Erik Petersen's blog

CITCON Melbourne 2008 @ The Jasper Hotel

Sun, 15 Jun 2008 19:31:07 -0500

A followup reminder for CITCON, following on from my original post

After a venue search that started at Southbank and slowly crawled its way north across the Melbourne CBD as we discovered Melb conference venues were pricier than all the other CITCON cities, we finally have a venue!

The Open Information Foundation, co-founded by Jeffrey Fredrick and Paul Julius, presents CITCON Asia-Pacific 2008 in Melbourne, Australia.

The first hacker, 70 years on

Wed, 14 May 2008 06:30:33 -0500

The original meaning of hacker included “A person who enjoys exploring the details of programmable systems and how to stretch their capabilities”, “One who programs enthusiastically (even obsessively)” and even “One who enjoys the intellectual challenge of creatively overcoming or circumventing limitations”. These are all descriptions of Konrad Zuse, who probably qualifies as the world’s first hacker. He graduated as an engineer in 1935, found a job but quit after a few months to build a “computing machine” to perform “tedious calculations”, based on ideas he had been pursuing during his studies. He took over his parents loungeroom, and over the next 3 years built a large cabinet holding over 20,000 parts, metal pins and hand cut metal sliders (his friends also helped cut them). It was a 1 hertz machine (powered by a vacuum cleaner motor), and programmed by holes punched in old movie film. It could perform a multiplication in 5 seconds and was the first working programmed computing device . Like many prototypes, as Zuse said, “It just never worked right.” as the metal sliders frequently jammed. In design, it is clearly a computer , and unlike the first American computer it was both programmable (not configured by cabling), and binary (input numbers were not stored as base 10 but converted to base 2).

So 70 years on from then, we now recognize the 67th anniversary of what was truly the first reliable programmable computer. On May 12, 1941 , 67 years ago , Zuse debuted his Z3, the world’s first general-purpose digital computer, a fully automated, program-controlled and freely programmable machine (having ditched steel sheets for relays). Unlike some early computers, it was quite small - only the size of 3 refrigerators! Zuse continued on his hacking way, defining the first programming language Plankalkuel (which was finally implemented 55 years later), and founding a computer company, which grew to 1000 employees and later pioneered the use of magnetic memory. After losing a 15 year fight for a patent on his computer ideas, he sold his company and became a reclusive painter.

He was rediscovered in the 1980s, turned his mind to wind power but unfortunately died before he published his ideas. While the Z3 was destroyed during the war it was rebuilt later in the 1960s. The Z1 was rebuilt in the 1980s, but like the first version it had similar reliability issues.

So the Z1 was buggy hardware. What testing feature did the Z3 have? Amazingly enough it had a debug mode, allowing a programmer to stop the execution and examine the values stored in the machine! I was lucky enough to meet a German post-graduate student who had met Zuse in the 1980s, but most people have not even heard of him. Next time someone has a new software product they are creating, how about naming it Zuse?

Qualities of Quality PMs

Thu, 01 May 2008 07:15:52 -0500

I’m enjoying being technoratified . I have more than 50 blogs as favorites. I noticed a note on one announcing a reissue of a project management book, with the opportunity to win a copy. The book is “Making things happen”, by Scott Berkun. You had to post on the qualities of a quality project manager. I was one of 50 posters while the competition ran, and was lucky enough to win one of the 10 books. I’ll reserve my opinion on the book till I read it, but it will have to be excellent to outdo Johanna Rothman’s Manage It which won a 2008 Jolt award. If you follow the link you'll find a podcast from Johanna to listen to, then search further and you'll also find a video interview as well.

The PM qualities list makes interesting reading, and there is even a synthesized audio track of the original blog post (but sadly not the comments). You can also read an Q&A interview with Scott on PM from the book’s original release.

