was the only one that's on my New Year's resolution list. I want to reiterate that the above mentioned opportunities just presented themselves and all I had to do was engage them. It's more proof that Plans vs. Real Life diverge most of the time. 

How's your year so far?

Remembering CAST2015 -- Part 1

This is my second CAST that I've attended in person and technically the fourth that I've participated in by watching the live webcast.

I flew into GRR on sunday and had the chance to catch up with +Dhanasekar Subramaniam over dinner. The details of that conversation requires a blog post in itself and will (probably) write that separately.

On the first day of CAST, I attended +Robert Sabourin's tutorial on Testing Fundamentals for Expert Testers. What really stood out for me on that talk has been the way +Robert Sabourin organized his presentation. He started talking about the History and Principles surrounding Quality, Economics and Management that can be applied on how we test software effectively.

The participants went through a series of exercises that further explained concepts on semantics, interpretation, pivoting based on gathered relevant data, ambiguity, etc. I also went through some practical applications in using logic, decision tables, as well as logic reduction techniques that can simplify the number of rules you will need to test by employing equivalence class partitioning.

+Robert Sabourin also focused on applying a Heuristic Model in solving problems. In order for you to show your understanding of the problem at hand, do you know;

• What are you looking for?
• Can you restate the problem?
• Can you make a visual model?
• Do you have enough information to find a solution?
• Can you identify the variables and the relationships between these variables?
• Do you understand the concepts used in stating the problem?
• Do you need to ask questions?

From there, the tutorial focused on more details on equivalence partitioning, story boarding, control flow testing as well as state models.

In all honesty, that session had too many concepts to be understood and absorbed in a single day. As an RST and BBST alumni, I've been able to pick and choose which concepts I've encountered before and which ones that are completely new to me. 

There's more to be said about the first day but my brain is completely mush right now. Until the next post.

how 'controllability' is causing me some spam

[Edit: As of Feb. 5, 2015, the issue was fixed. I am no longer spammed]

Controllability and Observability are two basic pillars of testability. In order for me to test a given system, I should be able to observe data or a given state. For me to make my tests even more comprehensive, I need to be able to control how that data behaves as well. 

Three years ago, I was working on a project that sends various content through email. one of the challenges we had was setting up email accounts where we can send these emails to. creating new accounts is extremely painful considering how we didn't have the necessary infrastructure to create fake emails on the fly.

The simplest solution I can think of at that time is allow the "+" character in email addresses so I can use (and reuse) gmail's alias feature. After that feature was added, I proceeded in automating creation of these emails by appending epoch time to my email. As far as I can remember, these accounts were added to a non-production user database, and scripts that use these email addresses run once a day.

Recently, I've been receiving newsletter emails from said company but when I try to unsubscribe, I get flagged with an invalid email error. Looks like they fixed/removed that testability feature I requested which stops me from unsubscribing. What puzzles me even more is that when I check the epoch time equivalent, these were users that were automagically created 3 years ago and must have been pushed to a production environment. 

So there you go, everyday I get reminded of a past I've left behind. I should just use Tamper Data, override the unsubscribe POST and get it over with.

oh well.