Are like a half-dozen in hand. Or something like that.
We’re back in business y’all! I’m receiving email at my normal email address (tim [AT] timothyjcoulter.com) and so I should be able to read anything you send me. Google says they’re still “verifying my configuration”, so I shouldn’t count my chickens before crying wolf (or so I’m told), but my initial testing looks good. Let those emails fly!
To Google. I’m using Google Apps for various reasons, most of which surround the ability to have my email accessible from one place with exactly the same filters and organizational structures.
But this means my email might be down for 48 hours. If it’s bouncing, that’s why.
UPDATE: An alternative (but temporary) email address is tim [AT] oneofthewolves.com. Feel free to reach me there.
Google Analytics told me that someone made it to my site via the search term:
“how to tell if your a wolve” — Anonymous
Oh how I wish I could help! I had to share.
UPDATE:
Here are a few other good ones:
“throbbing inside”
“what do we use wolves for”
“disproportionableness and incomprehensibilities”
Today is June 24th, the day the iPhone 4 is set to release in stores. If you have been paying attention, these new phones sell for $199 and $299, depending on size, and people have lined up despite robbery, heat and exhaustion in order to get their hands on one. I, on the other hand, received mine yesterday in the comfort of my own home. And I still haven’t paid for it.
I ordered the 16 gigabyte black version to replace my 3G, using AT&T’s online pre-order form. The experience there wasn’t great. Due to understandable outages based on demand, I had to try many times throughout the first night of availability in order to place my order. After refreshing the page while keeping entertained with something else, I finally got through, and placed an order instead of seeing their pesky “server busy” error messages.
I thought, “Great, I have my pre-order in. Now to just sit back and wait.” This wasn’t quite so.
Upon placing the order, I noticed that AT&T requested an authorization on my debit card for the price of the phone. This was expected; I needed to pay them. What was unexpected, however, was that two days later, the authorization had been removed. I literally had 200 extra dollars in my bank account, and didn’t know why.
Fearing that, like many customers, my order had been canceled, I tried to contact AT&T to see what happened. I first went the ‘no-human’ option and tried sending them an email through their web interface. There, I ran into this. Oops.
Resolving that the human option was the only way to go, I called up AT&T, and to my surprise, was given a lovely lady in the Midwest who told me that, “AT&T has double-charged people due to errors in their system, and in fixing the double charges they had removed people’s single charge.” She said they were in the process of correcting all charges, and that she would put it on her personal calendar to follow up with me at 1 p.m. sharp on the 25th.
I was happy. She confirmed that my order was in fact being processed — it wasn’t canceled — and she took the issue personally in order to follow up with me. Of all things, I must commend AT&T for their customer service. She was a gem.
But back to the iPhone. I waited, I was excited. I watched the tracking number as it shipped via UPS from Texas to Tennessee and finally to New York. I got home after a doctor’s appointment on the 23rd to have the iPhone in my hand and ready to use. After a bit of confusion reading AT&T’s quick start guide, I had the phone restored from a backup of my previous device, and was using it as if nothing happened. Kudos to iTunes and Apple for such a clean upgrade.
Fast forward to today. Checking my debit account, I still don’t see a charge. I see the account dwindle down as I make smaller purchases, but there’s still a happy bundle of money sitting there for AT&T to grab. It’s like Geico’s Kash: It’s theirs, staring at them expectantly from outside their kitchen window. From a business perspective I’m confused on how this would happen, and the giggly kid inside me wants to scream, “software bug in conjunction with human error!” But I don’t always get what I want.
Regardless, I’m not the only one who had this experience. I made a couple posts on Twitter to find others, and at least one other person received the same reward:
From @MrJakk: @timothyjcoulter Nope. Checked my bank statements today. Says shipped, but no charge…
Are we edge cases, or a large loss for AT&T that has currently gone unnoticed?
In any case, when I receive the call from that lovely lady from the Midwest tomorrow at 1 p.m., I’ll let her know that I haven’t been charged. Though I could keep the $200 as profit with the iPhone in hand, I at least owe it to the company for following up, if not for letting me ditch the heat, the stress, and the long lines.
