One of the Wolves

Okay, I’ll admit it: Wordpress has had widgets for a while. I didn’t care much at first, but ever since I upgraded to version 2.7, I’ve been salivating for an excuse to use the new admin interface.

Now I’ve found one: A flashy new theme, with support for widgets.

I’m impressed. Hats off to the Wordpress team for the great work.

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A recently-made mockup of The Open Planning Project’s website, released only within the company, shows an about page with a sub-heading and description that says we as a company are “driving best practices.” I haven’t made my distaste for this phrase known yet — and by no means is this post an announcement, though I wouldn’t mind if they read it; but I am a bit surprised we use the term. Though some have said it better (well, one at least), here’s my impression of the phrase and how it appears to be used in our context:

1. First, I agree fully with James Bach. Bias aside, best practices are like best friends: You never know when you’ll have a falling out. That’s sad, I know, but since I was little, I never wanted to choose a “best” friend because I thought it devalued the qualities of the other friends I had. Perhaps I’ll choose one when I’m old?
2. Through conversations with coworkers, most on the programming side, there seemed to be this implicit understanding that “best practice” really meant “the best practice we know of right now.” This still doesn’t pass the context argument, but there seems to be an understanding that “best,” here, is not absolute over time… though it sometimes seems to be touted as so. There also seems to be this notion of, “Most bridges are built in way X, and therefore, way X is the best practice.” This might actually hold some weight in the development side of software engineering just as I assume the phrase holds in some contexts within structural engineering — I mean, let’s not forget Tacoma Narrows. But in testing, I’d assume stakeholders’ interests (among other variables) are too fickle and disparate to choose one “best” way of managing them. (I’d love to hear more from structural engineering folks to see how this phrase is used, if at all.)
3. In my company, “best practice” feels like a marketing term. This is one of James’ arguments. If the quality of the software produced is a measure of the practice (this isn’t always the case), I wouldn’t say our practices are “the best.” That said, if there’s truth in advertising, maybe there’s a context — perhaps a geospatial one, an area where TOPP excels — where we really are leading the practice. Does that mean we’re the “best”? I don’t know.

I talked to the CEO of an optics-based software company recently, and he described his product not as the “best” product on the market, but as the best for a certain context — in his case, the high-end precision optics market. Not the low-to-mid end, where software is of lower quality but is much cheaper. I felt his description and use of the term “best” worked because he gave a context, though he was sampling over a single variable, quality, which to each person is fairly subjective — that is, if you subscribe to Jerry’s view, described here.

As humans, though, we seem to place the label “best” by ignoring variables we think are uninteresting, all with the intent of rallying behind a common leader. At one point, the software industry was led by IBM. After that it was Microsoft. Now it’s probably Google. Which is the best, you ask? That’s like asking which is the best car company. Maybe what you’re really asking is, “Which company hasn’t turned into an 800 lb. gorilla?”

I’ve probably belabored the point already, but the word “best,” in my opinion, is simply one person’s perception of the environment in which things exist, sampled at a certain point in time. They choose variables that they’re interested in, explicitly or implicitly, then find a leader amongst those available. What they don’t take into account when assigning their label is the concept of time, or that over time perceptions change. Or maybe they take time into account, but the “best” label simply doesn’t hold as things change. And we all know how fast the software world changes…

But again: The variables they sample over may not have value to others, even if the label holds, for them, over time.

My last analogy, simply because I had to hit home while making a cheap shot at Britney Spears, is that maybe the concept of “best” in “best practice” is just as fickle as “’til death do us part” in 50% of American marriages. Perhaps we assign the term too quickly. Or, maybe, we’re just looking for social status in a world that rewards that sort of thing.

Experiences, Inferences, Questions, Testing best practices, britney spears, marriage, no best practices

I’m getting some responses (in comments, and email) that paint ofthewolves.com — or at least my description of it — as segregating the community around software testing. Although I could entertain this perspective (Why have two playgrounds?), I get the impression that the young software testing community is underrepresented, and could use a place where information is targeted specifically to — and possibly from — them. This doesn’t mean the whiz kids will go off on their own and create new testing techniques that we won’t share with the older generation; instead, it’s specifically targeted toward sharing our ideas and cultivating information that may be interesting to us — that is, cultivating it because I’m not sure it exists elsewhere. This could be: What to look for in an entry level testing job. What troubles occur transitioning into the software testing workplace. What skills are needed when beginning a career in the testing world. I’m not sure I can answer all these questions from my experience, but I think there’s value in putting them all in one place.

In some sense, this idea is an attempt on my part to find out if there actually is an “us.” My impression of most people in the software testing world is that they were thrown into it unexpectedly, yet have since chosen to make it a career. I rarely see people who have chosen it early on, or have recently graduated and have found it to be their passion. In my experience, I often get confused looks when I tell people I want to be a tester after having such a rich programming background in school. With ofthewolves.com, I not only want to share this experience with the world, but I want tell others teetering on the edge that this decision is okay, that there are others like you and that it is something you can make a career out of. To me, this is recognition, not segregation, and will eventually help the community as a whole.

Now. Behind this dramatic exterior is an implementation that still needs to be crafted. It may be that this blog presents informal case studies of the troubles new testers face. It may be this blog targets information toward nervous graduates who don’t have the testing equivalent of “Programming websites with Rails.” It may be that this blog inspires highly experienced testers to reflect back on their transition and spotlight the things they went through. I’m not sure, at this point, as the idea is still very young. Yet, I think it’s important to get others involved, to see if this idea has any value and to see if something good can come of it.

