Certifications

I attended a course recently, took and passed an exam to qualify as an ISTQB Advanced Technical Test Analyst (ATTA) . It's probably the last certification course I'll ever do. I have ISEB's Foundation Certification, which basically confirms I'm not brain-dead, I have ISEB's Intermediate Certification, in which I learned nothing except how to pass the exam. ATTA is an improvement, but the certification demonstrates more about my understanding of the expectations of a the examination board than my testing abilities.

The reasons for doing these courses are to enhance the CV. I'm no longer convinced that they do this. Foundation is fine, but the others are pretty much worthless. In a fight between experience and certification, experience wins.

I'm just starting a new project at work. It's completely outside my comfort zone. It appears to be process intensive. There are high expectations. The lazy, comfortable part of me is dreading this. Having talked to the test manager, I suspect the pain will be worth it. It's genuinely going to be a 'valuable learning experience'. I mean that most sincerely, folks. I think I'll learn more about testing in the next few months than I have in three certifications and 4 years as a full time tester.

There may be a trip to Switzerland in it next year too, which will be nice.

Setting Up for Productive Procrastination

There's only so much time, and much of it is wasted. I'm going to try to waste less of it by means of this cunning plan:

I'm unsubscribing from some RSS feeds and subscribing to some others.

I threw out the MacDailyNews feed a while ago, and it felt quite liberating. Today I've gone further. MacWorld, MacUser, TUAW, AppleMatters etc, in fact, the whole folder called 'Apple News' has been chucked.

I'm thinking of chucking 'Tech News' too (The Register, Wired, Ars Technica), but haven't plucked up the courage yet.

The feeds I'm subscribing to are all blogs. They're blogs by professionals software testers. It's what I do, but I don't think much about it, I don't read much about it, and I'm not really getting any better at it. I want to. Pretty much all the books I've read on testing cover the same old stuff and are, frankly, uninspiring.

So I'm looking to real people for inspiration instead. Wish me luck.

I'm starting with Adam Goucher's Quality through Innovation and Eric Jacobson's Test This Blog. I'm going to use them to learn from and I'm going to use them as experienced content filters.

Cognitive dissonance holds no fears for him.

Charles Arthur calls Paul Thurrott an idiot very politely.

Blog Comments

I'm not a tech blogger. I'm a Software Tester and I occasionally post, occasionally about tech, because it's good indulgent creative fun and, as pretty much nobody reads this, it's not going to hurt anyone.

This post was going to be a comment on Ian Betteridge's blog entry on the whole should-Gruber-allow-comments-on-Daring Fireball thing.

As Ian wants to encourage everyone who really wants to comment on what I write to get their own blog fired up, and write. You never know, you might enjoy it, that's what I'm doing.

It's not, though, the first time I've written here as a response to another blog. I do use comments on sites, but not really very much these days. It seems like a waste of time and effort. There's an awful lot of stupid out there and I'm trying not to participate.

I'd tend to use Twitter to contact @ianbetteridge, who I kind of know, via Twitter, and I'd use email to contact comments@daringfireball.net. @gruber doesn't know who the fuck I am, and as emailing is more effort, I'm only likely to do so if I have something to say that I think he'd want to hear. I honestly don't want to waste his time.

I'd probably email John if I thought he'd got something factually wrong. He'd want to correct it, (which he does). I might also drop him en email if I thought he'd missed something (say he was writing about drawing graphs, but seemed not to know about omnigraphsketcher, and I thought that was a great tool he should know about).

The first post on this blog linking to an external source linked to Daring Fireball. That's no coincidence. Had there been comments, I'd have left one alongside dozens of others that would be ignored and forgotten.

So thanks, John and Ian for indirectly and directly getting me to post stuff here that at least I'll be able to read again sometime.

Ten reasons why you should still avoid Android

1. The back of the case is still plastic, so it's going to get scratched to buggery and the battery cover will keep falling off.

2. Hardware designed to meet a features checklist with no regard to usability.

3. The camera will have a tiny sensor with a huge megapixel count, which will yield awful noisy images.

4. You can't upgrade the OS to the latest version because the carrier doesn't let you. You have to buy a whole new phone and get locked in to another lengthy contract, probably getting a lower 'unlimited' data cap in the process.

5. New Android devices will be out practically every week, rendering your Android device out of date, forcing you to sell it at a loss in order to upgrade to the latest and greatest and get locked in to another lengthy contract, probably getting a lower 'unlimited' data cap in the process.

6. Locked in to Google for map data, which means directions will probably tell you to walk across a busy road and probably die. Add the cost of good health insurance to that mobile contract.

7. Voice-to-text that you'll have to correct manually, which will take more time, so you won't bother after a while. Even if it does work, which it won't, which I can say with complete certainty, even though I've never used it on a phone, you won't use it becasue it'll make you look like a dick in public*

8. Doesn't have a gyroscope, so gaming is impossible. It'll still be impossible when a gyroscope is introduced, because it didn't have one to start with, and no games will support it. Ever.

9. Due to uncontrolled multi-tasking, your battery will only last for 30 minutes, and you'll have to use a clunky task manager to take control, but the battery will be dead by the time you notice anyway.

10. See the web grind to a halt with all that Flash crap.


Yes. That was mostly bullshit. Want Android ? Get an Android device. Want an iPhone ? Get an iPhone. Happy with your crappy PAYG 4 year old mobile and can't justify the contracts on any smartphone ? Stick with that phone. Honestly, it's fine.

* If you use a BT headset, you don't seem to mind looking like a dick in public, so this may not apply to you, except it will, because voice recognition doesn't work. I know this for certain because I bought some in 2000, for a desktop, and it was shit. It didn't work then, and itll never work. That's crazy Star Trek tech. Science *Fiction*.

Why I think Apple products are light on features…

Something occurred to me the other week regarding the paucity of box-ticking features on Apple products. I'd forgotten about that thought until reading a comment on Adam Banks' blog (Ten reasons to doubt the Telegraph’s linkbait). 1st draft of this entry was about 1,000 words. I've trimmed it a little:

Apple doesn't add any feature that introduces more problems that it solves.

#twitterjoketrial

The #twitterjoketrial reminded me a little of a story Mrs Daycoder told me recently. It's a case of procedures gone mad and common sense thrown out of the window.

Mrs Daycoder is a primary school teacher. She's trained in first aid. The school has an incident book, in which, according to procedures, all accidents and injuries must be recorded. The staff mostly have a reasonable amount of common sense, so below a certain threshold, very minor accidents and injuries simply aren't recorded. Once they make it into the book, then staff have no choice but to follow procedures to the letter.

One of the teaching assistants (TA) doesn't have quite as much common sense. She's a stickler for the rules. A child came in from the playground with a splinter in his finger. The TA immediately wrote it into the incident book, and procedures then had to be followed. The procedures forbid any medical treatment by staff, the child's legal guardian must be called in to deal with the incident, and this is what happened. The school secretary had to explain and apologise to the dumbfounded mother of this child that the staff weren't allowed to remove the splinter from her son's finger, and requested that she come to the school to deal with the incident. After convincing the mum that it wasn't a joke, she reluctantly came in. Had any of the other staff dealt with the issue at the start, they'd have done so without fuss and without the incident being logged.

The #twitterjoketrail is the same thing. At each stage, it came to the attention of someone who wouldn't or couldn't defy procedure for some reason. Perhaps through a legitimate fear of taking responsibility, a lack of common sense or pig-headedness.

That someone should have a criminal record, and have had his chosen career halted because of this should appall all of us.