Posted on June 1, 2021
Difference between Machine Learning and AI
The omniscient corny horn pours out the following words of wisdom:
If it’s written in Python, then it’s probably machine learning.
If it’s written in PowerPoint, then it’s probably AI.
Posted on May 31, 2021
The Little Tester #150
These are the made up stories of a team working in an Agile environment. Their daily struggles and successes are presented in a comic/parody/satirical way. Click on the image to see it in full size.
The team members are:
- Little, the main character. The team’s tester.
- Coffee, the team’s Java developer.
- Mr. Fancy, the team’s UI developer.
- Senor, the Senior Developer of the team.
- Kitty, the Scrum Master.
- Glasses, the Business Analyst.
- And the manager.
Disclaimer
- This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, situations presented are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons or events is purely coincidental.
- The sole purpose of this comic strip is to be humorous.
- The drawings are made by hand on paper, by means of pencils and fine liners, except for the outline, by the author. Hence their imperfection.
Cyndi wants you to know: "The formatting of this article went shite due to causeless use of HTML <blockquote> tags in the original post." 🤷♀️
Posted on May 26, 2021
ISTQB® releases Certified Tester Advanced Level Agile Test Leadership at Scale -1st Increment – v0.3 (CTAL-ATLaS)
ISTQB® has released the 1st increment of the Advanced Level (CTAL) Agile Test Leadership at Scale (ATLaS) version 0.3. This is the first of the six increments planned in the CTAL-ATLaS certification. CTAL-ATLaS is a “Agile” module within the ISTQB® Certified Tester Scheme and an in-demand next step after the ISTQB® Certified Tester Foundation Level (CTFL) and ISTQB® Certified Tester Foundation Level Agile Tester (CTFL-AT).
The release consists of the first chapter (Quality Assistance) of the ISTQB® Advanced Level Agile Test Leadership at Scale syllabus (v0.3), body of knowledge (v0.3) and sample exam questions and answers (v0.3).
Because of the incremental model the Release Notes will not be available until the very end of development of the complete ATLaS product.
This is the first time that ISTQB® has developed and released a certification incrementally. According to Agile principles, iterations ensure better quality through early feedback and continuous improvement.
When will the complete CTAL-ATLaS certification be ready?
We are planning to have it available by Q4 2022 (current estimation).
More information can be found in the CTAL-ATLaS FAQ section.
Product Owner of the CTAL-ATLaS v0.3 Mette Bruhn-Pedersen, said:
“With the increasing demand for business agility there is an even greater need for accelerated quality. This is not achievable if all responsibility for quality remains in the individual teams or specific roles, such as testers. Therefore, test management becomes quality management and organizations need to adopt quality assistance across the organization as well as within delivery teams. This changes the role of quality assurance and test professionals to be closer to agile test leadership and to fostering a quality culture and mindset.
ISTQB® will offer a new certification at Advanced Level to help people build the competencies needed to effectively contribute to such demanding business environments. The certification is called Agile Test Leadership at Scale (ATLaS) and the first increment is now available for download on ISTQB®’s website.
In the first chapter you will learn the need to foster a value-driven quality mindset and culture. The certification looks at what Quality Assistance is and the skills that you need. It supports understanding quality assistance as an approach to quality management. It provides examples for the coaching, facilitation, training and change management skills required for quality assistance. Plus uses given quality related problems to illustrate how quality assistance uses a combination of the four important skills.
Using Quality Assistance with your organization brings value by:
- Providing support in changing the mindset and culture to one that scales business agility
- Enhancing everyone’s responsibility for quality
- Giving test leaders and people in other leadership roles new skills to accelerate quality
ISTQB® will be releasing each increment as it is developed to engage the community; so training providers can start to build courseware and exam providers can build exams. We also wanted to gain early feedback directly from our customers to help us tailor this certification to market demands. This is a new way of releasing for ISTQB®, using an iterative method building assets up until the final full launch when all materials, including exams will be ready. You will also see a new look syllabus format which focuses on the learning you will gain, supported by a Body of Knowledge giving you rich examples and walking you through each learning objective in detail.
The Agile Test Leadership at Scale qualification is aimed at people who work in an organization that is pursuing agility at scale, or business agility, and who already have a basic understanding of agile and agile testing. The ISTQB® Foundation Level certificate and Foundation Level Agile Tester certificate are prerequisites for taking the Advanced level Agile Test Leadership at Scale certification exam.”
ISTQB® President Olivier Denoo added:
“The ISTQB® is proud to release the first chapter of our new Advanced Level certification, Agile Test Leadership at Scale.