Lastly, as a more personal interest: I refuse to believe I’m one of the only up-and-coming software testers in my generation. If there are more out there, I want to give them the spotlight as these are the people I’ll be working with in the future.

Testing conspiracy, ofthewolves.com, recognition, software, Testing

I have an idea, and decided to simply “throw it out there.”

I’ve owned ofthewolves.com for a while, with the intention of making a community blog that aims content toward recent graduates interested in software testing. The idea, in general, would be to get younger rock star bloggers who are willing to write (hopefully) awesome stuff for their own crowd, and their soon-to-be crowd (recent graduates). If it has a niche, we could use it to cultivate the young testing community who likely don’t even know they exist. I know of two other community members my age. Hi Rebecca, Mel.

It would also let me create the “wolf” testing brand, a badge passed down to me when I first received the title.

Is this a good idea?

EDIT, 12/17/08: Followup here.

AST, Testing

This is my attempt at attracting the very few readers within my age group to get out to the polls.

Please vote tomorrow (or, for whenever you read this, today). Not only is it fun, but all the cool kids are doing it.

Seriously, it’s more important than you may think. Make it out to the polls tomorrow and participate in something that will be of great impact to you and your country.

Experiences

Just after the United States’ much anticipated presidential and vice-presidential debates on foreign policy, YouTube’s new audio preview feature — a take away idea from the popular web-comic XKCD — isn’t doing much to boost America’s stature on the international stage. In fact, Youtube’s new feature, which I’ll affectionately refer to as YouTube’s Sam, probably supports the policies of the last eight years — as evidenced by this text-to-speech translation.

That’s right folks, you heard it here first. YouTube’s Uncle Sam translates “All your base are belong to us” as “All your base are belong to U.S.”

I can see the campaign commercial now: WARNING: He’s pro-war, and he wants you!… to get a (moose) rifle and join the Army.

Sorry, I had to do it.

Though he can’t really be pro-anything, he does seem to only support mostly-correct English, something I’d doubt shows up a whole lot in YouTube comments. That said, it’s a cool feature, but he won’t be making stump speeches anytime soon.

Here’s a few more gaffes I found while exploring what he had to say:

• “I am an American.” translates to “I A.M. an american”
• “Barack Obama” translates to “Barrack O-BAM-a” (Like “barracks”, and “Alabama”)
• “Sarah Palin” translates to “Sarah Pal-inn”, a common mispronunciation.
• “Mmmm, I like cheese.” translates to “em em em em I like cheese.”
• “em em em em” translates to “em-em-em-em” (faster)
• “em-em-em-em” translates to “emerganim” (I have no clue)
• “jajajaja,” Spanish for haha, translates to “juhjawjuhjuh”, even on Spanish YouTube.
• “haha” translates to “heya”.
• “ha ha” translates to “ha ha.” Must we type a space?
• “lol rotflmao you are sooo 1337 haxor.” translates to “lawl wrotefulmow you are sue-oh thirteen thirty-seven hackser.” So he’s not 1773. That’s fine.
• And last but not least: “Tim Coulter” translates to “Tim Coulter.” Can’t argue with that!

Oh, Sam only supports 150 characters for translation. And he doesn’t do the roflcopter.

Bugs

Inspired by coworker Nicholas Bergson-Shilcock’s personal brand, I decided to spend some time this weekend working on a brand of my own.

The result became www.timothyjcoulter.com.

I’m pretty happy with it. At first, I was simply going to link to my blog, put up some contact information and make my resume available. Instead, I got excited about syndication, and decided to parse the RSS feed in Javascript while making the whole thing work cleanly without a page refresh.

If you turn Javascript off, you’ll see my original idea.

Now that this brand is there, timothyjcoulter.com will be where I point people to for information about me. oneofthewolves.com will stay my blog — there’s no way I’m giving it up — but timothyjcoulter.com will contain more general information that’s not available on oneofthewolves.com.

The photo is courtesy of Chris Tanner.

Update, 10/6: It’s now functional in Internet Explorer 6 & 7 (though I gotta fix that darned loading icon. )

Projects, Work

Yep, you read that right.

According to the iPhone of Nicholas Bergson-Shilcock, a fellow coworker, Google’s stock recently dropped 1,182.22 points, putting it at a relatively unhappy low of 406.41. I mean, I knew the stock market was bad… but this bad?

Check out the damage in a screenshot below.

Bugs

At least this site is. The rest are soon to follow.

If you have significant Linux experience, SliceHost is a breeze.

Note: The Wordpress migration was more of a “new install” than an actual migration. Users who have created an account and made comments may have to enter that information again.

Double Note: The site is wicked fast — at least, comparatively. I’m a happy camper.

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Hey all. This website, a few other websites, and all of my email are moving over to SliceHost. They come highly recommended by the few I’ve talked to (which, given only a few data points, is still leaps and bounds above the generic find-’em-on-Google hosting provider), and their service gives me more control over my websites and what I can do with them.

You may see intermittent outages due to this change. Arguably, you should already be seeing intermittent outages due to my current provider (hence the desire to change), but once the change is made I’ll be the likely candidate for blame if and when the sites go down. Not the host (in most cases). This, then, let’s me fix problems at my leisure.

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