LINDA WRITES A FAIRY TALE…

For those of you that don’t know, I’ve contributed a chapter to the upcoming book “Beautiful Testing” along with a bunch of other people you all probably know pretty well. It was an interesting effort, since contributors were all over the map in terms of their perceptions of the industry, and what I liked about the effort was that all of the proceeds go to charity. So everyone put their differences aside and did Something Good to benefit someone other than themselves. I must report to you, however, that writing for a book of this kind is somewhat painful. Besides the effort to write the chapter, we all had pretty stringent deadlines, several reviews by the editors, specific formats, etc. One of the final steps has been having a handful of official reviewers of the overall book; two developers and two non-developers.

The developers had quite a bit to say about my chapter.

Ahem.

One said they really wanted to read a story about someone who didn’t have the skills of a good tester and how they acquired them (you know, something “real”), and the other was appalled by my unabashed enjoyment of working on a SWAT team with Attitude. The non-developers had only good things to say…

Well, after giving it a lot of thought, like for ten or twelve seconds, I decided that while I was not going to change my book chapter, I would write a blog entry that gave both of the development reviewers what they really wanted.

A fairy tale.

I hope you’ll all bear with me. I’m not too experienced with works of fiction.

Once upon a time, there was a programmer named Dufus. Dufus wasn’t a very good programmer. He dropped objects he didn’t understand into his code just like all of his little friends, but his code was very very sick and he wasn’t smart enough to make it well again. The testers were mean to him. His boss was mean to him. The other programmers made fun of him.

Dufus was very very sad.

One day, Dufus’s boss, Mr. Dunderhead, decided that Dufus wasn’t a very good programmer, so it was likely he would be a very good tester. After all, testers aren’t really responsible for anything, otherwise they’d be business users, project managers, or programmers.

So Dufus joined the testing team.

Now since Dufus wasn’t the brightest bulb in the pack, reading specifications, or anything else, were not some of his very Most Favorite Activities. He didn’t like to ask questions about how things should work, especially from his old buddies in development, or those scary, weird business users, for fear of looking stupid. And he didn’t like or trust his new team, since they didn’t seem to get the zeitgeist of “The Farmers and the Cowboys Should Be Friends” (yee-haw). They seemed, well, CRITICAL of the software produced by his old team.

After the code he tested and said was OK broke production 47 times, his kindly new boss, Black Bart, explained to him that he was obviously a “test tool” and set him to executing the step-by step test cases written by his colorful and irreverent crew. It took a while for Dufus to understand him, as he didn’t understand the lingo, which appeared to be interspersed with dozens of ways to say the same thing. Dufus had difficulty understanding even one way. Eventually, however, after the boss’s trained parrot repeated it enough times, and he was slapped repeatedly by his test lead’s winged monkeys, Dufus got the idea.

So Dufus officially became a Tool.

However, as Dufus wasn’t particularly observant OR much of a reader, and since he had a lot of experience with code, he might or might not run a given test, depending on whether he thought it might break something. And he really didn’t want to break anything; his old buddies didn’t like it much, and even when he did ask them about it, what he had found was never really a problem anyway. Dufus was not surprised. Everyone knows development rarely makes mistakes.

After his second try, when the code he tested and said was OK broke production 62 times, his new boss kindly drilled him a brand, spanking-new orifice, since it appeared Dufus couldn’t listen very well with his existing orifices, and his testing approach seemed somewhat constipated.

But his new orifice was kind of painful, his new teammates, although they respectfully referred to him using his new title “The Tool”, didn’t seem to like him much, and his old friends were still making fun of him, but not in the same way. The winged monkeys were giving him the finger whenever they thought he wasn’t looking. And he didn’t like the fish-eye he was getting from the parrot.

Dufus was very very sad.

One day, while sitting disconsolately in his little cube, staring without comprehension at his little PC, he heard a roaring sound outside his cube. Some tattooed, leather-clad dude on a Harley went flying by and tossed a bunch of pearls on his desk.

Dufus grunted.

What were these pearls? They looked good. They smelled good.

They must be Magic Pearls!!!!

So Dufus ate them.

Clutching his stomach in pain, Dufus made a run for the restroom. He barely made it. To his surprise, he yakked up a Giant Hairball of test ideas! And suddenly he felt, well, he felt GOOD. He tidied up the ideas and presented them to his boss, Black Bart, who thoughtfully fingered his gold earring and said “Arrh”….

The parrot hopped onto Dufus’s shoulder and affectionately bit his ear.

Dufus inexplicably found himself naming his goldfish “Aristotle” and using his here-to-fore unread specifications for more than just a paperweight. He signed up for the Oxford English Dictionary on-line. He had questions about everything. During the next testing release, he wrote 192 defect reports and made his old manager, Mr. Dunderhead, sob openly into his frayed polo shirt. Production didn’t break at all. The business users, Lola and Lily, thanked him in ways he’d only seen on the Playboy Channel. His new team took him to lunch. The winged monkeys made him coffee. He became smarter, stronger, and better-looking. Dufus was very very happy.

And They All Lived A Quality Life Happily Ever After.

The End.

The moral of my story?

Can’t you guess?

“The Only Way a Dufus Can Become a Good Tester is By Magic.”

All, I hope you enjoyed my Very First fairy tale and I hope you’ll read the book and see what made the developers feel, well, just a tad uncomfortable… If my particular perspective doesn’t do it for you, there are many talented people in the field who have contributed to “Beautiful Testing” and the proceeds go to a very good cause, which is cure/prevention of malaria. My off-shore lead had to recover from a combined bout of malaria and typhoid, so this cause is closer than one might think. I haven’t read everyone’s contribution as yet, but as a group we couldn’t be more different; I expect it to be interesting. The experience certainly was interesting – we had Politics, we had Disagreements, and we had Drama. I’m thinking that probably the only thing we could all wholeheartedly agree to is that we never want to share a hotel room.

I’m Chapter One, and it’s called “Was It Good For You?”. I hope you’ll consider buying a book; none of us are getting a dime out of it and it’s for a very good cause. You can pre-order through Amazon and the book comes out on Friday, October 30...

Enjoy.