Squares, Bowls and Triangles

I never forget the speech of a Google test engineer many years back, when he started with a slide that showed nothing but just all red colors. He took a chair and sat near the audience watching the wall together with us and said nothing. After quite a while he stopped the pondering silence and stated: "one gets used to red colors if you only stare long enough to it".

The point he was making here was to never accept your test scripts to report failures for too long. You should immediately address newly introduced bugs and fix those. If you wait too long, more and more tests may go wrong until very soon, you don't get alerted anymore when new tests fail. It may become a normal situation for your tests to fail. This is not only true for automated testing. It applies the same way to manual testing. If you get used to all the flaws and error messages an SUT (software-under-test) reveals, it is just a question of time until you arrange with it.

You don't see these things anymore after a while until someone with fresh eyes points you to all these known but weird things happening on your screen. You may then realize that you may have been reeducated softly. Ask yourself whether you still wear the hat of a customer or have you already turned from a quality focused engineer to an ignorant which - almost in trance - automatically clicks away all the noise. You may explain to yourself that these are all known issues reported in the past and someone will care about sooner or later. Really? Reality shows that these issues are long forgotten; although saved, but in a deep ocean called backlog where none can or wants to touch them anymore. If a bug sits in the backlog for a while, the likelihood for it to die increases. If a bug hasn't been fixed till now, it probably isn't important enough to care about.

Quite some time ago, when I realized that, me too, was just about to get used to quirks, exceptions and error messages, that pop-up like huge bubbles created by a hunting whale, I communicated my perception to the team and it was a shock when I noticed that others seem to have already "fallen in love " with all this puzzle of inconsistency.

As a result I asked myself, do I allow to adopt the attitude of the squares, or am I an ignorant bowl unable to accept things may be seen differently or am I currently just a triangle who struggles to take a decision.  I think I need a therapy... =;O)

Declining Confidence

Let's assume someone has a brain fart and suggests to convert all bugs into tasks, only to get rid of the bug backlog. Gone are all the bugs in a second. All of a sudden you produce bug-free software. What a great achievement.

Another product manager cleaned his backlog by converting all bugs into tasks only for time sitting in a meeting with the release manager. He had less to explain then. When the meeting was over, he moved the tasks back to bugs. Believe it or not, this really happened and this scenario reminded me to “Patriot Games” with Harrison Ford playing a former CIA agent. One scene was about a terrorist training camp in the desert. The chiefs knew the exact times when an American espionage satellite flew over their area. They hid their weapons and anything that seemed suspicious; then they holed up in their tents until the danger had passed.