I was hacking together a piece of Ruby code today.  The code was only a couple of hundred lines long, but I must have tested it 100 times. The test was as much of a hack as the code.  Code, test, code, test, code, test.  Fixed something?  Test it.  Added a (tiny) feature?  Change the test.  Why is it then, that as part of a non-hacking team of uber-professionals, it might be *days* before the code gets tested properly?  In a waterfall process, it might be weeks.

Is it because when we make it someone’s sole job to do the testing, that the test itself becomes somehow “precious”, and not the throw-away thing that might be more useful?  Or is it just a result of working in a team and not on your own?

Many people are using services like Twitter to let each other know what they are doing.

In recent years, portable digital measurement devices for blood pressure, temperature and heart rate have become common in the home. At the other end of the scale, technology has revolutionized even highly complex examinations; I found this article from 2002 http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/2319249.stm. Most of us are already carrying sophisticated mobile devices capable of short and long range connectivity. Surely it is only a matter of time before all these things become smaller, consume less power and combine to give us a more accurate view of how we are feeling?

Big Blue has just announced predictions for five big technologies in the next five years

Q: How do you go about testing a crystal ball?

A: Non-deterministic model based testing

Interesting to see that blogging could be the new “make or break” for a product:

 http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/technology/2008/11/can_stephen_fry_kill_a_gadget.html

Is this because blogging is so immediate – so you’re much more likely to put down your first impressions? A powerful argument for ensuring that you get that all those consumability niggles sorted…

I dug these up when we were first thinking of a tag line for this blog.
Thought it was a good time to share them with you all.

“Why go into something to test the waters ? Go into it to make waves.”

“The greatest test of courage on earth is to bear defeat without losing heart.”
Robert Green Ingersoll

“Courage doesn’t always roar. Sometimes courage is the quiet voice at the end of the day saying, “I will try again tomorrow.” ”
Mary Anne Radmacher

“Here is the test to find whether your mission on earth is finished. If you’re alive, it isn’t.”
Richard Bach

“Let’s just say I was testing the bounds of reality. I was curious to see what would happen. That’s all it was: curiosity.”
Jim Morrison

“The test is to recognize the mistake, admit it and correct it. To have tried to do something and failed is vastly better than to have tried to do nothing and succeeded.”
Dale E. Turner

Program testing can be used to show the presence of bugs, but never to show their absence!
Edsger Dijkstra

Courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point.
C. S. Lewis

Testing leads to failure, and failure leads to understanding.
Burt Rutan

“If it ain’t broke – you’re not testing it properly”
Jon Tilt

More entries, more often… that’s the plan!!

Is there actually actually a name for this?