While Agile methods are spreading fast and becoming the new norm in software development and testing, the time has come to scale up and focus on a new dimension: Agility at Scale.
More than just isolated projects, organizations are facing challenges to align Agility across their whole business. Many different approaches have already been adopted by industry such as SAFe® and Spotify.
Complementing our core Foundation and Agile Tester certifications, the Advanced Level Agile Test Leadership at Scale qualification is approach-and-methods-agnostic. It is aimed at people who work in an organization which is pursuing agility at scale or business agility. In this first chapter you will learn the need to foster a value-driven quality mindset and culture.
It is also important to notice that for the first time, an ISTQB® certification is being released in several parts. Not only is this a great opportunity for our dedicated team to "walk the talk", but also a new approach to better streamline the efforts within our ecosystem. By publishing the certification in increments member boards, training providers and exam providers have the opportunity to iteratively localize materials, design courseware, and create exam questions so everyone is ready when the full certification is launched.
I hope that you will immediately start using these materials as part of the career development programs in your organizations to accelerate your business agility transformations.
I wish you all a happy reading. Stay tuned and take care...”
Chair of ISTQB® Marketing Working Group Sebastian Małyska, noted:
“It’s just a first step towards an awesome journey. Very few organizations, in fact only those that are brave ones, are designing a new product or value driven by the experimental process. This is one of the basic concepts of Agile that is commonly forgotten. Thus, ISTQB® would like to remind the community that combining two things like innovation not only at product but on the process level and strong knowledgeable and supporting team are the critical ingredients of business success.”
Thank you to all who have supported the update including Michael Pilaeten (Working Group Chair); Mette Bruhn-Pedersen (Product Owner); Jean-Luc Cossi, Richard Green, Michael Heller, Leanne Howard, Ebbe Munk, Francisca Cano Ortiz, Samuel Ouko, Tal Pe’er, Murian Song, Marcelo Chanez, and Loyde Mitchell (Authors) and many other from Exam & Marketing Work Groups.
(Source: ISTQB)
Posted on May 26, 2021
ISTQB® releases Certified Tester Advanced Level Agile Test Leadership at Scale -1st Increment – v0.3 (CTAL-ATLaS)
ISTQB® has released the 1st increment of the Advanced Level (CTAL) Agile Test Leadership at Scale (ATLaS) version 0.3. This is the first of the six increments planned in the CTAL-ATLaS certification. CTAL-ATLaS is a “Agile” module within the ISTQB® Certified Tester Scheme and an in-demand next step after the ISTQB® Certified Tester Foundation Level (CTFL) and ISTQB® Certified Tester Foundation Level Agile Tester (CTFL-AT).
The release consists of the first chapter (Quality Assistance) of the ISTQB® Advanced Level Agile Test Leadership at Scale syllabus (v0.3), body of knowledge (v0.3) and sample exam questions and answers (v0.3).
Because of the incremental model the Release Notes will not be available until the very end of development of the complete ATLaS product.
This is the first time that ISTQB® has developed and released a certification incrementally. According to Agile principles, iterations ensure better quality through early feedback and continuous improvement.
When will the complete CTAL-ATLaS certification be ready?
We are planning to have it available by Q4 2022 (current estimation).
More information can be found in the CTAL-ATLaS FAQ section.
Product Owner of the CTAL-ATLaS v0.3 Mette Bruhn-Pedersen, said:
“With the increasing demand for business agility there is an even greater need for accelerated quality. This is not achievable if all responsibility for quality remains in the individual teams or specific roles, such as testers. Therefore, test management becomes quality management and organizations need to adopt quality assistance across the organization as well as within delivery teams. This changes the role of quality assurance and test professionals to be closer to agile test leadership and to fostering a quality culture and mindset.
ISTQB® will offer a new certification at Advanced Level to help people build the competencies needed to effectively contribute to such demanding business environments. The certification is called Agile Test Leadership at Scale (ATLaS) and the first increment is now available for download on ISTQB®’s website.
In the first chapter you will learn the need to foster a value-driven quality mindset and culture. The certification looks at what Quality Assistance is and the skills that you need. It supports understanding quality assistance as an approach to quality management. It provides examples for the coaching, facilitation, training and change management skills required for quality assistance. Plus uses given quality related problems to illustrate how quality assistance uses a combination of the four important skills.
