This post is part of a series showing my working through the 2025 Advent of System Seeing exercises set by Ruth Malan. For background see the introduction . Days 1-5 Days 6-9 Days 10-16 Days 17-19 Days 20-24 As we reach the final few days of exercises we're into reflection and consolidation of ideas. Day 20 Task : (1) Look across the past 19 days and draw out concepts related to systems (2)…
This post is part of a series showing my working through the 2025 Advent of System Seeing exercises set by Ruth Malan. For background see the introduction . Days 1-5 Days 6-9 Days 10-16 Days 17-19 Days 20-24 This set of exercises is concerned with the location of a technical system within a social system. Spoiler: it only adds complexity. Day 17 Task : (1) Considering the situation you’re…
This post is part of a series showing my working through the 2025 Advent of System Seeing exercises set by Ruth Malan. For background see the introduction . Days 1-5 Days 6-9 Days 10-16 Days 17-19 Days 20-24 This section of the Advent series is largely concerned with material I can't share in much detail, a practical exercise exploring a real-life scenario at work. I've done the exercises and…
This post is part of a series showing my working through the 2025 Advent of System Seeing exercises set by Ruth Malan. For background see the introduction . Days 1-5 Days 6-9 Days 10-16 Days 17-19 Days 20-24 In this set of exercises, the idea of feedback is introduced. Feedback is at the heart of systems thinking because we humans seem to be primed to view the world as a simple linear…
This post is part of a series showing my working through the 2025 Advent of System Seeing exercises set by Ruth Malan. For background see the introduction . Days 1-5 Days 6-9 Days 10-16 Days 17-19 Days 20-24 The initial exercises introduce some core concepts and a couple of approaches to modelling, and encourage us to think about our work and the system we're looking at. Day 1 Task : (1) Draw a…
My friend Patrick Prill posted some of his System Seeing practices at the start of the year. He is a systems thinker and nobody's fool so I guessed that if he valued Ruth Malan's Advent(ure) in System Seeing series of daily exercises it would be worth taking a look. I did. I agreed. I bookmarked it and then ... And then months later I came back to it. Although the activities are cast as an Advent…
You know when you suddenly realise you have an internal model of a chunk of the world that's been guiding your thinking and behaviour but you never realised? I love that. The most recent instance for me was a couple of weeks ago when asked what problems I have with test data at work. That's when it became obvious that I have three broad categories of test data, and want something different from…
How do you test a product with distributed logic and non-deterministic components? Well, it depends on the product and when the question is asked. This post is one answer, for now. A service I work on exposes an API for internal and external clients and calls multiple other services. It orchestrates a reasonably complex journey for a user, with their inputs and the responses of the services…
In Looking Good, Testers! I made the case that testing is about looking and that delegating the looking to someone or something else involves a risk calculation: do you both understand the task the same way, is the third party likely to carry out the task in the way you requested, how easily can you check any results they give back, could they complement you in some way, how will you keep your…
Testing is inherently about looking because, put simply: If you don't look, you're not likely to find. The interesting challenge is to look in the right way at the right place at the right time. This is what motivates any kind of intentional testing: how can we put ourselves in a strong position to look for, see, and — crucially — recognise the things that matter to the people that matter, when…
Over the years I've seen, heard, and been in many conversations about the tools testers must learn . So many specific tools mentioned in that time, but I prefer an answer like this: Learn the tools that are important for your context. Perhaps that sounds like a cop-out, because it means testers will have to think about what they're doing, why they're doing it, the results they want to get from it,…
I'm continuing to be inspired by Patrick Prill's series of posts on the way AI is impacting personal, societal, and economic systems and today that leads me to share another short analogy. See also Hedging Your Bets and A SpotifAI Model? Into the Groove by Jonathan Scott recounts the history of recorded music. You probably already have some background awareness of a timeline something like this:…
You've almost certainly heard of the Prisoner's Dilemma : two members of a crimimal gang are captured and interrogated separately. The police tell them both they are looking at a year in prison but offer a deal if they squeal: less time for incriminating their colleague. There are three scenarios: No-one talks: the default one year each One talks: the talker goes free , the other gets three years…
