James Bach reports on a statement allegedly made by Yaron Sinai, the CEO of Elementool, and Joseph Ours comments.
In light of Joseph’s comment, I too wonder if Elementool was tested by human testers under the control of their own process. Perhaps it was tested by testers who strictly followed the steps, which Mr. Sinai apparently suggested was all that was necessary.
If the latter, then Joseph’s experience can be explained in terms of W. Ross Ashby’s general systems law, The Law of Requisite Variety. This law suggests that a system with N states cannot be controlled or understood by a system with fewer than N + 1 states. There’s a variation of this law in Karl Weick’s advice that if you want to understand something complicated, you have to complicate yourself (Sensemaking in Organizations, yet another wonderful testing book that isn’t about testing).
One key to excellence in testing is not only to understand testing itself, but also to explore and investigate widely diversfied interests and skills so that new learnings come to the field.
If Elementool was indeed tested by unskilled human testers, Mr. Sinai’s dismissal of the role of interactive testing performed by humans is perhaps explicable. The problem Joseph reports would seem like a pretty difficult bug to pass by skilled testers. (Yet one never knows. Perhaps it was a bug introduced moments before a product manager, under market pressure, decided to ship the product without a review, a unit test, a more general functional test, or a targeted retest of that area. Perhaps there’s a platform-based problem, based on an environment that Joseph has and that the Elementools people don’t. Perhaps it was a known bug that only happens in the exact case outlined by Joseph, and was deemed insufficiently important to fix. But in such cases, you run the risk of being embarrassed by a tester like Joseph. Or me. On the other hand, maybe you don’t embarrass easily.)
On the page http://www.elementool.com/Services/Common/ControlPanel/EditUsers.aspx, I added a second user to my demo account. I deactivated the user by clicking the associated checkbox and pressing the Update button. Upon returning to that page, I clicked the checkbox to reactivate the user. I got this:
Every time I reproduced the error, I got a different error code. This is surprising and interesting; it was true when I reproduced Joseph’s problem too. I would have expected a consistent error code per problem. It may be that the error code refers to a specific incident logged in Elementool’s tracking system; or it may be that there’s no mapping between the error code and anything useful; or there may be some other explanation.
I was curious about the quote in James’ blog post, and I wanted to check out Jeff Feinman’s other articles on SDTimes’ Web site. I did a site search. Ah, here’s one:
Clicking on the underlined link calls up the URL listed below the summary. That returns a page of today’s top stories, not the article I’m looking for. The URL in my address window is now http://www.sdtimes.com/default.aspx?aspxerrorpath=/static/sdtimes100_07_02.html (my emphasis added there).
So I found another Jeff Feinman article instead. That one, headlined “Serena computerizes agile development” starts “March 6, 2009 — Serena Software is putting agile development into a software-as-a-service model, but the company admitted that transforming such a human-oriented process into a computerized one wasn’t an easy task.” For a second time in a few days, Mr. Feinman uses a peculiar form of expression to confuse a process and a tool that aids that process.
The article includes this little gem: “The No. 1 objection that people have against SCM tools in general is that it’s a tool,” said René Bonvanie, senior vice president of marketing for Serena. “Developers hate tools. Anything that forces process or input, they hate. So we needed to build something that was computerized but super simple to use, and very intuitively usable to people who are used to whiteboards.”
Well, at least there’s some consistency. The marketers for Elementool and Serena provide stupid, sweeping generalizations to offend members of the testing and programming communities equally. It’s odd that Mr. Feinman would publish such remarks uncritically, and that no developer, no member of the Agile community has as yet seen fit to object. QiD.
Update, 2014-09-10 This post was updated to correct a graphic problem, to get rid of some Blogger-related cruft, and to fix an inaccurate reference, pointing it properly to Weick.