UPDATE, 6/25/10: I woke up this morning to find a charge on my account. It seems like they’ve finally fixed it. Good for them.
“There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” — Hamlet, Act 1, scene 5.
Oh the eternal words of Shakespeare. His works still apply today, and his words span the world over. You’ve heard him quoted before. If only he knew how I’ve quoted him today.
I’ve been doing some thinking. Not just the everyday thinking — not about what to eat tonight, or what I’m going to wear tomorrow (see, I rarely even do that). But the kind of thinking you usually do when you’re stuck fifty feet in a well, and all you can do to entertain yourself is knit. Except you don’t like knitting. So you let your imagination run wild.
My imagination lately has been running around Agile culture. The good, the bad, the not so good and the not so bad. The main takeaway, in the whirlwind of possibilities and dot-matrix printer-like results, is a question: Is Agile a culture of confirmation? And is this okay?
Micheal Bolton expresses his views on confirmation in his blog post here. In general, his view is that confirmation is the simple act of checking the correctness of known assumptions about a piece of software, while testing is the act of garnering new and useful information. I’ll admit, when I first wrote this blog post I hadn’t read Micheal’s, and I had my own ideas, but he expresses those ideas much better than I could. This post, then, is a bit of spin.
I was calling confirmation verification. I was redefining the term widely used in testing, and describing it colloquially as making sure stuff works and does what’s expected. The inverse then, and the million dollar question and what I care most about, is, what — and who — is making sure that same stuff doesn’t do what it’s not expected?
Now, this is a bit of a simple description, but let’s get specific, and bring this to Agile. Agile has standups. It has TDD, it has retrospectives. It has championed “the iteration”, continuous integration, and the utility of scripting languages. It’s also reduced the need for extensive design documentation, which is my personal favorite, and it promotes, at least in its marketing, very close interaction with the customer.
And let’s be clear: All of this is good stuff, and it’s very valuable. But there’s something missing. A hole. A way of thinking that isn’t quite included in the hype, and in the massive jigsaw puzzle of software development philosophy, there’s a piece yet to be filled.
The piece, of course, is the unknown. Continuous integration, TDD, unit tests, large suites of functional tests, etc., can only verify that the software is working. It can tell us when things stop working — which is perhaps its greatest strength — but it can’t tell us anything about the problems we don’t write tests for; the problems we aren’t aware could be problems. Sometimes these are user interface issues. Sometimes these are product oversights. Sometimes these are problems we think our automated tests cover, but don’t actually test. There could be any number of reasons. But if these problems are left unfound, they make it to the customer’s screen. And this, I think, is where much of the trouble lies.
The Agile philosophy and marketing material I’ve seen says nothing about detailed, investigative testing. Instead, it promotes what I see as rigorous confirmation using primarily automated testing practices. These practices verify the happy paths and the not-so-happy paths that we can think of at the time of writing, but they miss the things we don’t know. As well, when it’s time for the customer — the product manager or the client, not the end user — to review the software for correctness, they generally focus on their positive assumptions of functionality rather than focusing on the unknowns. And I think this is important. Because it might be my Kaner and context-driven upbringing, but the only techniques I can think of to help us discover what we don’t know revolve around exploration and manual testing. And an internal sense of curiosity. I just can’t think of any other way to learn.
In that respect — and a tip of the hat to those who gave me much appreciated feedback — I’ve learned from a previous post about dating that I need to state my conclusions more clearly. Here, I intend to be clear. Resisting another quote and some iambic pentameter, or some vague call for idealism, the moral of this story is: Agile practices are useful, have value, and I appreciate them. But in many cases, they can be made better when bolstered by a team of interested, investigative testers. It’s a matter of managing our unknowns, and I think the culture should embrace that.
Now — to end this soliloquy. Because the dot-matrix printer just died.
Fin. Exuent left.
One of my acting classmates blew me away with a piece of unsolicited feedback the other day. After viewing an impromptu acting performance where we were encouraged to say things that are not said in polite company, my classmate whispered to me,
“I think you’re dying to be more provocative.”
