Observations from EuroSTAR 2013

Only just returned and with the first cup of coffee - mostly still in the cup - my head is buzzing with impressions, images of people I met, presentations, quotes and all. This post will try to capture as much of this as possible.

Friday morning I happened to eat breakfast with Dot Graham and John Stevenson and of course we reflected upon the conference. I put forward a notion of feeling that "testing is slowly coming out of the years of adolescence". With that I mean, we're getting more critical to what is being said, what is being thrown our way and better at taking a stance for our profession.
I think several keynotes represented this view. Laurent Bossavit's opening keynote, which essentially dissected myths about for instance the higher cost of fixing a defect if found late. Pretty much all testers I know can recite actually found real-life counter-examples of this myth, so I was not surprised to learn that there's practically no evidence behind it. Ironically the only data that could be found did not support the theory. The urge to delve into the matter, which I got from that great keynote, and which I hope others got as well, resonates fairly strong with me.

And it was backed quite a bit also with keynotes from Keith Klain and Martin Pol, with messages of being persistent, professional and keeping on calling 'bullshit' whenever appropriate.

One prominent example was reading aloud some of the promotion statements collected at the EuroSTAR EXPO, promising that the tools would do everything for us, and guarantee fantastic results - claims the tools cannot ever fulfill.
And this in contrast to the Tuesday afternoon keynote (by Harry Collin's last-minute replacement), stating that when computers started doing less and leave more options and decisions to humans, they often helped the most - oh the irony.

The final taking stance urge came from Fiona Charles' keynote: get in there and argue! It's our job, it's our responsibility as professional testers to ask questions and probe deep into whatever knowledge is presented. One very good question was asked during the open season of that keynote: doesn't that require quite a lot of bravery from a tester ? And the answer was shockingly clear: yes! But it's our job to be brave in these matters.

What else did I take away from the conference? As a facilitator I of course was very much aware of how the facilitated open seasons (15-20 minutes after each presentation) with K-cards worked. Overall, it worked well, I think. Anyway it felt way more fair and inviting to ask questions than at previous EuroSTAR's I attended where there was only a few minutes after each presentation to ask questions, and it always seemed to be someone loudmouthed who got to ask the one question that there was time for. Now, if only the sessions could get a little longer than 45 minutes, we could get deeper into each subject.

The EXPO seemed different this time. I don't know what it was, but my take on it was that the sales guys were getting a bit tired of their own messages. Anybody else got that impression too ? It may be overly interpreting - but it was like they had taken so much criticism and hardly now could straighten up and give the normal pitch again. Maybe they heard the keynotes as well.

Summing up for me - this was one of the better EuroSTAR's I've attended. The presentations I saw were diverse and interesting. Good subjects. Thank you EuroSTAR.

PS: putting a half-hour feedback session in the middle of the workshops is.not.a.good.idea!

Problems computers (still) don't solve for us

This is a rant. Be warned.

I'm constantly using computers for professional and leisure purposes, and spread over several technologies. And it strikes me so often nowadays, that they have all come to suffer from the same troubles.

In more cases than not, computers are taking up our time by requiring us, their lords and masters (aka human beings), to do a lot of different things, that we really shouldn't be bothered with. We have enslaved ourselves so deeply in the need for computing services that we accept doing this!

One thing that bothers me mostly these days is the insatiable need to organise files and folders. I am old enough to remember a time without folders. No need since the storage was limited to a 5,25 inch floppy. The floppy itself was a folder. With added storage room came the "folder". 

Of course, some people older than me, or more pedantic, may now turn their attention to telling me off, since there was in fact folders before then. Sure, this is just how I remember it on early, sort-of-publicly-accessible computers in the beginning of the 1980'ies. The question to ponder though, is - why do we still have folders ?

Let me ask you: aren't computers getting better at searching ? (yes, google and bing are very good examples). Aren't computers having enough cpu cycles per second to be able to organise our relatively few files (I'm talking about the files we humans produce, not the files f.ex. a compiler produces) ? (yes, they ought to). So - why should a human being even bother to name files and place them in a folder structure ? Why can't the computer take care of that ? 

(But - how could we fnd the files again?) - well, from content, circumstances, date and time, ownership, lists or tree structures produced, presented and maintained by the computer in it's plentiful spare, idle cpu cycles..  We're so hung up on the ANCIENT concpet that a file can have for instance only one name - often with a postfix "surname", denoting it's "type". Why can't a file have more names ? Tags ? Even my ("#€)(€ - sorry) samsung blueray cannot cope with recordings of tv programs, if they span more than 1 tv program. It only has a huge 1 TB hd space.. should be possible to store more than 40 chars per recording, right ? It's a terrible piece of machinery... but I digress.

The entire concept of a file system lacks updating to the 21st century. We are sort of stuck in the way we had to do things 30-40 years ago. 

Why does this bother me ? Well, I had my eyes opened a couple of years back, when I decided I wanted to invest a few bucks in my writing. I like writing, but I needed a good tool to help me. I found a gem called PageFour. It's cheap enough for anyone serious about writing to invest in, and IT HAS A MAGNIFICENT TAKE ON DOCUMENTS! First, they made the program in a way that you will never loose what you type in. You could just type and close down the program. It would have saved your text (actually they added a save button because human beings, their users, mistrusted computers so much, they felt better having a save button... that's so sad ...)

Secondly they decided to put the folder and file problem out of the world. Instead the user can organise their writing in "notebooks" and "pages". Not too different you think ? Well, the words are different and much more human understandable. Their users are writers, not techies. 

But the beautiful thing is, to write something you pick a notebook - maybe the nearest one - fling open a new page and start writing. Yes - that sounds like something you do without a computer, but in PageFour, this is what you do - click on a notebook, click on the +page button, start writing. No hassle of navigating through a file structure, and then ponder what the filename should be. 

(Yes! that actually takes up a lot of my brain cycles and they should be busy doing the writing...)

PageFour is a bless to use. It's low in features, yes, by frigging design! It's about writing, not styling. 

Another big thing (with me at least) is that computers still take up like 1-2 minutes to start up. My pc's have grown in capacity, cpu cycles, memory, hd size and all over the years, but since the 1990'ies, they have consistently taken minutes out of my life for starting up. Why ? 

Well, luckily, I got pushed into buying a Mac. Wow. Problem solved. 

Only, now I can't use PageFour anymore. 

Yes, I know this is more ranting than any other thing, but what I really want YOU to think of, is - why do we put up with all this crap that computers (and the humans behind the OS's and user interfaces) still don't solve for us ? They are still supposed to be our tools, right ? We shouldn't let them demand things from us that they are perfectly capable of solving themselves!