Why study other people's mistakes?
Six months ago, we launched the Panbagon project - a collective blog dedicated to collecting bugs and discussing them. As I wrote in the announcement published in Habré, I have no goal to make either a public bug tracker or a board of shame. I wanted to create a kind of incubator where ideas could turn out of the garbage that could be useful for finding bugs similar to those described in the Panbagon. Therefore, I called not only to describe the bug itself, but also to express thoughts that you have about this.
However, I am occasionally asked a sacramental question in the headline - why study the mistakes of others? So I decided to explain why I consider this a very useful exercise for testers.
However, I will start a little from afar - with a story about fire morels.
')
Recently, Michael Bolton published on StickyMinds.com a series of remarkable articles in which he examines some fragments of the history of the development of various areas of human knowledge, and discusses what lessons we can learn for our testing classes. One of these articles, “Food for Thought” , I want to partially retell, it seems to me that the examples described there will allow me to better outline my idea.
Bolton mentions in his article the book by Michael Pollan "The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals". This book is devoted to a comprehensive review of food and its relationship with a person - how we produce it, how we receive it, and how we eat it.
Among other things, Pollan talks about a very rare mushroom "fire slick" that grows on fires in the first spring after a forest fire. Not only is this morel rare, it is also quite difficult to detect - it is small in size and very similar to the speck that rolls literally everywhere in the place where it grows. Specialists use special techniques to search for these mushrooms. One way is to look along the ground at a low angle, this allows you to see protruding caps; another way is to look near the dogwood bushes, which prefers the soil of the same temperature as morels; another way is to search at the same height above sea level, where mushrooms have already been found this week. “I understand what these theories are for,” writes Pollan, “Theories tell us when to focus more carefully, scrutinizing the forest floor with my eyes, and when it is possible to weaken attention. For the Morel Hunter, focused viewing is a highly accurate search tool, but it is a limited resource, and theories that accumulate knowledge accumulated in the past help to spend it efficiently. ”
When testing, we act in the same way - we try to look for errors of a certain type, creating specific conditions in which they can appear, look at the system in the right places and at the right angle, feed specific data to the input, and so on, we know we use many different heuristics in which knowledge accumulated in the past is concentrated.
But Pollan writes further: during the hunt for morels, you must “be ready to discard all past theories and use something that seems to work in this particular place and at this particular time. Mushrooms behave unpredictably, and theories work only until they face a new mystery. ”
Why, with bugs, everything is exactly the same! All the techniques, models, strategies and heuristics that we use sometimes benefit, but in certain situations they can, on the contrary, lead us away. And you can never understand in advance whether this or that method will work or not, and which of them will be the most effective. Because bugs are unpredictable, like fiery morels (can be bugs be called morels, eh?)
However, Pollan further writes that one can still learn to look for morels, for this, the well-known property of the human brain, which psychologists call the “pop-out effect” - “... when we record some visual characteristic of an object in our mind that coordinates We want to notice or to detect (it can be a color or a form or something else), the object seems to stand out, pop out from the environment. Probably, people acquired such a remarkable ability in the process of evolution, collecting, it helped to find food .
Can we use this “built-in” skill to search for bugs during testing? Apparently, to some extent we can. Yes. Moreover, we can develop it through training. Consideration and discussion of bugs helps to “look” at the detection of bugs, thanks to the fixation in the brain of certain patterns consisting of sets of signs of the presence of bugs of a particular type.
We now return back to the Panbagon.
Simply describing a bug is the same as showing a morel found by you. To the eater, that is, the consumer of these morels, this result is undoubtedly important. Your customers want exactly that from you. But if you are discussing the results of your hunt with other testers, more important and interesting for them is not the morel as food, but how you found it. Of course, the size, shape and color will be carefully studied, but they also would like to know what the ground was there, what grew next, whether the hat stuck high, the sun shone brightly, it shone in your back or in the face and other signs of the environment.
If you have found a dozen mores, analyzed the accompanying signs, formulated a theory, and then, using it found another ten, you can immediately present this theory. Perhaps it will be useful and someone else will be able to find a few mushrooms with it.
But if your theory has not yet taken shape - you can at least just tell about all the signs that you thought were important, about what you thought and what you felt at that moment. Why did you notice this bug? Were there any other bugs nearby, and if so, why did you decide to tell about this one? Do you often notice such bugs? What thoughts or emotions are accompanied by the moment of “seizure” of the bug? Do you have confidence that next time, if a similar bug arises in a similar situation, you will find it too?
