Invalid Use-Case

How often have you heard the phrase "This is an invalid Use-Case" only to learn quite a while later that you haven't been far away from reality when such ignorance strikes back. Safety critical industries– by their nature - have a different approach in fixing problems in the long-term. They learn from defeat (watch full article)

Demystify Test Automation II

London strike back

1:1, now they downed the London Stock market

Recently in the server room

Last night technicians performed some maintenance work on the air conditioning system in the computer centre and didnt tell anyone. They could not finish their work in time and left the server room with no cooling at all.
First room temparature SMS-warning received early in the morning (30 degrees C), then the second warning moments later, now 40 degrees, but of course none was reachable at that time. The servers shut down automatically when they "feel" it is getting too hot, but for 3 of the servers this was their last activity..., so this cartoon is dedicated to those 3 lonely servers who sweat to death...=;O)

Cern about to create black holes

According to a news entry by CNN about a month ago, the most powerful atom-smasher ever built could make some bizarre discoveries, such as invisible matter or extra dimensions in space, after it is switched on in August.This collider, called the largest scientific experiment in history, is expected to begin test runs in August. at CERN in Switzerland. Some critics fear the Large Hadron Collider could exceed physicists' wildest conjectures: Will it spawn a black hole that could swallow Earth? Or spit out particles that could turn the planet into a hot dead clump?

David Francis, a physicist on the collider's huge ATLAS particle detector, smiled when asked whether he worried about black holes and hypothetical killer particles known as strangelets. "If I thought that this was going to happen, I would be well away from here," he said.

The collider basically consists of a ring of supercooled magnets 17 miles in circumference attached to huge barrel-shaped detectors. The ring, which straddles the French and Swiss border, is buried 330 feet underground.

Squirrel downs Swiss TV station

These bugs are envious, they heard a squirrel managed to down the Swiss TV channel for at least an hour.

A difficult tester

Testers should be curious and pessimistic, don't expect to win a lot of friends and don't expect them to see what you see.

Sahara

It has been quite a while since I last put another cartoon on paper and the reason is not the missing subjects, that is for sure! There is quite a bunch of ideas just waiting in the queue to get shifted from draft to final mode. The cartoon is dedicated to UNICEF and will be part of the UNICEF exhibition next month in Steinen, Germany. The really interesting thing here is that - by accident- it fits so nicely to the weird scenarios I am just going through. Good luck, little birds!

Wrong Medicine

When the best process becomes nothing but theory and deadlines are close. The title of this cartoon could have been "against-all-odds", but it is already the day after..when you get back what you have shipped...!

Different Views

80/20

If you were a developer, the text for you instead might be:

"Time's up folks!...now let's count the LOC (lines of code)"

New office / Extreme Squeezing

All the employees were kept out-of-office for three days only to get this when they came back...

Acrophobia

Zero Bugs

A bad time for bugs, at least for some of them...

Ctrl Alt Delete

SDTimes, N.Y. was so friendly to print this cartoon into one of their newsletters on April 1, 2008.

Not sure, whether that link still exists at:

http://www.sdtimes.com/content/article.aspx?ArticleID=31920

Robot shopping / maintenance

Alpha Centauri

This cartoon is a remake of my originally really awful drawing. 

Demystify Test Automation

Something About Coverage

Minor Fix

Victim of CMM Level 5

When the CEO of announced that he wants to head to SixSigma level 5 I felt sorry for all those poor bugs. Finally we will have enough time to find all those little creatures and throw them out of the system. While drawing a few poor bugs who lost their jobs – or who were detected - after searching for them as part of the new programme.
This is a remake of the original cartoon drawn in 2006. The original cartoon had only 2 bugs.

Stealth Deployment

This is a rework of a cartoon I drew in December 2006 based on a story that happened almost exactly like the cartoon demonstrates. I was "CC"-ied an Email which the head developer at that time answered to Engineering team. He forced them to deploy a piece of code while bypassing all agreed software deployment processes. And it wasn't the only time we suffered such actions. The original version of the cartoon together with one of my first contributions as an author was published later by BZMedia, N.Y. (New York)

90/10

One day, a furious CTO invited the head developer, an architect and me into his office and started shouting. We were made responsible for the loss of a several million-dollar deal. I cannot remember the exact details anymore, but I remember being confronted with charges that could be easily disproved. Disappointed about the unfair treatment, I started to draw my very first cartoon. It served as a tool to channel my anger. When my colleagues saw the cartoon, they enjoyed it and couldn’t wait to see more of the same kind. So I continued drawing.

The term 90/10 was one of 3 slogans that ruled the company. 80/20 which is the well-known Pareto principle, 30/30 should remind us that one third of what we do is waste, and 90/10 meaning to take ownership. You are 90% responsible of what you do. In the cartoon, the numbers are twisted by purpose as this CTO didn’t follow his own code of practice.

 

 

No idea

The challenge of getting the required information is well-known among testers. Even if you get the required documentation, what you really need is missing. I have seen a broad variety of documents with different levels of quality (from excellence to unusable) but the experiencie I liked the most was a project that combined two very different approaches in two different phases of the project.
The project started as an XP approach where the system was built from scratch; as the tester, I worked with developers and the project leader. During that time I learnt the application inside out, even though there was not much documentation around. After the program was shipped, we shifted to phase 2, from XP to a more classical approach where the developer and the BA wrote just rough specifications. After the initial version was built, I got release notes with valuable background information written by the BA and the developer. Even at a late stage in all the following phases, reading those release notes was enough for me to understand exactly which extensions were introduced and where I had to look for defects because I knew the application well from the first phase.

In another project that came with poor documentation, target users tested the system every six weeks for a whole week. During that week we delivered fixes every day and agreed on new features for the next iteration. The product quality was amazing. RUP and XP were foreign words at that time.
In cases were no or or poor documentation is around, I ask developers to present the features they have introduced rather than forcing them to write poor documentation that contains only half of the required information. Rather than focusing too much on requirements documentation, it is more imporatn to have the team close together and make sure you get the information you need to come a comain expert of the AUT.