Using Quality Assistance with your organization brings value by:
- Providing support in changing the mindset and culture to one that scales business agility
- Enhancing everyone’s responsibility for quality
- Giving test leaders and people in other leadership roles new skills to accelerate quality
ISTQB® will be releasing each increment as it is developed to engage the community; so training providers can start to build courseware and exam providers can build exams. We also wanted to gain early feedback directly from our customers to help us tailor this certification to market demands. This is a new way of releasing for ISTQB®, using an iterative method building assets up until the final full launch when all materials, including exams will be ready. You will also see a new look syllabus format which focuses on the learning you will gain, supported by a Body of Knowledge giving you rich examples and walking you through each learning objective in detail.
The Agile Test Leadership at Scale qualification is aimed at people who work in an organization that is pursuing agility at scale, or business agility, and who already have a basic understanding of agile and agile testing. The ISTQB® Foundation Level certificate and Foundation Level Agile Tester certificate are prerequisites for taking the Advanced level Agile Test Leadership at Scale certification exam.”
ISTQB® President Olivier Denoo added:
“The ISTQB® is proud to release the first chapter of our new Advanced Level certification, Agile Test Leadership at Scale.
While Agile methods are spreading fast and becoming the new norm in software development and testing, the time has come to scale up and focus on a new dimension: Agility at Scale.
More than just isolated projects, organizations are facing challenges to align Agility across their whole business. Many different approaches have already been adopted by industry such as SAFe® and Spotify.
Complementing our core Foundation and Agile Tester certifications, the Advanced Level Agile Test Leadership at Scale qualification is approach-and-methods-agnostic. It is aimed at people who work in an organization which is pursuing agility at scale or business agility. In this first chapter you will learn the need to foster a value-driven quality mindset and culture.
It is also important to notice that for the first time, an ISTQB® certification is being released in several parts. Not only is this a great opportunity for our dedicated team to "walk the talk", but also a new approach to better streamline the efforts within our ecosystem. By publishing the certification in increments member boards, training providers and exam providers have the opportunity to iteratively localize materials, design courseware, and create exam questions so everyone is ready when the full certification is launched.
I hope that you will immediately start using these materials as part of the career development programs in your organizations to accelerate your business agility transformations.
I wish you all a happy reading. Stay tuned and take care...”
Chair of ISTQB® Marketing Working Group Sebastian Małyska, noted:
“It’s just a first step towards an awesome journey. Very few organizations, in fact only those that are brave ones, are designing a new product or value driven by the experimental process. This is one of the basic concepts of Agile that is commonly forgotten. Thus, ISTQB® would like to remind the community that combining two things like innovation not only at product but on the process level and strong knowledgeable and supporting team are the critical ingredients of business success.”
Thank you to all who have supported the update including Michael Pilaeten (Working Group Chair); Mette Bruhn-Pedersen (Product Owner); Jean-Luc Cossi, Richard Green, Michael Heller, Leanne Howard, Ebbe Munk, Francisca Cano Ortiz, Samuel Ouko, Tal Pe’er, Murian Song, Marcelo Chanez, and Loyde Mitchell (Authors) and many other from Exam & Marketing Work Groups.
(Source: ISTQB)
Posted on May 24, 2021
The Little Tester #149
These are the made up stories of a team working in an Agile environment. Their daily struggles and successes are presented in a comic/parody/satirical way. Click on the image to see it in full size.
The team members are:
- Little, the main character. The team’s tester.
- Coffee, the team’s Java developer.
- Mr. Fancy, the team’s UI developer.
- Senor, the Senior Developer of the team.
- Kitty, the Scrum Master.
- Glasses, the Business Analyst.
- And the manager.
Disclaimer
- This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, situations presented are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons or events is purely coincidental.
- The sole purpose of this comic strip is to be humorous.
- The drawings are made by hand on paper, by means of pencils and fine liners, except for the outline, by the author. Hence their imperfection.
Cyndi wants you to know: "The formatting of this article went shite due to causeless use of HTML <blockquote> tags in the original post." 🤷♀️
Posted on May 17, 2021
The Little Tester #148
These are the made up stories of a team working in an Agile environment. Their daily struggles and successes are presented in a comic/parody/satirical way. Click on the image to see it in full size.
The team members are:
- Little, the main character. The team’s tester.
- Coffee, the team’s Java developer.
- Mr. Fancy, the team’s UI developer.
- Senor, the Senior Developer of the team.
- Kitty, the Scrum Master.
- Glasses, the Business Analyst.
- And the manager.
Disclaimer
- This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, situations presented are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons or events is purely coincidental.
- The sole purpose of this comic strip is to be humorous.