Let's study bugs in their habitats together, try to identify the signs by which we can detect them, and we hope that as a result of this new theories and heuristics will appear that will benefit anyone of us, and with it the honor and glory of the skillful tester.
However, I am occasionally asked a sacramental question in the headline - why study the mistakes of others? So I decided to explain why I consider this a very useful exercise for testers.
However, I will start a little from afar - with a story about fire morels.
')
Recently, Michael Bolton published on StickyMinds.com a series of remarkable articles in which he examines some fragments of the history of the development of various areas of human knowledge, and discusses what lessons we can learn for our testing classes. One of these articles, “Food for Thought” , I want to partially retell, it seems to me that the examples described there will allow me to better outline my idea.
Bolton mentions in his article the book by Michael Pollan "The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals". This book is devoted to a comprehensive review of food and its relationship with a person - how we produce it, how we receive it, and how we eat it.
Among other things, Pollan talks about a very rare mushroom "fire slick" that grows on fires in the first spring after a forest fire. Not only is this morel rare, it is also quite difficult to detect - it is small in size and very similar to the speck that rolls literally everywhere in the place where it grows. Specialists use special techniques to search for these mushrooms. One way is to look along the ground at a low angle, this allows you to see protruding caps; another way is to look near the dogwood bushes, which prefers the soil of the same temperature as morels; another way is to search at the same height above sea level, where mushrooms have already been found this week. “I understand what these theories are for,” writes Pollan, “Theories tell us when to focus more carefully, scrutinizing the forest floor with my eyes, and when it is possible to weaken attention. For the Morel Hunter, focused viewing is a highly accurate search tool, but it is a limited resource, and theories that accumulate knowledge accumulated in the past help to spend it efficiently. ”
When testing, we act in the same way - we try to look for errors of a certain type, creating specific conditions in which they can appear, look at the system in the right places and at the right angle, feed specific data to the input, and so on, we know we use many different heuristics in which knowledge accumulated in the past is concentrated.
But Pollan writes further: during the hunt for morels, you must “be ready to discard all past theories and use something that seems to work in this particular place and at this particular time. Mushrooms behave unpredictably, and theories work only until they face a new mystery. ”
Why, with bugs, everything is exactly the same! All the techniques, models, strategies and heuristics that we use sometimes benefit, but in certain situations they can, on the contrary, lead us away. And you can never understand in advance whether this or that method will work or not, and which of them will be the most effective. Because bugs are unpredictable, like fiery morels (can be bugs be called morels, eh?)
However, Pollan further writes that one can still learn to look for morels, for this, the well-known property of the human brain, which psychologists call the “pop-out effect” - “... when we record some visual characteristic of an object in our mind that coordinates We want to notice or to detect (it can be a color or a form or something else), the object seems to stand out, pop out from the environment. Probably, people acquired such a remarkable ability in the process of evolution, collecting, it helped to find food .
Can we use this “built-in” skill to search for bugs during testing? Apparently, to some extent we can. Yes. Moreover, we can develop it through training. Consideration and discussion of bugs helps to “look” at the detection of bugs, thanks to the fixation in the brain of certain patterns consisting of sets of signs of the presence of bugs of a particular type.
We now return back to the Panbagon.
Simply describing a bug is the same as showing a morel found by you. To the eater, that is, the consumer of these morels, this result is undoubtedly important. Your customers want exactly that from you. But if you are discussing the results of your hunt with other testers, more important and interesting for them is not the morel as food, but how you found it. Of course, the size, shape and color will be carefully studied, but they also would like to know what the ground was there, what grew next, whether the hat stuck high, the sun shone brightly, it shone in your back or in the face and other signs of the environment.
If you have found a dozen mores, analyzed the accompanying signs, formulated a theory, and then, using it found another ten, you can immediately present this theory. Perhaps it will be useful and someone else will be able to find a few mushrooms with it.
But if your theory has not yet taken shape - you can at least just tell about all the signs that you thought were important, about what you thought and what you felt at that moment. Why did you notice this bug? Were there any other bugs nearby, and if so, why did you decide to tell about this one? Do you often notice such bugs? What thoughts or emotions are accompanied by the moment of “seizure” of the bug? Do you have confidence that next time, if a similar bug arises in a similar situation, you will find it too?
Let's study bugs in their habitats together, try to identify the signs by which we can detect them, and we hope that as a result of this new theories and heuristics will appear that will benefit anyone of us, and with it the honor and glory of the skillful tester.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/81390/
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