Yesterday was a busy day. I love busy days. Hopefully you will find an idea or two in this write-up.
In the morning, I dropped of Andrew at school, loaded up the car with school supplies, ran a couple errands, and headed off to my first stop.
First stop, Give Away School Supplies
I dropped off supplies at the Edison Brentwood, an East Palo Alto public school. They had the TrueGift Donations sign-up sheet which had been posted in the teacher’s lounge and I was ready to go. I spent about an hour dropping off over a hundred boxes of crayons, fifty pairs of scissors, a hundred notebooks, and some miscellaenous supplies. I am now out of scissors, glue sticks, colored pencils, and wide ruled notebooks. When helping so great a problem, is it better to spread around the supplies or target them to completely fix a couple of schools?
Second stop, Colingo at Sandbox Suites.
I trekked up to San Francisco to meet at the SandBox Suites drop in office. This is a new pay-by-the-day office with an open design that just opened up a couple days ago. I met with Benjamin Lowenstein and Arthur Richards, founders of the start-up Colingo. We spent a few hours chatting through their design for language learning software targeted at children using the One Laptop Per Child‘s XO computer. We played with the XO and some python XO code, and then I walked them through the XO’s Hello World application. They are doing good work and I hope to keep in touch with them.
Third stop, Dinner with My Brother.
Hugh and I had dinner and talked over TrueGift Donations. Hugh just had a packing party where over a hundred boxes were packed in a few hours. We discussed how my short-cutting the web site did or did not fit into the TrueGift mission. We chatted about life.
Fourth stop, Ignite Talks at DNA Lounge.
The Ignite talks were hosted at the DNA Lounge. Good talks on the censorship tangle by Violet Blue; several talks on the Internet being more hopelessly malwared than you can believe; cool burning-man robots; Chicken John for Mayor; etc. Lamest talk was a five minute infomercial for a backpack company. The format of having a new slide every fifteen seconds is horrible because waiting for slides keeps breaking up the flow of conversation.
Fun day.
My ideas roll out as a blog, and are more contemporary than topical. Here is a summary of topics to date:
Shameless Plug
Write-ups of Technical Videos and Events
Free New Software Ideas
Free New Product Ideas
Free New Ideas about Society and Politics
TrueGift Donations and Education Ideas
Other Blog Posts
Google Test Automation Conference Lightning Talks
Good and excellent short talks from the 2006 conference covering many testing topics. Slides are available.
01:20 Dan North from Thoughtworks on Getting Lean
- Automated Testing has the secondary effect of enabling two of the Lean Principles: Lean Product Design (maximize discovery by faster releases) and Lean Manufacturing (low variance repeatable testing).
- Sort of supply chain management because design is just before coding is just before release.
- Automated Testing allows for frequent shipping of high quality product.
06:00 Steve Freeman JMock I Done By Five Minutes
- JMock is a library for using mock objects in the test-driven development of Java code.
- JMock’s types allows IDE to expose just right spots. Good error reporting.
10:50 Nat Pryce, The JMock II update
- Update is Java 5, JMock library is framework independent
- Cleaner testing code, better IDE autocomplete
- New refactoring support
15:01 Christine Newman from Progressive Insurance, Getting More Funding for Automated Testing
- Quantify the value of automated testing with numbers like “Production Problems Prevented; Risks Mitigated (by severity); or Hours Saved”
18:20 Andrin von Rechenberg, Google Intern, Improving WURFL data
- Database mobile phone capabilities are hard to test for 8500 user agents.
- Check your logs to see how they navigate, e.g., to find HTTPS capability
23:30 Ade Oshineye from ThoughtWorks, Five Heresies in Five Minutes
- Convert your logs of real people into test cases
- Mutation Testing works (change code, if test passes then test is bad) for high risk, about to be refactored, or bug-prone sections.
- Run actual tests on production hardware with production systems for new release or when making a dummy is hard.
- Test your vendor’s code lest their upgrades break you or you are afraid to upgrade.
- Static analysis works now. Use FindBugs or PyChecker or IntelliJ’s stack analysis server to find bugs people won’t find or broken language idioms.
29:00 Timur Hairullin for Vandex (Russian Search Engine)
- Had unexplained performance problems on an update.
- Measure performance from time between first byte of request to something happening inside browser of older computers; not just to server sending last byte of response.
32:00 James Richardson on Automated Testing: Why Bother?
- How do I quantify Automated Testing? I missed Christine Neuman’s lecture.
34:00 James Lyndsay for Workroom Productions, Automated Tricks for Manual Testors
- Some tests must be manual and observed by good testers; they look for surprisers and emergent behaviors.
- Use snippets of code (your manual testers should code and use Unix)
- Use virtual machine images to hand over bugs.
38:26 Jordon Dea-Mattson, some radiation treatment machine firm
- Working on client/server in life-critical, highly regulated systems.
- Most testing strategies have single points of failure; try thinking of testing defense in depth.
- Collect more data in the (wild) field instead than just crashes.
- Think of software ERP, integrating the whole requirement to delivery chain.
- Strong recommendaton for TestQuest; UI testing tool.
42:10 Curtis “Ovid” Poe with the Perl Foundation, TAP
- TAP (Test Anything Protocol) is a human and machine readable protocol for test output.
- TAP is simple, line oriented, and implemented in C/Perl/Python/Ruby/JavaScript/PostgresSQL
- Driven by PerlQA team and a new language agnostic list is forming.
Overall, a great video.