- The drawings are made by hand on paper, by means of pencils and fine liners, except for the outline, by the author. Hence their imperfection.
Cyndi wants you to know: "The formatting of this article went shite due to causeless use of HTML <blockquote> tags in the original post." 🤷♀️
Posted on May 10, 2021
The Little Tester #147
These are the made up stories of a team working in an Agile environment. Their daily struggles and successes are presented in a comic/parody/satirical way. Click on the image to see it in full size.
The team members are:
- Little, the main character. The team’s tester.
- Coffee, the team’s Java developer.
- Mr. Fancy, the team’s UI developer.
- Senor, the Senior Developer of the team.
- Kitty, the Scrum Master.
- Glasses, the Business Analyst.
- And the manager.
Disclaimer
- This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, situations presented are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons or events is purely coincidental.
- The sole purpose of this comic strip is to be humorous.
- The drawings are made by hand on paper, by means of pencils and fine liners, except for the outline, by the author. Hence their imperfection.
Cyndi wants you to know: "The formatting of this article went shite due to causeless use of HTML <blockquote> tags in the original post." 🤷♀️
Posted on May 3, 2021
The Little Tester #146
These are the made up stories of a team working in an Agile environment. Their daily struggles and successes are presented in a comic/parody/satirical way. Click on the image to see it in full size.
The team members are:
- Little, the main character. The team’s tester.
- Coffee, the team’s Java developer.
- Mr. Fancy, the team’s UI developer.
- Senor, the Senior Developer of the team.
- Kitty, the Scrum Master.
- Glasses, the Business Analyst.
- And the manager.
Disclaimer
- This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, situations presented are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons or events is purely coincidental.
- The sole purpose of this comic strip is to be humorous.
- The drawings are made by hand on paper, by means of pencils and fine liners, except for the outline, by the author. Hence their imperfection.
Cyndi wants you to know: "The formatting of this article went shite due to causeless use of HTML <blockquote> tags in the original post." 🤷♀️
Posted on May 1, 2021
Apostrophe, Ampersand, Exclamation mark & Co.
by T. J. ZelgerSince I am in the testing business, I am preaching the use of special characters and umlauts whereever and whatever we test. Umlauts (ä,ö,ü) and special chars such as é,â, etc. are very common in Europe. In the US and elsewhere, you often see lastnames with a single quote such as O'Neill, O'Connor or think about company names like Macy's and McDonald's.
Sometimes, we forget to include these characters in our tests and then we promptly pay the price in the form of bugs reported in the field.
But, awareness is increasing in our team and I am really delighted when I see a colleage posting a note into the group chat yelling:
"Hey Buddy, there were no special chars in your demo.Will it work with an exclamation mark, too?"
I love that, but I also recommend to first test a new user-story using simple inputs. There is no means to attack an application with special chars if it can't even deal with simple ones. Once I've convinced myself that the happy case works, I go over to feeding the program with more difficult input.
It's always exciting to watch how a system deals with a combination of chars like"{äöü},[áàâ]/|éèê|\ë!:;+(&)'%@" but if it fails, and if this is the exact string you include in a defect report, developers and/or business analysts will likely give you the hairy eyeball and close the issue unfixed, hereby suffering from the delusion that these inputs won't be entered in production.
What has worked better for me, is to analyze which character causes a problem and then use it in a meaningful context so it becomes obvious to the stakeholders that the problem you spotted is worth getting fixed.
For example, I've made it a habit to use M&M's Worldstore Inc. whenever I use or create a company address. That's not because I love chocoloate so much but rather because it has a mix of special characters that all caused headaches in my past and current career as a software tester: the ampersand, the apostrophe and the dot.
Same approach is applied for street-names and ZIP codes. It is a common misbelieve that ZIP codes need to be numeric. Go visit the UK and check how their ZIP codes look alike. Street names can contain slashes, dashes, single quotes. Street numbers can be alphanumeric separated by a slash.
A blank in a name isn't excotic at all. Look at Leonardo Di Caprio. I've seen programs that cut away the second part, leaving the famous actor with the short name "Di".
Below find a few examples of names I use regularly in testing:
- M&M's Worldstore
- Mr. & Mrs. O'Leary
- Léonardo Di Caprio
- Renée-Louise Silberschneider-Kärcher
- Praxisgemeinschaft D'Amico & Ägerter GmbH
Example street names:
- 29, Queen's Gardens
- 4711 Crandon Blvd., Appartment F#1000
- Rue du Général-Dufour 100-102
- 55b, Rue de l'Université
- Elftausendjungferngässlein 12b
and ZIP-Codes:
- 4142 Münchenstein 1 (Switzerland)
- 33149 Key Biscayne, FL (USA)
- EH4 2DA Edinburgh (Scotland)
Special characters are interesting also at places where you can submit different kind of texts.
