CEWT #7 Reflections

Posts about CEWT #7:

• In One Sentence, Define Quality, Bug, Testing
• We Don't Know?
• Dirty Testing Secrets: Testing in Half the Time?
• CEWT #7 Lean Coffee
• Dishing the Dirt

CEWT #7 Abstracts

The seventh Cambridge Exploratory Workshop on Testing, CEWT #7, will be on 24th November 2019, hosted by DisplayLink. The topic is

Dirty Testing Secrets

Here's the abstracts:

Mark Bunce, The Secret of Machine Learning

If you believe the hype and media buzz you’d think we have well and truly entered a new evolutionary age of artificial intelligence.  Machine Learning is a hot-topic in many business domains and it is often seen as the magic wand that will quickly solve all problems.

But how do “traditional” practices in software engineering fit with the challenges of delivering this new technology?  Mark will discuss his experiences of grappling with this problem, in particular the dirty testing secrets that evolved and why, when introducing a Machine Learning “Cognitive Investigations” solution that sought to replace the human decision making processes in the Anti Money Laundering operation of a global banking organisation.

Aleksandar Simic, It's Not a Secret

What makes a secret harmful for me, for us testers or for whoever relies on us? How can we reveal the secret? Can the revealed secret become a secret again?

Karo Stoltzenburg, Testing in Half the Time

It seems to me that half of the time, at least, we testers really are not needed; half of the time, at least, the testing we do really is unnecessary; and half of the time, at least, a tester in the team can actually risk destabilizing the team. In this talk I'll explain why and suggest that tester hubris is one of our dirty secrets.

James Thomas, We Don’t Know

There are terms in our domain, terms that are fundamental to our work, terms like quality, bug, and even testing itself, that many testers would struggle to define. I’d say it’s an open secret within testing, but would it surprise our colleagues?

CEWT #7 is Coming!

The seventh Cambridge Exploratory Workshop on Testing, CEWT #7, will be on 24th November 2019, hosted by DisplayLink. The topic is

Dirty Testing Secrets

What dirty secrets do you know about in testing? What dirty secrets do you know about in your team’s testing? What are your own testing’s dirty secrets? Come and share them at CEWT #7!

Practitioners in every industry do things that people outside of it would be surprised about, maybe even horrified by. Different practitioners develop their own ways of working and some of those would upset even their colleagues within their company and industry. We tend to keep quiet about these things. They are our dirty secrets.

We’re interested in exploring what testing’s dirty secrets are perceived to be, what justifications there might be for keeping them secret, and whether they are actually secret rather than visible but not seen or perhaps even deliberately ignored.

We want to discuss occasions when a secret was revealed and what the causes and ramifications of that were. We are curious about attempts to be open that failed, attempts that succeeded, and challenges around openness when trying to fit testing inside a wider software engineering culture.

We want to know  what motivates us to perpetuate a secret rather than change things, and what could persuade us to move some existing practice underground, out of view. We are wondering whether secrets are kept from particular kinds of people, at particular times, for particular kinds of practice or data. We are asking whether we ever deceive ourselves in our work.

We are also wondering how we feel about all of the above, and how we deal with those feelings in ways that help us to continue in our role, or perhaps leave it behind and try something else.

As usual, the topic is deliberately open and the discussion we want is open-ended and open-minded.

Note: this is not an open call for participants. We try to support the local testing community by inviting those who've attended other Cambridge meetups recently first.