I’ve been the owner of a HTC Vario III Windows Mobile based phone for over a year now. As time has gone on I’ve found myself doing more and more things via my smart phone. However certain things were very restrictive due to the crummy version of Internet Explorer that comes with Windows Mobile. Obviously I could have paid for Opera, but who wants to do that in the “free” world.

Recently I discovered the Iris Web browser developed by torchmobile.com and it’s been liberating. Now, I don’t disagree that this powerful type of browser interface has been available for other mobile platforms for a while (yes iPhone, you still rock). But for me I can breathe again.

So officially count this as my first post written soley from my dinky little smart phone.

(Slightly different topic: my mobile contract is up soon, shall I go Android?)

At the end of 2008 I switched credit cards from provider X to provider Y, lured by the promises of untold wealth from the cashback deal they offered. However, I’m yet to have a month where using this card has gone smoothly: which makes me wonder how well their application and business logic has been tested.

It was all triggered by me setting up a direct debit to pay the card off each month, and I thought nothing more of it. I was therefore somewhat surprised when the next month no payment was taken and I was spanked for interest. I phoned up - and was informed that my direct debit had indeed been set up, but flagged to start in the year 8888. At first glance, this looks like a user error which the software should reject. But then you could argue that 8888 is a valid year - just a very unusual one to use in a direct debit.

So where do we mark the cutoff between sensible data entries and wrong ones? Can we implement fuzzy logic for such subjective testing? And if so, how can we guarantee repeatable behaviour between tests - which is critical for automated testing?

Anyway - the direct debit is now working, but this appears to have triggered me travelling down some sort of error path in the credit card company’s business logic. I’ve decided to stop using this card for 2 months to let the dust settle: and then perhaps I’ll test their business logic some more…

Ok, we discovered a long time ago that Telnet and FTP happily broadcast your username/password combo in plain text. So then we started using Secure shell (SSH) and Secure copy (SCP). Obviously with these being Linux based technologies there are Windows utilities such as WinSCP.

Everything is great and all are happy. However, it doesn’t stop there…

The clever bods who wrote SSH allow you to pass command line parameters to the remote system that will get executed and the output returned to your local system. Here’s an example:

ssh me@example.com ‘ls’

This will run the ls (list files) command on the remote system and return you the result, though not before prompting you for a password. So, to make the experience even smoother you can perform some magic by swapping digital keys to remove the dependency on passwords. I’ve used the following Web page a bunch of times to set up SSH login without password.

Enjoy this post and the sunny weather

Good news! I’ve bought myself a new phone, and it’s modern - you don’t need both hands, a custom sling and a three-phase power supply to use it. Things started well; email pretty much set itself up, a trip to Fring provided instant messaging, but GPS was a whole world of pain. Typical, it let me down in front of Dr Ben - which is never a good idea. The last time he laughed this much was when my first sat nav took us on a  ’short cut’ which grounded my car out. This time we ended up walking half a mile down a very busy road because he insisted on making random navigation decisions until I could demonstrate a reliable satellite lock - which didn’t happen. After several days of futile google searching and guess work, I finally modified the A-GPS settings to remove the http:// prefix. I don’t know why I did this, but it worked and I got a lock within seconds. A colleague’s handset  confirmed my guess-work, the http:// prefix was clearly not required. I must admit that, as a tester, I’m ever-so slightly disappointed that I fixed it.

I found myself watching an episode of Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares USA the other night. As expected, it was not going very well and Gordon seemed to be getting more and more frustrated with one of the Chefs. Something had to give, but my heart sank when Gordon held up an apple and asked the question ‘What is this?’ Now I have come to respect Gordon’s approach to project recovery; he’s straight talking and gets results. Eventually the answer came, ‘it’s an apple Gordon’. Oh dear, maybe he’s just been working too hard.

Clearly the wrong answer! Gordon seemed to get quite upset. Apparently it’s not just an apple, it’s a bundle of flavour and inspiration for several dishes. This got me thinking, as testers do we just see test cases, or do we see crit-sits and outages prevented. If it really is just test case xyz, how can we get anyone interested in it?

