Hitting Earth

 Readers of my cartoons often ask me about the root incident behind these sketches. Many of the ideas develop over years. I keep making notes on things that happen to me (or to others) especially when I think, it could make a great story or lessons learnt later on. Sometimes, no direct background story exists on a cartoon; like this one. The original inspiration was born due to an article about a comet coming closer to Earth. There were speculations whether it is really just a comet or maybe something else. Even though the root idea had nothing to do with software development or -testing, you can still draw your own  relation to interesting software related stories. I mean, how often have you experienced a situation where you warned about a possibly wrong decision made by either your boss, a manager, a customer or whoever, only for you to later get a confirmation in the form of "Told ya!". 

Revise the Test Report

I thought, I'd published this cartoon in 2020 already, but couldn't find it, so I am doing it now, with a 3 years delay...=;O)

Additional note as of December 2025:
funny though, the cartoon is as relevant today as it was when I originally created it. History repeats itself.

 

Plus...there is a similar cartoon of mine as of August 2021 (Accurate Test Reports) that pretty much addresses a similar topic.

 

 

 

 

 

License Expired

 In an amusing short video from CNN[1], Alexei Navalny, a Russian opposition leader and anti-corruption activist, explained the meme MOSCOW4. It is representative for the stupidity of Putin’s command structure which - according to Navalny - consists of an array of complete morons. He underlined the statement by naming an example with one of them who was hacked his email passwords several times in sequence. The first password was “Moscow1”, then “Moscow2”, etc.  

After we ourselves managed several times to forget updating expiring license keys for our customers, I remembered this story. We are not any better and I thought, it was about time to honour our repetitive mishap with a corresponding cartoon. For the dinosaurs, I was experimenting with a different kind of filling grey; something Gary Larson had in his cartoons, too.

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[1] https://edition.cnn.com/videos/world/2022/04/19/navalny-moscow-4-origseriesfilms-3.cnn

Bad luck !

According to the table below(published by the New York Times [1] today on March 20), New York has almost 7 times the amount of registered infected Corona patients compared to Washington but "only" about 0.5% of them have died so far.

That's quite a good quota (for Corona). Let's have a look at the other side of the continent.   The Corona deathrate in Washington is nearly 6%. That's quite a contrast. What can be the reason for this difference? In most other States the mortality rate is roughly around 2%, similar to other countries in the world.

Here are some superficial (not seriously meant) hypotheses:

• The New Yorkers are doing something extremly right and those in Washington are doing something extremely wrong

• The dirty air in New York is poison for the virus. The more CO2, the better for human beings. Bad news for Greta Thunberg.

• New York may not be a typical state for eldery people to relax...,probably more young and healthy people live there while in Washington may be a pan of sick or eldery people spend the rest of their lives there (again, this isn't meant seriously, okay?)

• New York was better prepared for this predictable disaster

• or...the measures may have been taken inconsistently and/or the numbers are simply wrong

Let's get more curious and read the full article. We find valuable information by reading the details and then very quickly understand what happened. It is noted that 2900 of the reported cases in New York were all registered at the day of publishing the numbers. Interesting, probably it is too early for those new cases to "die". If we ignore these new cases (7102-2900), we still have a quite good quote of 0.8%. Better than in many countries worldwide. But further reading the article reveals “At least 35 of the deaths were connected to a single nursing center in Washington" and "...many of those cases involved older people with other health problems that made them especially vulnerable to coronavirus”.

Aha! So, it was jsut bad luck for the nursing center to get hit so hard. If you ignore these numbers (75-35)…we are back to an almost "normal" rate of 2%.

These numbers make sense now. No need for me to look for creative hypothetical argumentation.

And the link to IT? A similar incident once happend near the end of our software development sprint. In parallel to the development of user-stories, we also performed refactoring tasks to get rid of technical debt. As is the nature of refactoring, it may break previously working functionality. This is what happened: Instead of being ready for the sprint review, we had to reject the demo of 2 buggy user-stories that were working properly just a day before. It cost us valuable story points. We didn't achieve the goal. What followed were long-winded discussions and assumptions of what to do and what not to do in the future, whereas I thought: "WTF, Just bad luck, shit happens".

[1]https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/us/coronavirus-us-cases.html?action=click&module=Spotlight&pgtype=Homepage

I am not a robot

...

The truth about agile development and scrum

James Whittaker in his book "Exploratory Software Testing" (page 148) stated: "As testers, we must simply get the most work done that we can in the amount of time allotted to us".

Unfortunately, it's very popular to squeeze testing time when deadlines are near.

Years after I drew this cartoon, I worked in a project where we regularly had a burndown chart that looked liked the one below.
Hardly anything was delivered to testers until shortly before the sprint ended. We were thrown a huge bunch of completed tasks over the wall.

You might guess what happened next. Some testers felt the deadline pressure, too, hence probably didn't really accurate testing anymore and simply closed the tasks after a very quick and dirty smoke test (if at all); and all this just just to look great in front of the PM or to however one had to present the results. That's what obviously happened here. Dare those who work with testers who give a shit on deadlines and simply send back for rework all your half-baked features.

How developers see their code

The idea of this cartoon was born after a conversation with a developer who didn't intend to clarify whether a certain piece of code was working as expected.
 The developer stated: "by looking at the code, I know that it works".
Actually, he wasn't at fault, but it was kind of amusing for me to see how different developers think compared to software testers.

I don't believe in code-snippets that I see on a piece of paper or checked-into some source code management system. I want to see this thing run, fly and rock before I make a statement that I like what I have seen. Besides, it also reminded me to another developer statement I've accidentally witnessed many many years ago and I will never forget that phrase which was: "I haven't tested it, but the implementation looks great".

To be honest, I can't tell here whether the developer said that to himself to blow his own horn or whether he was talking to another developer to compliment on his work.

However, after all these years being involved in many testing projects and having developed software myself long time ago, I have always marveled developers' ability of innocent look at their code like they constructed a beauty, only to learn a little later from a critical thinker that either half of it is missing or not working as intended. When I was developing software my own, I was always uncertain whether I did the right thing and I asked the customer several times, if this is really how this thing should work. But that was 20 years ago and we didn't have any testers at that time who served as a protective barrier between development team and customer. The customer was coming to us - developers - every six weeks to tell us where we were wrong. We faced these customers directly. Maybe that made a difference.

Finding the right moment for your tests

There are these great moments in a testers's life when you realize that some of those great testing ideas tests should have been applied a little earlier.

Inspiration:

On February 21, 1990, commander Hans Lutz, carried out a system training on the Saab 340 aircraft type with a copilot onboard. The discussion turned to the procedure of remedying a landing gear retraction fault. The commander was of the opinion that on the ground, with the landing gear under load, the function of the retraction mechanism was interrupted. Contrary to the commander’s assumption, the hydraulic pumps began to work and the retraction process could not be interrupted. The aircraft impacted on the ground and was a total loss.

Source:
https://www.sust.admin.ch/inhalte/AV-berichte/1793_e.pdf (chapter 1.5.1.4.2)

New App in town

This app introduced a completely new driving experience...

BTW, please excuse the grey shade in the last two cartoons. This is an ugly boring bug within Google's Blogger tool which introduces a grey background into all uploaded pictures even though whey are supposed to be clearly white.
There are some comments from other bloggers who suffer of the same problem. 

Waterproof