Michael Bolton The other day on LinkedIn, Wayne Roseberry posted a puzzle that (he says) ChatGPT solved correctly. Here’s the puzzle. “Bob and Alice have a rectangular backyard that has an area of 2500 square feet.Every morning, Alice walks the 50 feet from her back door to the neighbor to pick up their laundry as well. What is the longest straight line that can bisect Bob and Alice’s back yard?” According to … Read more
This ChatGPT getting dumber? This paper raises the question; this blog post questions the conclusions; and this article has more to say. That’s not a very useful question, because “dumber” is not exactly a property of ChatGPT (or anything else). It’s a set of relationships between ChatGPT’s behaviour; people’s notion(s) of dumb and smart; and the context. Evaluating that requires a complex set of perspectives, values, and social judgements. For … Read more
Yet another post plucked and adapted from the walled garden of LinkedIn “What the large language models are good at is saying what an answer should sound like, which is different from what an answer should be.” —Rodney Brooks, https://spectrum.ieee.org/gpt-4-calm-down Note for testers and their clients: the problem that Rodney Brooks identifies with large language models applies to lots of test procedures and test results as well. People often have … Read more
“A test that is defined in terms of one expected result is undefined against the other types of results available from that test.” —Cem Kaner, 2004 (https://lnkd.in/gjFZYNGs) Almost 20 years on, that message is still lost on many testers, developers, and managers. Yet, as of today, we have another chance to acknowledge it and to spread the word! Excellent testing is not really about obtaining the expected result. Excellent testing … Read more
This post started as a LinkedIn post, which got started as a comment replying to this poll: It’s depressing to see ideas about testing and risk reduced to dopey formulas that are great for softball “certification” exam questions, but terribly limited for investigating and revealing product and business risk. Here’s how we describe “boundary” in Rapid Software Testing: A means by which something is classified or filtered This means that … Read more
For a long time, I’ve suggested that testing should focus on product problems that pose risk to the business. That remains true, but lately I’m thinking there’s another consideration. For instance: yesterday, I accepted an invitation for an online meeting from a potential client. The invitation contained a link to a Microsoft Teams meeting. (If you know where this is going, and find it too painful, just skip to the … Read more
Ben Fellows, Quality Conversations Ben Fellows, CEO of Loop Software & Testing, has a YouTube channel in which he posts discussions of topics like Playwright Framework, GitHub Actions, & general Software Testing! Ben Interviewed me for his Quality Conversations channel on April 7, 2023 We explore the evolution of software testing and quality assurance, discussing key topics such as terminology misconceptions, the importance of customer service, the role of senior … Read more
After 20 years of working together to develop the Rapid Software Testing approach, James Bach and I have decided that — improbable as it may seem — it’s time to wrap it all up. Perhaps this will be a surprise to our followers in the community, but we now must confront what we previously thought was unimaginable: recent developments in technology have, for all intents and purposes, made testing obsolete. … Read more
This post has been brewing for a while, but a LinkedIn conversation today reminded me to put it in the bottle and ship it. Testing is socially challenging. There’s a double meaning there. One meaning is that testing involves challenging the product and our beliefs about it, in a social context. The other meaning is that probing the product and people’s beliefs about it can sometimes be uncomfortable for everyone … Read more
Today brings an example of applying of the *consistency within the product* oracle heuristic. (You can read more about that here and here https://www.developsense.com/blog/2012/07/few-hiccupps/) For reasons known only to the gods, when I visit AirBnB today, it insists on quoting all prices in Chilean pesos (CLP). At today’s rates, the Chilean peso is roughly 600 to the Canadian dollar, so a property that might cost CAD200 per night displays as … Read more