I came across this site which has a lot of great information: 97 Things Every Software Architect should know.  I particularly like this quote from Michael Nygard’s advice in Skyscrapers aren’t scalable:

We often hear software engineering compared to building skyscrapers, dams, or roads. It’s true in some important aspects.  The hardest part of civil engineering isn’t designing a building that will stand up once it is finished, but figuring out the construction process.

Lots of great stuff for software engineers in general.

Whether it’s known as off piste testing or explorative testing, there seems to be some value in tests that weren’t originally planned but suddenly come to mind. My question is: Should they have been planned in the first place?

I can understand straying off the path slightly when a defect is found and you go on the hunt for bug clusters. I can also appreciate that a person’s understanding of the system under test can grow as they use the code and so might discover additional areas that warrant testing. However, in this case I believe you should resort back to some formal test planning to ensure that an appropriate job is done of testing that area.

So what does that leave for off piste testing?

Obviously this assumes that you’ve done some formal test planning up front. I know this isn’t the case for everybody so I guess I can ask an alternative question int that case: If all your testing is done off piste (i.e. unplanned) then are you comfortable that all risk areas are being covered?

I think my preference would be to have a mixture of both, however I still can’t shake the feeling that off piste testing is simply areas that we’d forgotten to test!

Our blog has now been running for just over a year and I thought it was about time for a bit of reflection.
The chart above, brought to you by the power of Google analytics show our first year stats (visits per month). After a good start in the year our enthusiasm waned and you can clearly see our readership dropping off between april and September.

Fortunately our change of strategy later in the year seems to have built up the interest again.

I am now mere moments away from finally switching off my windows box and making the iMac our primary home machine.

The last hurdle was cleared this week when I found a replacement accounting package for the family treasurer to use and replace the copy of Quicken 2002 we have been running for many years on the PC.

The reason I took so long in finding a proper replacement was that I’d failed to listen to my stakeholder (my wife, Liz) on what her actually requirements were for the new package. I had investigated all sorts of shinny new software, from the free GNUCASH (that took me half a day to build) through to some fancy stuff from Igg Software called iBank. Everything I looked at seemed to do the the job (at least the trial versions allowed me to import the data) and looked good.

However, each time I ran the stakeholder demo I got the response ‘its too complicated’, or ‘I don’t want to learn a new package’, ‘I just want it to look and work like the old Quicken’.

Now Quicken isn’t the most fantastic piece of software, but it does a job, Liz knows how to use it and we’ve got several years worth of transactions in it. Its satisfied my stakeholder’s needs. So here I was trying to find something wizzy and new, when all Liz actually wanted was to have Quicken run on the iMac.

Unfortunately there isn’t a Mac version of Quicken (there was one, but they stopped it in the UK a while back and they’re promising one later this year), but in my searches I stumbled across an offering from Codeweaver called CrossOver Mac that claims it allows Windows programs (albeit a specially selected list) to run on a Mac. So last weekend I downloaded the trial version, installed Quicken 2002 and rebuilt all my transactions using a backup file and hey presto! we were in business.

After running the Mac and PC in parallel for a few days my stakeholder made the call to make the switch permanently. So we are now fully Mac’ed’ and I have a delighted treasurer.

Lesson learned, listen to what your stakeholder really wants, don’t assume you know better. Sometimes the simplest solutions are the best.

Now the only thing I have to crack is convincing my eldest that the Mac’s parental control really is a good thing!

It’s not every day that someone takes something that you’ve worked on, gives it a bit of a polish, hands it back to you, and then you go “Wow look at that cool technology!”

Today that happened to me. I was pointed towards a YouTube channel called CICSFluff (interesting name there!). There’s three flashy videos that some professional media company must have created:

CICS Events and WebSphere Business Events providing Insight in to Action

New Face CICS - The CICS Explorer

CICS and WAS Working in Harmony

I promise you this isn’t me marketing a product! I’m just amazed at the magic that can be created with a bit of paint and a voice over