QA Hates You

From Hagakure: The Book of the Samurai:

Lord Aki declared that he would not have his descendants learn military tactics. He said, “On the battlefield, once discretion starts, it cannot be stopped. One will not break through to the enemy with discretion. Indiscretion is most important when in front of the tiger’s den. Therefore, if one were informed of military tactics, he would have many doubts, and there will be no end to the matter. My descendants will not practice military tactics.”

The first facile quip I was going to make was that Lord Aki would probably insist that testers should not learn to code, but the real lesson here lies in the danger of being to overloaded with knowledge about a project or a piece of software that might constrain your ability to test it as a new piece of software without being influenced by too many considerations about why things are done this way and why the software is this way and why users would never do that.

Just charge in and start logging the defects.

From Hagakure: The Book of the Samurai:

When there is something to be said, it is better if it is said right away. If it is said later, it will sound like an excuse. Moreover, it is occasionally good to really overwhelm your opponent. Also, in addition to having spoken sufficiently, it is the highest sort of victory to teach your opponent something that will be to his benefit. This is in accordance with the Way.

I have a new Objective statement on my resume, brah, and this is it.

From Hagakure: The Book of the Samurai:

Once, a group of ten blind masseuses were traveling together in the mountains, and when they began to pass along the top of a precipice, they all became very cautious, their legs shook, and they were in general struck with terror. Just then the leading man stumbled and fell off the cliff. Those that were left all wailed, “Ahh, ahh! How piteous!”

But the masseuse who had fallen yelled up from below, “Do not be afraid. Although I fell, it was nothing. I am now rather at ease. Before falling, I kept thinking ‘What will I do if I fall?’ and there was no end to my anxiety. But now I’ve settled down. If the rest of you want to be at ease, fall quickly!”

I think this was the point of Agile before it became an industry of its own.

The Defense Innovation Board has a handy guide to Detecting Agile BS.

Definitely worth a read.

Dice.com used to be a good source for IT job postings, but in the last couple of years, not so much. I don’t know if it’s been totally eclipsed by the Joel on Software/Stack Overflow jobs board, or if my current city employers aren’t as hip to it as the employers in my previous, larger city, are, but it’s basically a collection of the same rotating set of low-level jobs that have a lot of churn or some hard-to-fill positions whose postings rotate through the primary employer followed by a series of recruiters looking to fill those jobs for the primary employer and wet their beaks in the process.

Oh, and now a posting for a pet groomer trainee.

At this point, Dice is a couple marketing intern and vacation club sales representative postings short of being Monster.com.

Unleash the Archers, “Test Your Metal”

That’s North American football, not soccer. Why would you call that “football” when the sport has a name associated with it and not another sport? Because you like the confusion?

Where was I?

Oh, yes, it’s football season, which is why I see a job posting like Mobile QA Engineer, and I think, “I’m more of a pocket tester.”

Ask an American friend to explain it to you.

U.D.O., “I Give As Good As I Get”:

Remember, testers and quality assurance professionals: You should always give at least as good as you get. If not better than you get.

A local business in Springfield, Missouri, allows you to smash things. It’s called a Rage Room.

Although, honestly, it’s really not much different than what we do every day in software testing.

And the QA lab here already has everything I need, from an electric guitar for some ill-rendered heavy metal to a heavy bag to varied martial arts weapons. So I don’t have to leave the cave and see the sunshine this week either.

How Complaining Rewires Your Brain for Negativity.

The article provides steps to help curb your negativity, but why would we want that? Better to use the steps:

1. Have a clear purpose.
2. Start with something positive.
3. Be specific.
4. End on a positive.

to write better bug reports so long as by “positive,” you say, “I’m sure this is broken” and “I’m sure customers will flood the service desk with calls unless it’s fixed.”

I posted on Twitter the other day:

Mostly as an excuse to repost one of my recent favorite animated gifs:

So apparently, I’m looking for a new career, and some recruiter was quick to seize upon it:

Recruiters who perform ill-limited LinkedIn search to blast the results with job offers usually hit me for jobs I’m way overqualified and overpaid for. It’s rare that I get something completely out of the industry like this.

But who knows what I’ll get when I add voiceover work to my LinkedIn profile. Perhaps job offers to do voices for cartoons, which is not unlike what I do daily on conference calls.

I’ll let Lzzy Hale and Halestorm take this one:

“Uncomfortable”.

Hopefully this consulting company can find the Senior Hemissourlp Desk person it’s looking for.

Heaven knows, good hemissourlp desk people are hard to find.

As you probably know, I’m a big fan of Leo Morachiolli, a Norwegian scientist proving every week that metal makes everything better.

Here is his cover of Peter somebody’s song “Sledgehammer”:

“I want to be your sledgehammer” is right on my business card.

So what happens if I regard this test email sent out to the production mailing list?

I mean, the only content of the message is a Forward to a Friend button.

Which works.

So, is this a successful test or not?

To be honest, I’ve worked some places where only scapegoats are recognized.

Three Days Grace, “The Mountain”:

It’s been a while since I’ve made fun of advertisements in software magazines, but since SD Times is still sending me free copies of their buzzword-laden collection of advertisements amid laudatory stories about their advertisers, I might as well go on with the show.

Check this guy out:

I suspect the designer is trying to show a unit-testing ninja throwing a flying sidekick. But the feet are in the wrong position for it. With a sidekick, the kicking foot is horizontal with the toes forward, and the toes on the bottom foot should not be pointing straight down. The front kick features the foot vertical with the toes drawn back, and but there’s not a leaping variant where the non-kicking foot tucks up like that.

Maybe the fellow is just Russian dancing.

Also note that the product has mock right in the name. How could I not?

A purported eBay missive tells me that I’m more than a number to them:

I’m an alphanumeric variable to them.

You know, it could be a phishing scam. Or it could be an expensive start to a research project that looks no better than a sophisticated phishing scam due to a failed mail merge.

I’m engaging it the same way in either case.

According to LinkedIn, people found my profile using these search terms:

Tower Insurance + EIFFEL + Reality Television + Alternate

Because, really, that pretty much sums up my career.

Of all those things, the only thing I recognize is that I once wrote an article about the Eiffel tower which got published.

I have to wonder how far into the list of results the searcher had to go to find me.

For a few dollars more, I could bump myself further up in the results.