{"id":609,"date":"2013-04-24T20:35:57","date_gmt":"2013-04-25T03:35:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/angryweasel.com\/blog\/?p=609"},"modified":"2013-04-24T20:35:57","modified_gmt":"2013-04-25T03:35:57","slug":"filling-a-hole","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/angryweasel.com\/blog\/filling-a-hole\/","title":{"rendered":"Filling A Hole"},"content":{"rendered":"

I haven\u2019t blogged much recently, and it\u2019s mainly for three reasons.<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. I\u2019m busy \u2013 probably the hardest I\u2019ve worked in all of my time in software. And although there have been a few late nights, the busy isn\u2019t coming from 80-100 hour weeks, it\u2019s coming from 50 hour weeks of working on really hard shit. As a result, I haven\u2019t felt like writing much lately.<\/li>\n
  2. I can\u2019t tell you.<\/li>\n
  3. I\u2019m not really doing much testing.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    It\u2019s the third point that I want to elaborate on, because it\u2019s sort of true, and sort of not true \u2013 but worth discussing \/ dumping.<\/p>\n

    First off, I\u2019ve been writing a ton of code recently. But not really much code to test the product directly. Instead, I\u2019ve been neck deep in writing code to help us test <\/em>the product. This includes both infrastructure (stories coming someday), and tools that help other testers find bugs. I frequently say that a good set of analysis tools to run alongside your tests is like having personal testing assistants. Except you don\u2019t have to pay them, and they don\u2019t usually interrupt you while you\u2019re thinking.<\/p>\n

    I\u2019ve also been spending a lot of time thinking about reliability, and different ways to measure and report software reliability. There\u2019s nothing really new there other than applying the context of my current project, but it\u2019s interesting work. On top of thinking about reliability and the baggage that goes along with it, I spend a lot of time making sure the right activities to improve reliability happen across the org. I know that some testers identify themselves as \u201cinformation providers\u201d, but I\u2019ve always found that too passive of a role for my context. My role (and the role of many of my peers) is to not only figure out what\u2019s going on, but to figure out what changes are needed, and then make them happen.<\/p>\n

    And this last bit is really what I\u2019ve done for years (with different flavors and variations). I find holes and I make sure they get filled. Sometimes I fill the holes. Often, I need to get others to fill the holes \u2013 and ideally, make them want<\/em> to fill them for me. I work hard at this, and while I don\u2019t always succeed, I often do, and I enjoy the work. Most often, I\u2019m driving changes in testing \u2013 improving (or changing) test design, test tools, or test strategy. Lately, there\u2019s been a mix of those along with a lot of multi-discipline work. The fuzzy blur between disciplines on our team (and on many teams at MS these days) contributes a lot to that, and just \u201cdoing what needs to be done\u201d fills in the rest.<\/p>\n

    I\u2019m still a tester, of course, and I\u2019ll probably wear that hat until I retire. What I do while wearing that hat will, of course, change often \u2013 and that\u2019s (still) ok.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    I haven\u2019t blogged much recently, and it\u2019s mainly for three reasons. I\u2019m busy \u2013 probably the hardest I\u2019ve worked in all of my time in software. And although there have been a few late nights, the busy isn\u2019t coming from 80-100 hour weeks, it\u2019s coming from 50 hour weeks of working on really hard shit….<\/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":true,"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-609","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\/609","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=609"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/angryweasel.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/609\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/angryweasel.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=609"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/angryweasel.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=609"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/angryweasel.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=609"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}