This week I spent an hour testing with a complete stranger. And delivered a wallop of value to something he cared a lot about.

Let me back up a bit and offer some context…. I use Gmail for a lot of things: tracking discussions, keeping threaded conversations, creating and working on to-do lists, project management. I chose Gmail over some other GTD-type solutions because a) it has email built in (duh) and b) has a handy labeling feature for placing any particular conversation or thread into many different buckets, so that I don’t have to orthogonally categorize everything.

One thing that is frustrating about using Gmail in this fashion is that there is no clean way to annotate a thread or conversation or group of conversations. My big use case: as the eVoting SIG lead for the AST, I needed a convenient way to track and comment on the various threads of conversation that the IEEE working group was doing, as well as the internal work of the SIG. Since I was using Gmail to read and respond to the various discussions, that seemed like the logical place to annotate the conversation. I could write an email and pop a label on it, but once I send it it’s not editable, and if I don’t send it it clutters up my Drafts folder. Enter Gmail Notes.

A small group of developers decided that they had the same problem, and wrote a Greasemonkey script that used the Gmail API and the Gmail Apps capabilities to offer a note-taking capability, linked to a conversation or a label. This was just super for me, since I could finally do what I’d been unable to before, write an updatable, private note linked to a Gmail thread that would never get lost in the shuffle of a huge conversation. I installed the script, began working on it, and found a few bugs. I reported them back to the lead developer, John, and offered my testing services as part of his team.

Then in December, Gmail pulled support for the part of the API that supported Gmail Notes. So John had to punt. He switched over to using Jetpack instead of Greasemonkey, and came up with another method of identifying the conversation or label. I was called in to give it a spin, and had a hard time configuring it on my system. That’s when I set up an evening Skype session with John.

We used the screen sharing utility on Skype so that John could see my desktop (though not my cursor! Hey Skype, we testers need to see each other’s cursors!), and worked on setting up the Jetpack script correctly on my system. Then I led him through an exploratory test session, working all the functionality through a wide variety of states, and adjusting on the fly to the risks and issues that came up. We noted six separate issues, one of which appeared to happen only on the Mac I was using.

When we were done, I asked him how he liked pair testing like this. He was very pleased with the thoroughness of the testing and the flexibility of the format. He also said he’d be open to testing with a meetup group.

I love analogies – as comedy.

Eddie Izzard (a brilliant British standup comic) does a bit about Anglican ministers who try so hard to be hip and edgy and bring real life into the church. A close paraphrase: “Today’s reading comes from this magazine I found in a hedge. Cosmopolitan, Volume 224, page 58: ‘Lipstick colors this spring will be in the dusky pink area, with eye shadow to match.’ And this rather reminds me … of our Lord Jesus. Because you know, before he rode into Jerusalem on the donkey, he must have got tarted up a bit. Now let us sing hymn 399, ‘O Lord, What is My Hairdo All About?’”

So I have in mind a series called “And this rather reminds me … of Testing.” It might really work as improv – have people toss out ideas and have a panel riff on how it reminds us of testing.

Moderator: “I need an idea for a food item. You sir.”
Audience member: “Mayonnaise!”
Panelist A: “Ah, yes, mayonnaise. One places eggs in a bowl with a little lemon juice, then whisks as one slowly drizzles oil into it. The result is creamy, delicious, and shockingly unhealthful. And this rather reminds me … of Testing. I mean, who besides another mayonnaise maker even knows what a mayonnaise maker does? As far as most consumers of mayonnaise are concerned, it just comes in a jar.”
Panelist B: “Yes – just like testing! And, there are many flavors of mayonnaise.”
Panelist A: “Just like testing! In fact, I would go so far as to say we have transcended analogy and arrived in the realm of metaphor. Testing Is Mayonnaise. Can I get a hell yeah?”

I would find that funny.

At CAST2009, I took James Bach’s “Teach Yourself Testing” course. Part of his course was to have the testers play a deduction game with a variety of dice. The testers present a set of dice to the instructor, who responds verbally. The object is to figure out what the instructor’s response is going to be, and write down the algorithm that you deduce is being used to generate the response. The rules are you have to present a set of 5 dice, which you have rolled so their values are random.

I was paired up with another tester. Paul Holland, acting as Jim’s assistant, gave us our pack of dice. There were regular old 6-sided dice with dots, and also 4-, 6-, 12-, and 20-sided dice with Arabic numerals, and 6-sided dice with symbols such as exclamation point, spiral, explosion, skull, flower. One likely glowed in the dark.

My partner and I grabbed a random handful of dice, and rolled them, and asked Paul for his response. “Red blinking zero,” he said. We rolled again. “Red blinking zero,” he said. We rolled another set of dice. “Red blinking zero,” he said. Slowly, I began to detect a pattern…

Another of Becky Fiedler’s videos from CAST 2009 in CO Springs. When “Feature Creep” was over, I had enough time in my Lightning Talk slot for an encore. Jim Bach wanted to hear “Rapid Tester”, so I played it.

Becky Fiedler shot this performance of “Black Box” after dinner was all over and we were just hanging out in the hallway. It pretty quickly turned into a Jonathan Coulton love-fest after the testing songs were played…