Michael Bolton In the Guardian, October 22 2023, John Naughton writes an article on the complications associated with moving semiconductor manufacturing from Taiwan to the United States. The article and the problems that it describes are pretty interesting. At the centre of the product is the difficulty of transferring tacit knowledge about chip fabrication. It turns out that documentation on its own doesn’t work very well. What matters most is having people … Read more
In the Rapid Software Testing Managed class today, James Bach was talking about experiences with CTOs. It struck me that it might be fun to come up with an expansion of the abbreviation that would represent the wishful thinking that James was talking about; like “Chief Wishing Officer”, but with a word for “wish” that starts with T. Aha! I thought. Here’s a great application of ChatGPT — get it … Read more
This is a lightly-edited version of a repost on LinkedIn. The original post contained a photo of a conference talk. The presenter was a dude in a Spiderman costume. (I’ve always wondered how many Spiderman costumes we’d see at meetings of doctors, or journalists, or theoretical physicists. But I digress.) The screen displayed a slide “Everyone cares about User Experience, but no one cares about Developer Experience.” Spiderman outfit notwithstanding, … Read more
Vipul Kocher is a fellow whom I have known for a long time. I think we met in North America in the mid 2000s. I know I visited his company in Noida, New Delhi about 15 years ago, and spoke with his testers for an hour or so. On that occasion, I also visited his family and had a memorable home-cooked meal, followed by a mad dash in a sport … Read more
This post and the ones that follow represent an expansion on a thread I started on LinkedIn. On September 30, 2023, Vipul Kocher — a fellow with whom I have been on friendly terms since I visited his company and his family for lunch in Delhi about 15 years ago — posted a kind of testing challenge on LinkedIn. I strongly encourage you to read the post. I’ll begin by … Read more
ChatGPT may produce inaccurate information about people, places, or facts. https://chat.openai.com/ Testing work comes with a problem: the more we test, the more we learn. The more we learn, the more we recognize other things to learn. When we investigate a problem, there’s a non-zero probability that we’ll encounter other problems — which in turn leads to the discovery of more problems. In the Rapid Software Testing namespace, we’ve come … Read more
Code is created by people. HTML elements are code, which is created by people. As part of developing those elements, people can tag them with attributes (including but not limited to “id”) that make them easy to find, via tools, for testing purposes. This can be done deliberately and consciously, or automatically as part of the creation of the element. When that doesn’t happen, testers and developers have difficulty locating … Read more
In preparation for our automation and management classes, James Bach and I are currently analysing ROI calculators (“Here’s what you can save over N years using our product!”) and we’re going deep on reverse-engineering one from a prominent tool vendor. Opaque formulas; undefined and unexplained terminology; unnamed and inexplicable constants; weird, inexplicable coefficients in the calculation; poor testability; hilarious bugs sitting right there on the surface; impossible conclusions due to … Read more
In the previous post, I described ChatGPT as being a generator of bullshit. Some might say that’s unfair to ChatGPT, because bullshit is “speech intended to persuade without regard for truth”. ChatGPT, being neither more nor less than code, has no intentions of its own; nor does it have a concept of truth, never mind regard for it, and therefore can’t be held respsonsible for the text that it produces. … Read more
A little while back, on LinkedIn, Jason Arbon posted a long article that included a lengthy conversation he had with ChatGPT. The teaser for the article is “A little humility and curiosity will keep you one step ahead of the competition — and the machines.” The title of the article is “Testing: Bolt-on AI” and in Jason’s post linking to it, I’m tagged, along with my Rapid Software Testing colleague … Read more