If you submit a message like "meet you at Lexington Av/59 St" to a program that stores information in an XML file without escaping the slash or embedding the input in a CDATA tag, you've found an interesting bug.
Backslashes are used in many programs to escape characters, quotes and single quotes are used to terminate text elements. The latter is a common tool for hackers trying to manipulate the executed SQL statement in that they can attach an additional OR statement. The goal is to make the program return information for which one is not authorized or for which the query wasn't prepared.
Semicolons can confuse web client logic or cause problems when information is stored in CSV files.
Question marks and ampersands are both used in URL links, curly braces are common markers in REST payloads, etc.
Most often, I use my own extended version of the brown fox pangram that I have adapted to my personal needs:
René Di Agostino and Katie Holmes-Cruise a have a fox living in a box right opposite "Ottawa's Deacon Brodie" (Scottish Pub & Largest Whisky Collection in Ottawa). Each day the fox visits his friends and once he was seen jumping quickly over the neighbours' cat with a measured speed of > 50 km/h! How amazing is that?
Agree, there is room for improvement, but it's a text I can remember and it contains a whole set of interesting characters to challenge text processors.
One of my most funny treasures is the Canadian town St. Louis du Ha! Ha! This is the weirdest town-name I've ever heard of, because it has two exclamation marks. I have to admit that I did not report a defect if I couldn't save the town into the system because the likelyhood of such a city ever being entered by our customers is close to zero. Of course, Canadian citizens living in the area of Quebec probably disagree. Testing and test input is always a question of the context.
Null, True, All, Test and other funny bugs related to people's names
Besides the recommendation of using special characters in your tests, it is also worth to sneak a peak at reported stories related to people's names like Jennifer Null and Rachel True simply because their names were processed and mis-interpreted as NULL [BBC16] or - in the case of Rachel - a boolean value [9TO5] causing a problem using her iCloud account. I've not experienced either of the two cases myself in any of my tests but we found a similar issue where submitting the search term "Alli" returned documents titled "Alligator" and "Allister". All fine, but submitting "All" ended in an exception.
Stephen O, a Korean native living in the US had been hassled by credit card companies, because his last name was too short. When he applied the workaround by adding an extra O to end up with "OO", it didn't take long until he had a meeting with the government because he provided false information [NYT91].
A similar story was mentioned in a column by Rod Ackerman in the serie "Made in USA" in the Swiss newspaper Basler Zeitung. A US agency insisted to enter two initials for his first names. Since he had only one, he asked the clerk to enter R.R. Ackerman to workaorund the problem. Rod got into legal issues because of providing misrepresentation [BAZ].
Graham-Cumming could not register his name on a web-site because the hyphen was considered an invalid character [GRA10].
There is also Natalie Weiner who could not register either because here name was considered offensive [PAN18].
Yet another example is the story of William and Katie Test who were both unable to book airplane tickets simply because the system scanned the names for the term "test". A match triggered a security procedure to disallow the program of booking anything on a productive environment [COY17].
Wooha! That's exactly what one of my clients had implemented, too! I was surprised there was never any reported issues with it. So I investigated a little. First of all, in Switzerland, only around 50-60 people carry the name "Tester". Second, I've verified the implementation and found out. They arent parsing the last name for "test" but they used a different field. Doozy!
References:
- [BBC16] These unlucky people have names that break computers, BBC, 2016
- [NYT91] Why, O Why, Doesn't that Name Compute, New York Times, 1991
- [GRA10] Your last name contains invalid characters, Blog John Graham-Cumming, 2010
- [9TO5] iCloud user locked out over coding bug related to her last name, 9TO5MAC, 2021
- [BAZ] Column "Made in USA" in Basler Zeitung by Rod Ackermann (still finding out the exact publishing date)
- [COY17] People’s Names That Break Websites, 2017, Chris Coyier
- [PAN18] People with offensive lastname, Bored Panda, 2018
Further similar reading:
- Mein Name ist Lütkehaus, 1997, Zeit Online (unfortunately need to register
- Names that make computers go grazy 2017, Gojko Adzic
(Source: Simply the Test)
Posted on May 1, 2021
No reaction
The omniscient corny horn pours out the following words of wisdom:
I told a chemist a joke. No reaction.