“Language models” is typically interpreted as a compound noun, something that models language. A model is an idea in your mind, an activity, or an object (such as a diagram, a list of words, a spreadsheet, a role play, a person, a toy, an equation, a demonstration, or a program…) that represents (literally! re-presents!) another idea, activity, or object (such as something complex that you need to work with or … Read more
There’s a significant mistake that people might make when using LLMs to summarize a requirements document, or to produce a test report. LLMs aren’t all that great at summarizing. That’s definintely a problem, and it would be a mistake to trust an LLM’s summary without reviewing the original document. The bigger mistake is in believing that the output, the artifact, is the important thing. We might choose to share a … Read more
One of the reasons that software development and testing are screwed up is because people often name things carelessly. Jerry Weinberg was fond of pointing out that “floating point” was the kind of math where the decimal point stayed in the same place, where in “fixed point”, the decimal point moves around. People talk about “serverless computing”, when they really mean “computing using someone else’s servers”. “No-code testing tools”… well, … 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
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
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
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
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
I was investigating some oddness in Google Search today. Perhaps I’ll write about that later. But for now, here’s something I stumbled upon as I was evaluating one of the search results. Is this a problem? I think the developers of this site mean to say “Free delivery in the GTA for orders over $99″. (The GTA is the Greater Toronto Area.) Next question: is this a big problem? Will … Read more
I’ve had a long career in this silly business. All the way along, one of the sillier things that people have said is this: “Testing slows down the project.” This is roughly equivalent to saying that looking out the windshield and attending to the dashboard slows down the journey. Sometimes people say that discovering problems slows down the project, but that’s not true either. Discovering problems can dispel the illusion … Read more