She had me pegged. The technique we’re learning encourages us to notice and verbalize things that we wouldn’t generally say in typical social situations. For instance, things like, “you’re legs look hot,” or “you look disheveled,” or “you have a big nose,” are all statements that are encouraged in the classroom. What we say can’t be fake — it must be truthful to ourselves, and not forced — but it’s meant to help each actor explore a full range of emotion brought on by another person.
The vibe I was sending, unconsciously, from my seat in the audience to my classmate sitting right next to me, was one of intense excitement and interest in events unfolding in front of me. There was a lot of body movement. Audible laughter. Oohs and ahhs. I was watching two people be honest with each other on stage, and I was totally into it. It was better than a movie.
But why? Being provocative is interesting, and being interesting is attractive. Maybe it’s Freudian — I’d buy that. But the next question is how. I’ve found this. It’s good. Read it. It’s about blogs. If you cut the fat off the top, it’s about life.
Which brings me to my most recent post, the topic I had originally intended to address. That’s my most provocative post to date. I’ve gotten a ton of responses, just not here, with varying degrees of emotion attached. Some were unexpected, some were heated. I appreciate them all.
Keep them coming.
The rules go like this:
It’s a system, and it’s easy, but your main hurdles are (2) and (4). Rarely do you have a problem at (5). At (8), it’s tough to be honest and impress. That’s all you, buddy. At (10) you must let her offer to pick up the check, though if you don’t pick it up, you’ll be seriously reconsidered.
It’s a formula. A ritual. A liturgy. If you believe in it you’re undoubtedly a process weeny — but if you stray from it you end up taking big risks.
This leaves some decisions in your court. First, at (6) you need to know where to go, or poll her for things she’s interested in and think on your feet. Keep your budget in mind. At (7), you probably want to end up going to two places, especially if you live in a city and each place is within walking distance. Note: You may not always want to tell her about the second place. It’ll make you feel like you’ve gone somewhere together. At (8) and (9), focus on her and ask her plenty of questions. Expect to relate to her when she asks you a question. (10), of course, has already been discussed.
Though it’s not listed, there’s a mysterious number (11): You’ll need to kiss this girl. Sometimes it’s great on the first date. Sometimes it’s not. Feel it out.
So why do I bring all this up? It’s not to get in her pants, no, though you can use your powers for good or for evil. It’s that I completely rebel against it. Maybe I don’t like routine. Maybe I just want a little variety. Really though, I think the girls I’m truly attracted to are defined by their spontaneity; how confident we are together, and how much our connection holds when we digress from the power of social ritual.
And I like to digress quickly. I’m unsure why, but formulaic meetings take all the interesting parts away. It’s tragic, because you can be judged on your adherence to social ritual. I know — “you’re a good guy, she’s a good girl.” Too bad she didn’t trip into you.
But really I think that’s it. Most will go through the motions and jump through the hoops, and in the end will be good performers. But it’s those that take you by surprise that you really choose to keep.
Which I guess means…
Hence the ritual.
And when this baby starts kicking, I cannot be responsible for your sanity!
See, some of the best writing comes from the professionals. The above quote, to which the title is included, is said by Chevy Chase’s character Pierce on NBC’s hit TV show Community. Though the show and its writing are hilarious as all get out (yes, there’s probably a better phrase), I’ve wanted to be a bit more creative with my own.
I’ve realized lately that I’ve been neglecting this blog. It hasn’t been intentional neglect — not the kind that piles up in the sink or topples off the clothes hamper, whichever your fancy. But more like the mild distaste you experience after already eaten half the pancakes. It’s like you’ve already had enough: Let’s have some steak, or at least blueberries. There’s nothing wrong with this blog — and of course, nothing wrong with pancakes (steak pancakes? Hmm, I’ll have to try that). But I felt this space was getting a little too bland.
