Everybody Tests

A farmer had a plot of land he wanted fenced in and a limited budget for fence materials. He asked his three friends, an engineer, a physicist, and a mathematician, to propose solutions. The engineer being the practical sort took the full budget and bought the largest amount of fence and laid out the fence in a circle. Happy with his practical solution, he said, "friend, that's the biggest area enclosable with your budget." The physicist scoffed at the engineer's lack of "thinking outside the box" and laid out the fence in a straight line saying, "I presume the fence to extend infinitely in each direction. There, I've fenced half the world." The mathematician calmly took a 5-foot section of fence and built a circle around himself. Once encircled, he proudly announced, "I declare myself to be on the OUTSIDE." ~ Nerdy joke I heard somewhere. A local shipping company has a slogan on one of its trucks that made me laugh out loud inside ...

Daniel Pink claims science says we're doing it wrong in the Deloitte Digital studio model. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rrkrvAUbU9Y Currently within my office there is a formalized effort to find ways to improve our work culture. According to Pink, the organization needs to learn to support and reward the correct set of motivations. Based on his talk, one of the friction areas I see between studio consulting and financial consulting is that the bonus structure for financial consulting where mere effort and extra time linearly deliver  incrementally better results works against you in the creative software and design work we do in the studios. Pink suggests if we want to adapt to what the decades of motivation research conclude, maybe we should talk about removing the consideration of performance-affected bonuses from the studio model entirely, just push the financial concern right off the table, and let people have the agency to act on the intrinsic motivations that made them wor...

"Kickstarter isn’t a store — it’s a new way for creators and audiences to work together to make things."  ~ Perry Chen, Yancy Strickler, and Charles Yadler - Via Kickstarter.com's blog What the hell is an "Intrapreneur"? ~ Me. About 10 seconds before having my mind blown reading this article on fastcoexist.com I'll just say it. I want to build a Kickstarter platform inside my company so I can work from within to change the way things get done. How about I explain why... Last year around this time it was announced that my beloved little startup would merge into a large, multi-national conglomerate. Now those of you who have made that transition know that it comes with some benefits (stock buyout, larger resource pool, potential for job security). There are also typically some changes to how you do things. At a small startup, you typically get as much responsibility as you'd like based on willingness to drive development on products and tools that ...

"A sub-feature of this is the screenshots feature. While most of the fare you will see will be OMG LOOKEY HEREs, with a little skill, you can take quite good images." ~PARDOX460, The Art of Taking Good Halo 3 Screenshots Remember back a few posts when I dropped a bit of info about maybe perhaps capturing screenshots on failed UI tests? Well it wasn't a lie and now I'm going to show you how. First, I'll go over the prerequisites. Second I'll present you with a code sample that demonstrates how to implement the screenshot tool in your tests. And finally I'll wrap up with some recommendations on further steps to embed this into your continuous integration environment and practice. Let's get started, shall we? Phase 1: Prerequisites The bell I'm forced to ring whenever it comes to Android test automation is that Google have deigned to build it around emulators. This is convenient for them because they're not beholden to manufacturers' en...

*tap tap* Is this thing on? Okay, I have no idea when to start these kinds of things but I'd like to make a habit of being available for questions here. So here's a Q&A request. If you have any topics you'd like to see addressed, if there are any posts I've made so far that got you thinking, or if you just want to know more about me, please reply in the comments section or email me directly at: rcollins@ubermind.com rucollins@deloitte.com I'll reply in a follow-up post if the topic bears broadcast and more directly if you have personal questions you'd like kept to a smaller audience. Feel free to add comments too. Don't worry about my ego, I grew up with freckles and glasses. I'm bulletproof now.

" There are professional taste testers at the dog food companies that eat dog food all day. If you can afford dry dog food, see if u can afford a box of oatmeal and half a dozen eggs for protein. You are much better off eating human food. " ~in response to "Is dog food safe to eat?" via Yahoo! Answers Imagine you're at a board meeting for a major dog food brand. Now imagine that the CEO begin the meeting by picking up a fork and cracking open a can of grey, slime-doused kibbles and taking a large, oddly enthusiastic bite. According to Wikipedia, this is the origin story for the phrase " eating your own dog food " from which the practice of dogfooding derived its name. While the image above may be literally quite unpalatable, the ideals behind it are sound in this author's humble opinion. Why ask your clients to accept something you yourself haven't vetted outside the team of those who built it? So how do you empower a large crowd of peop...

"There are three kinds of lies: lies, damn lies, and statistics." ~Mark Twain, aka Samuel Clemens In a previous post I mentioned rather blithely that we were collecting code coverage data from live devices using Emma. If you're unfamiliar with Android's use of Emma, which comes with the Android SDK tools when you install them, the documentation won't do you much good. It isn't to say that the Android developer portals' " Testing from Other IDEs " section isn't helpful or that the online documentation for the SDK's InstrumentationTestRunner isn't either. Far from it. But if that's all you read, you may find yourself getting confused shortly after getting started. Let's say for example, that you begin your deployment of code coverage tracking via the robust set of Ant commands included in the default build.xml. You may notice from the Testing from Other IDEs section above that there is a simple command you can run that all...