ET thoughts: The Seeker (CKA) heuristic

Sun, 20 Apr 2008 02:18:28 -0500

Some people are more into mnemonics than others. I can recall walking along with James Lyndsay one day. This in itself was unusual because we are normally on opposite sides of the earth. We were discussing how there are many great mnemonics for test ideas, but neither of us was able to recall the items, just the mnemonics! I think this strongly influences our exploratory testing approaches. Alan Richardson has blogged about this here . Because it is general, It doesn’t really need a mnemonic, but I will give it an acronym. Seeker, CKA, Challenge Key Assumptions. While any tester can do this, the experienced tester will be more skilled at identifying key assumptions, and be more effective at using it. If you have less experience, or can remember mnemonics (!), maybe try the standard ones! You’ll find some links by searching for “test ideas” at my testingspot.net site

CITCON Asia-Pacific Melbourne Sat Jun 28th - Register now!

Tue, 22 Apr 2008 07:11:20 -0500

After a great conference in Sydney last year, The Continuous Integration and Testing conference (CITCON) is coming to Melbourne in 2008. It's an open space conference where we all meet the night before to propose and vote for sessions then spend Saturday sharing ideas and experiences, presenting, discussing and demoing. It was an amazing experience last year. The Denver CITCON has just happened (http://citconf.com/wiki/index.php?title=CITCONDenver2008Sessions) and June is not far away.

No liquids in the cabin, no solids in the hold - the Heathrow T5 baggage shutdown

Tue, 15 Apr 2008 20:26:10 -0500

Anyone who follows the news would have heard of the opening day debacle at the new T5 terminal at Heathrow in London England that culminated in passengers only being allowed carry on baggage resulting in a pile of over 20000 bags, wryly described by one blog commenter as ‘No liquids in the cabin, no solids in the hold’. With normality seemingly restored after backlogged baggage sorting moved off to Milan, Memphis and across the UK, what can we say about what happened and could it have been avoided?

try again tomorrow - leap year bugs

Tue, 25 Mar 2008 19:44:30 -0500

Around about 20 years ago, I left my first job at Frontier Software after 2 years. All the code was in COBOL, and it was some of the best, cleanest code I’ve ever seen. For common code, we would just include libraries to reuse standard functions. I can remember reading the date routines and the obscure logic of the leap year calculations. These days, most languages provide standard libraries of functions, so all the hard work is done. Does this mean that programs all handle leap years now? Apparently not, in fact the situation is so poor that “The honor society of leap year day babies” has provided a code snippet for programmers to re-use. They acknowledge it isn’t the best, and it is just in perl, but they are not programmers just frustrated users (looking for programmers to provide other examples). They have actually updated the code and added a ruby version as well, but being unfamiliar with change control, the new version is hidden as a link off the old page. So what are some of the things that frustrated them? Systems that refuse to allow Feb 29 in a leap year as a birthday. A ToysRus birthday card system that won’t accept leap day birthdays, YouTube (since fixed), Nickelodeon and Pampers, and assorted government systems . The workaround is typically to force a choice of a day before or a day after, which is effectively corrupting the information. No wonder they are annoyed.

Watch this next?: the $1 million data mining quality challenge

Wed, 19 Mar 2008 08:34:38 -0500

Quality is often measured in terms of accuracy (or Accurateness, according to this definition ) . For a shopping site, the closer you can predict what a customer likes, the more you can sell and the more inclined your customer will be to buy more and to stay loyal to you as a supplier. As any gambler knows, prediction is not a science but historical results can provide a best guess. Can you put a price on this? Who knows. One company has offered a prize to make it better though, one million dollars.

Lightning talks and Selenium

Sat, 15 Mar 2008 07:29:34 -0500

My first demo of Selenium was at a lightning talk at STARwest in 2005. I was watching it with one eye and watching the time keeper with the other. Not out of rudeness; I was actually hosting the event. Grig Gheorghiu did the demo and even blogged about it .

At Citcon Sydney last year, I did an informal tool survey and Selenium came out tops by a long way. We had some lightning-style talks at the session but nothing on Selenium.

Business rules for handling overdue library books ... a century overdue!

Wed, 12 Mar 2008 07:10:50 -0500

In Finland, there is a religious annual that comes out (obviously) every year, collecting 12 monthly magazines into a bound volume. The 116th edition of Vartija was printed in 2004 with the theme, “Doctrines Challenged by the Faith of Common Man”. I guess most Finnish libraries stock it, and Finns are regular readers borrowing 3 books every 2 months. If we have faith in common man, we can presume that they also return them. Unless their great grandchildren return them a little overdue….

SUM greater than the parts: 2 hours of Selenium meet on Youtube!