For instance, it’s all tech. Granted, it was supposed to be tech — that was the point — but for better or for worse, I’m less interested by it. Things I want to write about now don’t seem to fit the original tech motif: Politics, relationships, life; how I’m most likely a product of my often unusual surroundings, or why exactly is it like sands through the hourglass? Now, let’s not put tech in the corner (nobody puts tech in the corner), but I shouldn’t be limited by it.
Which is why I’ve rebranded. I’ve mentioned branding before when I was marketing myself for a new job. Now I’m doing it to set expectations. As the quote goes: “This is a throbbing cosmic womb of creativity.” It may not be no Community (yes, the extra ‘no’ was in there on purpose), but I’m going to use this space to further my writing, talk about other subjects, and be a bit more creative. And not worry about putting myself out there. Because, I’ll be honest: I was sweating bullets when I wrote my first post here. My reader base likely hasn’t changed; they’ve seen me grow, and this is part of it. The only other option was to make ‘em read two blogs by the same author. And c’mon, who wants that?
So. For you RSS readers, here’s a helpful link to check out the rebranding. Note the construction signs are still up. And for you testers, there are still some style bugs though I “went live” anyway. How’s that for a business decision?
Thank you to my current reader base, and — raising my glass — cheers to more interesting content!
Hello Network. Intent Media is looking to hire great people, and we want your help. We currently have the following permanent, full-time roles based at our office in New York City.
Director of Finance & Administration (link to full job description).
Product Manager (link to full job description).
User Experience Lead (link to full job description).
About us:
Intent Media is a start-up which sits at the intersection of e-commerce and performance media. Intent Media’s founders and management team include entrepreneurs and senior executives from Google, Travelocity and Right Media (Yahoo!). We’re backed by Matrix Partners (TheLadders, Gilt Groupe, SanDisk, Veritas…) one of the top VC’s in the country.
So there are the jobs. Now the bling.
Because great people are hard to find (and recruiters are expensive!), we’ll send you a check for $1K if you are the first person to introduce us to a candidate we successfully hire.
That’s right. Refer your friend and get a kickback if we like ‘em. Simple as that.
Thank you, and enjoy!
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Note: Professional recruiters are discouraged from actively recruiting people for these positions at this time.
Kurt Schrader, otherwise known as “The Shrade”, “Shradester”, and my boss, recently wrote a post about how we roll at Intent Media. And by how we roll, I mean how we use Cucumber to power automated functional tests of a large scale ad platform. Oh ya, that.
When I first mentioned Cucumber to a close member of the context-driven testing community, the reaction was “Oh, so you’re just entering manual scripted tests into a computer.” She’s South African, so it was more like, “You’re ent-ring scripted tastes into the computah!” (Ya, she knows who she is.) Though I felt her pings of discontent quickly, the answer was — “Well ya, I guess…”
In the tools world, Cucumber is the blood relative of both your normal manually-scripted tests and, say, FIT or FitNesse, with a bent toward integration tests (if that’s what you use it for). It’s manual scripted testing because you type your manual scripts into the computer; it’s automated testing because you also define pieces of code that match up with each line of each test. All Cucumber does is find the right match — and then happily goes chug, chug, chug.
It’s been a fun ride so far, and I don’t have many complaints. There is a question about whether to write imperative or declarative steps throughout your tests, as well as where to put your implicit state (we leave it in the browser). But as Kurt mentioned, we’ve been highly successful so far. I’d be interested to see if we have the same troubles that plague manual scripted tests over the long term, or if automating them keeps them in the public eye (i.e., continuous integration = continuous test fixing). We shall see.
In any case, it should be noted that Cucumber isn’t our only line of defense, and part of the reason Cucumber works is because of everything else going on around it. We have PMs doing acceptance testing, devs doing TDD and unit testing, I’m leading exploratory testing (which arguably the PMs are doing as well), and Cucumber is backing us up with integration tests that both the devs and I write. And that’s only functional: We have performance testing, user testing, smoke testing, and the whole nine-yards going on elsewhere throughout the company.
So ya, I’m proud to say that’s how we roll. If you’re interested, I’d encourage you to follow Kurt’s blog for more updates about the technical aspects of Intent Media, and to see how we’re building “the next great online advertising startup” (TM).
