Better Software - January 2008 - (Page 15) Test Connection angry. I also notice that there’s a link at the top of the page that says “Canadian point of sale.” I’m in Toronto; couldn’t the software have sniffed my IP address and offered the Canadian site by default? I click the link, and I’m taken to the homepage for the site. Everything that I’ve done so far has been forgotten, and I have to start over from scratch. I’m furious. Why am I furious? Is there a problem here? You bet. There are a lot of problems with this site, and my emotions are the first indicators. At every turn the site is delaying, confusing, frustrating, and annoying me—and amusing me, albeit not in a good way. Had I been a developer or tester of the site, I might have felt embarrassment, too. A bug is something that bugs somebody who matters. Testers can’t be sure that something will bug someone, and so we must apply heuristics—useful but fallible ways of solving a problem or making a decision. Oracles—heuristic principles or mechanisms by which we might recognize a bug—include compa- rable programs, documents, mathematical principles, personal experience, and people—“live oracles.” Emotional reactions are associated with a psychological and physiological phenomenon called “arousal,” which is the state of becoming alert or awake. For good testers, emotional reactions are oracles—trigger heuristics that wake us up to the possibility of a problem. Although emotional reactions don’t come with a guarantee, they can often aid our decisions about the existence or the significance of a problem. We sometimes depend on logical and objective assessments of software at the expense of other ways of thinking—ways that include feeling. Most of the results that this system is returning are functionally correct, but that correctness doesn’t matter when there are problems that interfere with the customers’ goals. If we engaged emotions and empathy more often and more consciously, they would point us rapidly to things that are important to people. Try testing a program while simply pretending that we have some skin in the game. Our customers constantly find bugs in our systems without any preparation, documentation, reference programs, or live oracles. Customers test the product by using it, and they recognize bugs and assess their significance and the associated value of our products. They can do that. So can we. {end} Michael Bolton lives in Toronto and teaches heuristics and exploratory testing in Canada, the United States, and other countries. He is co-author, with James Bach, of Rapid Software Testing and a regular contributor to Better Software magazine. Contact Michael at mb@developsense.com. Have you noticed your own emotional reactions as you’re testing—or using—software or Web sites? Do you have a story about them? M Follow the link on the StickyMinds.com homepage to join the conversation. www.StickyMinds.com JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2008 BETTER SOFTWARE 15 http://StickyMinds.com http://www.rallydev.com/bsm http://www.rallydev.com/bsm http://www.StickyMinds.com
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