I recently made a code change, and also made the corresponding changes to the unit tests. Once that was sorted and tided away in a commit, I spent another commit refactoring the unit tests. As I was refactoring, I realised that the motivation behind the refactoring, i.e. what was influencing its direction, was a desire … Continue reading Panning for meaning in unit tests
Analysing flooding rivers
I live in a place that has a river flowing through it. Like in many places in the UK, we have had floods this week, which has been stressful for people whose homes and businesses have been affected. Fortunately, we were OK and no-one here was affected too badly. As a complement to the stress … Continue reading Analysing flooding rivers
What motivates your technical writing?
I recently received a letter from my bank that was meant to explain something, but it didn’t. This reminded me of a fruitful conversation I had with someone on the Ministry of Testing slack community, about what motivations people might have for writing. In this post I’ll try to dig into that a bit, in … Continue reading What motivates your technical writing?
Customers, suppliers and fences
In my previous post, I contrasted two different terms for thinking about how people interact with your organisation – Customer Experience (CX) and User Experience (UX). Rebecca Brown (a CX expert I mentioned in the post) kindly explained her view of CX to me, which got me thinking of some quality and process things that … Continue reading Customers, suppliers and fences
Customer Experience or User Experience?
I’ve heard both Customer Experience (CX) and User Experience (UX) used to describe how someone’s life is changed, for the better or for the worse, because of the goods or services that an organisation provides. This article goes into my understanding of those terms – how they’re similar and different. I don’t think that either … Continue reading Customer Experience or User Experience?
Does your website reassure and welcome?
If you have a website, it's probably to fulfil some purpose - to let people buy something, or look something up etc. This purpose can be articulated as a series of requirements (functional or cross-functional), which can be ticked off during testing. In this article I will use some buildings to illustrate a point about … Continue reading Does your website reassure and welcome?
GB roads with gaps
I was driving recently, and realised that I was near a road that appeared to have a large gap. By that I mean: road A joins road B and stops, but some distance further along B there’s a bit more road A. It’s as if A has been chopped into two by B, and the … Continue reading GB roads with gaps
Just detail can lead to poor documentation
I've been around computers long enough to have encountered one problem many times. It's a problem that seems to be almost built-in to computers: poor documentation. In this article I'll focus on documentation of code that you use via its source code, e.g. an API, toolkit etc. There are mental tools you possibly already use … Continue reading Just detail can lead to poor documentation
Squaring complex numbers
As I mentioned in my post about quantum computing, complex numbers are a crucial part of quantum computing programs. I rushed over their details (and lots of other things) in that post, because I was trying to lay out the headlines of everything that you (and I) would need to know in order to understand … Continue reading Squaring complex numbers
Mental models for data processing
I was having a conversation today with someone about ETL pipelines, and I realised that the word pipeline brought along only some of the associations that would be helpful in data processing. In this article I will go through three different terms, and the associations they each bring. I think that they’re all useful in … Continue reading Mental models for data processing
