Isn’t it all just risk?
Over the last few days, Ben and I (this is a joint post) have been trying to reach agreement on our understanding of risk. Ultimately we want to identify some new and effective methods to articulate the risks we may identify. The discussions were held at lunchtime, and OK, things got a bit silly. Nevertheless, we think there is a lesson to be learned somewhere in the example below. As such, please do add a comment if you can find one… We’ve also submitted this as an idea to the BBC’s Genius programme.
Objective: Introduce consolidated risk gauge to simplify the (human : machine) interface. The merits of a such a device are illustrated in the motor-car example below.
Modern cars have a bewildering array of dials and warning lights on a dashboard – but are they really necessary?
Consider just one of these dials: the speedometer. Does a driver really care what his absolute speed, based on centuries old units and the period of the Earth’s orbit around the sun, is? The answer is no: a driver simply wishes to know he will get to his destination without incident: be it crashing, getting a speeding ticket or missing his appointment.
It is therefore proposed that the speedometer is replaced by a risk dial – which interprets prevailing driving conditions, speed limits and navigation plans – e.g., using existing GPS technology – to calculate a risk metric. For example, if the driver exceeds a speed limit on a road, the risk gauge will go up, as speeding tickets are more likely. The driver can then elect to change his driving style to reduce this risk.
This proposal can be extended further. Consider the fuel gauge. The driver does not care about how much is in the tank per se – he simply wishes to understand the risk of running out of fuel on his journey. This dial could therefore be replaced too, by one measuring this risk. Note that the speedometer and fuel gauges have been simplified to share a common unit – one of risk – and hence can share the same gauge! By extension of the same argument, all dials and warning lights can be incorporated into one single dial of “consolidated risk” – thus addressing the complexity of modern car dashboards.
Missed a car service? Risk increases. Parked in a dodgy area? Risk increases. Such a metric would help encourage drivers to minimise risk, and even find alternate transport methods. This conveniently brings the proposal onto its zenith: consider how much more pleasant and minimalist a Jumbo Jet’s cockpit would be if there was just a single risk gauge.
January 15th, 2009 at 09:11
Was discussing this with the family over breakfast this morning and the general consensus was that with a ‘riskometer’ in the car no one would actually ever leave their house. Car manufacturers could then replace the the riskometer with a simple recorded message of Anne Robinson saying “Please step away from the car – the risk is too high”.
Apart from that – sounds like a good idea. Next step I suppose is all humans having an equivalent dial on their foreheads to indicate their general demeanor. The measure could be in ‘money’ or ‘love’ units.
January 17th, 2009 at 22:27
What’s often unclear to me about risk, is what you are taking the risk for. In some
cases, it’s pretty obvious. For example, we all have to breathe, or we die.
Usually, we assess the risk of breathing to be pretty low, but with every breath
we take there is a slight risk of some deadly substance getting into our bodies
and killing us. Most of the time we breathe normally, but, walk into a cloud of
smoke billowing from a chemical factory, or worse, one of Richard’s bottom burps,
and we might decide to stop breathing for a while. If we stop for too long, the
risk-reward changes quite dramatically. Not only does the risk of dying from
lack of oxygen increase, but our instincts kick in and eventually take over
forcing us to breath. Our instincts have evolved thanks to the peculiar genes of
our ancestors giving us an advantage over our competitors; so we can probably
trust them. But sometimes, they will kill us, forcing us to breath in the deadly
fumes before we can reach the clear air a few steps ahead…
What am I on about? Who knows? Maybe there is a testing analogy in there somewhere.
Perhaps another drink will help… Cheers!
January 21st, 2009 at 18:05
I think you’re right – it’s sometimes difficult to understand who risk applies to. If you ship a buggy piece of code, the risk is both with your customer (downtime/production lost) and with yourself (reduced confidence/bad reputation): but how do you quantify these?
January 22nd, 2009 at 17:50
Well, I guess you could use the “Risk Based Testing” approach http://www.satisfice.com/articles/hrbt.pdf and there is a lot about the metrics in http://www.stickyminds.com/getfile.asp?ot=XML&id=13289&fn=XUS31659994file1.doc but I think the effort to do it effectively could be prohibitive. There may be some food for thought in those papers though.
I wonder if our focus on defects is depressing us testers. We can loose sight of the good stuff that is working well enough for the customers. We get into a kind of negative thinking mode where everything is about defects. Perhaps we should turn things around and measure successes. How many customer scenarios work, how many functional areas work, how many classes pass their unit tests… With that “positive thinking” view we can put the defects into better perspective and save on the psychiatrist bills – and mind altering drinks.
January 22nd, 2009 at 22:40
An excellent point Ian. I caught myself focusing too much on the ‘negative stuff’ today. As testers, we often start off with a set of known challenges and then experience things getting worse before they improve (in terms of status). At one level, this can be perceived as bad. The alternative view is that ‘now we know more, we know what to do next’ i.e., it’s no longer guess work, we have facts. As a tester, I understand it is up to me to provide the correct context(s) for my findings. Even so, it can be hard to find the positives at times.