Fri, 07 Mar 2008 06:44:20 -0600

When I read about the Selenium Users Meetup (SUM), I was excited. When I read the program, I was ecstatic. When I realized the location, I was shattered.

Last year I was able to visit San Franciso for Agile Open California. That’s because I was in Anaheim for STARwest. Now I’m back in Melbourne Australia, so San Fran was out of the question.

The strange tale of Jerry's new jail, revisited

Fri, 07 Mar 2008 23:49:36 -0600

I contributed the Bug of the Month to the January Between The Lines newsletter. I first blogged about it at the start of the year in a piece about two bugs . One was a system failure at the Seattle New Year fireworks, requiring human intervention to run the show. The story was carried by media around the world. The video of the whole incident is even available .

The P28 virtual fence: Borderline success or virtual vaporware?

Wed, 05 Mar 2008 04:06:01 -0600

I’ve already noted some of the issues around the virtual fence here. In May 2006, George W. Bush called it “the most technologically advanced border-security initiative in American history”. In a flash of originality, the 28 mile virtual fence in Arizona was called Project 28, or P28 in Chertoff-speak. Micheal Chertoff has now accepted the fence system, on the basis that “all of the defects” in the prototype project were either “cured” or “immaterial.” He also said “In some form or fashion, technology is going to be virtually every place on the border, but it’s not necessarily going to be in the configuration of P28,” The chair of the House Committee on Homeland Security, Representative Bennie Thompson, sees it differently, “The poorly structured contract that prevented the line Border Patrol agents from pointing out obvious flaws and caused an overreliance on contractors has resulted in a system that has been described as providing ‘marginal’ functionality at best,” I wonder if he was tempted to say the Border fence had borderline functionality. [grin]

The technology stack on top of each tower looks impressive . The project is anything but impressive , with many of the issues typical in the IT industry: badly underestimated effort, not involving users, and not enough testing, While there was evidently a push for reuse of existing systems and components, it caused many difficulties: trying to base the system around a law enforcement dispatch system (!) that couldn't scale, trying to use off-the-shelf components that weren't designed to integrate, and a lack of standards for the sensors. The builder of the system, Boeing, has only taken 3/4s of the $20 million fee, granted a $2 million credit, and apparently paid $40 million to get this far on a project that will now finish in 2011, not the end of this year (which was already a year and a half past the original schedule). That will only be phase one!

Advice for Simon: How good Dev teams fix bugs

Sun, 02 Mar 2008 20:17:34 -0600

Simon posted to a software testing discussion list: I’m working on a project at the moment which is slipping day on day and one issue we’re seeing is that the development team refuse to believe they can estimate how many defects they can fix in a certain time frame. I’m trying to influence them to do so (as is my manager) but having not been a developer (apart form creating the odd web site) I don’t know how true this claim is. Personally, I think by breaking a task down, or using a gut-feel based on experience you can estimate anything but they disagree stating that until they investigate they don’t know how long a defect will take to fix. Does anyone have any experience or ideas which could help?

Is Google-Alerts a chatterbot?

Tue, 19 Feb 2008 06:49:31 -0600

Many eons ago (in internet time), I used to use a newsbot at an English site called lineone.net to search articles of interest. I dont even think “blog” was a word back then! Lineone only exists in the archives now. Today I use Google for all my alerting, and it is a great tool, but I hardly harness its power . I didn’t even realize until researching this that Mcrosoft had a newsbot called Newsbot but it seems to have gone the way of Lineone.

I know Google like to really push the boundaries developing software, but I must admit I was surprised to note at the bottom of an alert there was a link “Invite Google Alerts to chat”. Wow, what was this? I clicked the link, then was disappointed to see the email account was a noreply one. I was shattered. [grin] Suggestion for Google Central, Don’t invite Gmail chats with noreply email addresses.

Many eons ago (well a few decades at least) I used to try chats with Eliza, an early chatterbot. She also now lives (as antique software) on my HTC Touch PDA. It is an interesting testing challenge to try to confuse a chatterbot. It is quite easy for Eliza. There are many others to try out here . I am sure Ms. Google Alerts would be hard to confuse, if she ever finds her voice. She still hasn’t replied to my invite to chat either…