Vital Software Issues 'N Stuff

Item based collaborative filtering in the OP room

 

(Source: Simply the Test)

See you next year

 

Some facts about my cartoon blog:

- 8000 clicks per month 
- 500'000 (far more) in total 
- most of the visitors are from USA, Asia and South America.

No ads on the blog by purpose. 

Please note, if you are using one of the cartoons for personal use, you are free to do so, but if you use them commercially, you must ask for permission. It's just fair. ThanX.

(Source: Simply the Test)

Obvious Bugs

 

After a series of good quality delivered to the customers, there came the temptation to short-cut testing activities. Under pressure, trade-off decisions have to  be taken. Can we risk delaying the release again due to a weird anomaly that happens from time to time while we have no reproducible scenario at hand? Is it better to start investigation and communicate the bad news to the release manager? What if we ship anyway? Will the testing department look bad if customers find obvious bugs like low hanging fruits? We've gone through all of this, but one lesson we have learnt is to raise a ticket for all anomalies, regardless whether we have a reproducible scenario yet. The meaning is to label our internal findings as known anomalies/findings and ship this information along with the release notes. As soon as we have a reproducible scenario, we extend the ticket accordingly and the product owner can plan the fix. If it turns out to be a flash in the pan, good; and if not, at least, we are not in the line of fire. We found the problem, before the customer did.

(Source: Simply the Test)

Special fears in the world of insects

    

(Source: Simply the Test)

Hitting Earth

 

(Source: Simply the Test)

Roughing up the atmosphere

 

(Source: Simply the Test)

RegEx at Stone Age

 

(Source: Simply the Test)

Arrested for deep seeking

 

(Source: Simply the Test)

The Fosbury Flop

The Fosbury Flop & the Dunning-Kruger Effect
When Richard Fosbury surprised the audience with a new world-record in high jump at the Olympic Games in Mexico, I was just about 1 year old. Too young to understand what he achieved. I learnt about him long time later and was surprised how professionals and experts looked at him as an outsider with little chance to achieve anything meaningful.

Richard proved them all wrong and demonstrated their cognitive limits. He broke the world record with his declined technique by jumping backwards with a curved body while all others used really awkward looking ways to jump over the bar. 

Soon after Richard's breakthrough, his technique has established as THE standard...despite Cassandra.

I am sure that such incidents still happen a lot no matter in which field. Many great ideas vanish because of prejudice and limiting spartial sense. Our experience is based on what we have seen working and other things we've seen went badly. 

It's all too natural that we enforce our "formula" of success for future undertakings while we tend to reject what sounds strange or what reminds us to past bad experiences.

But, do we really understand the reasons for our success and are we clear about all factors that led to good or bad experience?

Many great ideas vanish because of some crestfallen and misled decision makers ruling their little universe. Some ideas may show up again years or decades later and claimed as the new hype while the original inventors in vain long disappeared in the dark.

Some of the knowledge and theories that people apply to their actions are sound and meet with favorable results. Others are wrong-headed or incompetent.

Want some examples?

1. Mr. Arthur Wheeler who robbed two banks at broad daylight with this face rubbed with lemon juice. He was convinced the videotape cameras could not render it. He was arrested the same night (Fuocco 1996).
   
   
2. 271 Fearless, was a courageous woman who proved them all wrong when old grey men claimed "Women can't and must not run a Marathon". At the Boston Marathon, some unreasonable errants tried to push her out of the crowed while running. With her courage, she changed the minds and enabled women being accredited to run Marathons despite all that hypocritical advices.
   
   
3. Switzerland introduced the right for women to vote in 1971. Why did that take so long? If you watch interviews in Switzerland shortly before the elections, it is shocking to hear what the people had in their mind at that time. Believe it or not, but Afghanistan allowed women to vote 8 years before Switzerland.

So what?
Don't laugh at crazy ideas. Accept exotic or extraordinary thoughts and suggestions as a possible alternative even if you don't like it. Don't deny it just because it doesn't fit into your pattern of thinking. Give the team a chance to fail and succeed. If the idea proves wrong, at least you have some facts at hand to argue. If it succeeds, you have helped an innovative team achieve a breakthrough.

(Source: Simply the Test)

Fatal exception – or how to get rid of errors

Dave, a good friend,  sent me a WhatsApp message and made fun of a software that– when put under load - did not properly log invalid login attempts.

All he could see was “error:0” or “error:null” in the log-file.

 This reminded me to a similar situation where we were hunting down the root causes of unhandled exceptions showing several times per day at customers out of the blue. 

 The log-files didn’t really help. We suspected a third party provider software component and of course the vendor answered that it cannot come from them.

We collected more evidence and after several days of investigation we could prove with hard facts that the cause was indeed the third party component. We turned off the suspected configuration and it all worked smoothly after that.

 Before we identified the root cause, we were overwhelmed about the many exceptions found in the log-files. It was a real challenge to separate errors that made it to a user’s UI from those that remained silent in the background although something obviously went wrong with these errors, too. The architects decided the logs must be free from any noise by catching the exceptions and properly deal with it. Too many errors can hamper the analysis of understanding what’s really going wrong.

 Two weeks later, the logfiles were free from errors. Soon after one of the developers came to me and moaned about a detection he just made. He stated someone simply assigned higher log-levels for most of the detected errors so these could not make it anymore into the logfiles. In his words, the errors were just swept under the carpet.

I cannot judge whether that was really true or whether it was done with just a few errors where it made sense, but it was funny enough to put a new sketch on paper.

(Source: Simply the Test)