Hands up if you think the world needs another format for retrospectives. Yeah, right. Yet here I am. Last October it was clear that we were becoming jaded. After a phase of novelty themes (at the festival, NSYNC, 8-bit video games, ...) and a long stretch of Stop Start Continue , engagement in our retros was sliding. So when it was my turn to facilitate I wanted to find a different format and I…
My friend Patrick Prill continues to dissect the growth, use, and risks of AI in our industry at the rate of an article or two a day, each one teasing out a particular thread from the very tangled issue ball. ( Here's yesterday's.) I recommend reading them for a thoughtful and detailed analysis and reflection on today's software and social ecosystems and the ways that AI is reshaping them. They…
My friend and colleague Patrick Prill has been writing articles about AI in our industry at a prodigious rate over the last couple of weeks. (Here's the second of yesterday's pieces.) I recommend reading them for a thoughtful and detailed analysis and reflection on today's software and social ecosystems and the ways that AI is reshaping them. I can't compete with the breadth, depth, or frequency…
In 2024 I wrote a post, An AI Red Light , about a creative project I did with my daughter using both AI and "traditional" tooling. This was my conclusion: I think we were pragmatic in our choice of tools. Where our vision required control (video) we used a tool that gave us that control. Where we were happy to cede some control in exchange for output at a quality we could not produce ourselves…
There was a time when testing was all about the mnemonics . Well, we had no AI back then so thinking about our human craft and how to share what we had learned using our human intelligence with other engaged humans for later recall in their human heads seemed important. But this post isn't about dumping on AI. It isn't about mnemonics either even if WTTWTH does look like something that'd fit well…
The Wikipedia page on infinite loops in programming describes them as "a sequence of instructions that, as written, will continue endlessly, unless an external intervention occurs." One common example might be a while loop whose exit condition is never met, and needs to be aborted by a human pressing Control-C . With that concept in mind, we can make an easy analogy to software development where…
I was guest speaker for a software testing class at EC Utbildning a couple of weeks ago. I talked about one of my hobby horses — using automation to amplify my ability to explore — and I'll give the same talk at the Ministry of Testing Cambridge next Tuesday. Perhaps you can make it? Chatting with the Swedish students on the call before my presentation I asked what they liked about testing and, as…
In Your job is to deliver code you have proven to work Simon Willison writes: As software engineers we ... need to deliver code that works — and we need to include proof that it works as well. He is coming at this from the perspective of LLM-assisted coding, but most of what he says applies in general. I think this is a reasonable consise summary of his requirements for developers: Manual happy…
In yesterday's Angry Weasel newsletter, Leadership is a Constant Experiment , Alan Page was explaining how, as a leader, he gets better results by trying things intentionally, in public, in a safe way: But in real work, confidence isn’t the superpower. Curiosity is. I feel this too, although confidence, or the appearance of it, can get you a good way up the greasy pole, if that's your chosen…
Last night I was at the Cambridge Tester meetup for a workshop on leadership. It was a two-parter with Drew Pontikis facilitating conversation about workplace scenarios followed by an AMA with a group of experienced managers. I can't come to work this week, my cat died. Drew opened by asking us what our first thoughts would be as managers on seeing that sentence. Naturally, sadness and sympathy,…
I bought a belt recently. Unexpectedly, it came with a tool for making holes and the notice above. My initial reaction was to chuckle and think "yeah, we could probably all learn something from that." But, honestly, that's just lazy. That's the cheap laugh. That's this misguided thinking: DO NOT OPEN THE EDITOR BEFORE YOU FINALISE THE REQUIREMENT And I am so over that. When asked what advice I…
It's all relative. There's enough wrong in the world that having an imperfect job in tough economic times is still a privilege that many would cherish. And yet, in its own isolated context, the daily grind can genuinely feel like being physically ground down, minced, fragmented. Which is why it's important to find a glimmer of joy where you can. And I found one this week, in the accidental coining…