{"id":107,"date":"2010-03-16T12:08:03","date_gmt":"2010-03-16T19:08:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/angryweasel.com\/blog\/?p=107"},"modified":"2010-03-16T12:08:03","modified_gmt":"2010-03-16T19:08:03","slug":"testing-for-brown-mms","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/angryweasel.com\/blog\/testing-for-brown-mms\/","title":{"rendered":"Testing for Brown M&Ms"},"content":{"rendered":"

One thing I\u2019ve learned in my testing career is that where there are bugs, there are more bugs. Some of my colleague Nachi\u2019s<\/a> research shows that components with a high number of pre-release bugs has a corresponding share of the post-release bugs. The heuristic works well on a smaller scale too \u2013 if I find annoyances or other slop 10 minutes into a testing session, odds are that there are many, many more bugs in the feature.<\/p>\n

This post<\/a> by Ajay<\/a> demonstrates a good example of \u201cslop\u201d. There are certain things anyone designing a kiosk application should do to ensure that the application remains in kiosk mode (sidenote: as a tester, I love kiosk machines because they\u2019re a great target to demonstrate testing ideas). When I see flaws like this, I know there are more \u2013 perhaps dozens or even hundreds of other flaws in the application, and I wonder how many of those flaws are exploitable for more serious damage. <\/p>\n

And now, as I read the comments, I see that JB said<\/a> basically the same thing in the first comment.<\/p>\n

And then I was reminded of this article<\/a> I read last week about business advice from Van Halen. Van Halen were famous for the rider in their contract stating that they should have a bowl of M&Ms with all of the brown candies removed. It seems like an arrogant rock star tactic, but there was something significant in the request.David Lee Roth knew that if the M&M request wasn\u2019t handled correctly that there were likely other problems in the venue adhering to the contract. Brown M&Ms in the bowl indicated that a deeper look at the logistics of the event were in order.<\/p>\n

\n

In other words, Roth was no diva. He was an operations expert. He couldn’t spend hours every night checking the amperage of each socket. He needed a way to assess quickly whether the stagehands at each venue were paying attention — whether they had read every word of the contract and taken it seriously. In Roth’s world, a brown M&M was the canary in the coal mine.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

I\u2019m sure there are hundreds of examples of the \u201cbrown M&M heuristic\u201d \u2013 now I just have to see if I can remember to call it that.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

*I have no idea why I decided to use the word \u201cslop\u201d today to describe annoying behavior, so don\u2019t ask.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

One thing I\u2019ve learned in my testing career is that where there are bugs, there are more bugs. Some of my colleague Nachi\u2019s research shows that components with a high number of pre-release bugs has a corresponding share of the post-release bugs. The heuristic works well on a smaller scale too \u2013 if I find…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_kad_post_transparent":"","_kad_post_title":"","_kad_post_layout":"","_kad_post_sidebar_id":"","_kad_post_content_style":"","_kad_post_vertical_padding":"","_kad_post_feature":"","_kad_post_feature_position":"","_kad_post_header":false,"_kad_post_footer":false,"_kad_post_classname":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-107","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-allposts"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/angryweasel.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/107","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/angryweasel.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/angryweasel.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/angryweasel.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/angryweasel.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=107"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/angryweasel.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/107\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/angryweasel.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=107"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/angryweasel.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=107"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/angryweasel.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=107"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}