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Here’s the meeting request I sent out:

From: Daniel Irvine
Sent: 17 March 2006 15:02
Subject: Graduate Scheme: A model relational database system
When: 24 March 2006 14:00-16:00 (GMT) Greenwich Mean Time : Dublin, Edinburgh, Lisbon, London.
Where: Training Room

- Codd’s original description of a database
- Representing a database mathematically
- An OO design of a database system
- Implementation

A few minutes later, one of the invitees sent me a reply:

—–Original Appointment—–
From: Daniel Irvine
Sent: 17 March 2006 15:02
Subject: Graduate Scheme: A model relational database system
When: 24 March 2006 14:00-16:00 (GMT) Greenwich Mean Time : Dublin, Edinburgh, Lisbon, London.
Where: Training Room
- Codd’s original description of a database
- Representing a database mathematically
- An OO design of a database system
- Implementation

- Yawn
- sleep
- loose the will to live

You’re going to have to think of an angle, some way of dressing this up. “A model relational database system” will not sell at the box office I’m afraid.

Possible Alternatives:

1. 10 Things you always wanted to know about relational databases but were afraid to ask.
2. Fun with relational databases.
3. Relational databases a magical mystery tour.

Or
Just plain lie
And bill it as

4. Databases and their use in the porn industry

Thanks for that, Chris. But reality hit me: my presentation is as dry as the Sahara. It was full of mathematics and code, and at almost 100 slides it could probably have been used as a sedative.

Being one for challenges, I was determined to fix it, and fix it I did.

Ten things you always wanted to know about databases… but were afraid to ask.
Here’s my no-nonsense guide to writing an engaging presentation:

1. Write down a plan

2. Make it interactive
Get your audience to work out the hard bits. In my presentation, there are “cue” slides which introduce the mathematics or the code; but they don’t give the hard details. I leave it up to the audience to work those through, and then write the answer down on the whiteboard beside the projection screen.

• Use the handouts to give full explanations, as your slides won’t tell the whole story when your audience go back to read it later.
• Slides can be used to introduce difficult concepts, but don’t try to get all the facts down on the slides: you can talk through those.

3. Give analogies when you’re presenting complex idea
If you’re talking about complex ideas, give analogies to ideas that everyone is already familiar with.

4. Use summary slides
It might sound obvious, but then again, you might think everything is so obvious that you don’t need to summarise it.

• Summarise each section of your presentation.
• Every slide should have a “summary sentence”.
• Summarise summaries: each section should summarize sub-sections.

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” This feature is also used for xanax vs lorazepam phone number assigned to the same physical line for roommates or teenagers, in which case it is sometimes marketed under the name teen line.

For this reason, most retailers will refuse the return of names xanax generic SIM Card.

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Examples reported in branch officers ascent company loan manager where this have occurred include the 2001 September 11 attacks, the Hawaiian earthquake, the 2003 Northeast blackouts, the 2005 London Tube bombings, Hurricane Katrina, and the 2007 Minnesota bridge collapse.

One disadvantage of this approach is that the permanent test analysts are constantly training the inexperienced graduates.  I’ve been at the company for 9 months and I’m still asking questions of the senior test analysts (mostly about the devil’s database, Oracle–but that’s a story for another day).  And, given that a new breed of graduates is just around the corner (one is starting in two week’s time), you can see that a lot of time is wasted training the inexperienced testers.

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The use of ringtones cellular is prohibited in some train company carriages.

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This figure is expected to increase to 90% by payday fast approval credit loan 2010.

The experienced professionals around me–managers, developers, test analysts, and others–teach me a great deal. But as well as that, I get a lot from reading. I read relevant IT books–on topics such as business strategy, development processes and test engineering–as often as I can: whilst sitting at my desk waiting for tests to complete, on my lunch break, on my way home from work, and when I have spare time in the evenings.

Are you reading too? If not, why not? Amazon has a great wishlist feature that I use to put in any books that anybody recommends to me; or, if it’s referenced in a book I’m currently reading, I’ll put it in my wishlist and buy it at some point in the future. Amazon intended this feature to be used for relatives and friends who buy these books for you, but I find it a great way to store a list of things I’ll buy in the future.

Why read?
It does surprise me that more people don’t read. Out of the fifty or so development professionals in my office, I only see two or three of them reading regularly. Like me, their desks are sky high with books, and we often chat about what we’re reading and what insights we’ve gained from our latest possession. There are so many good reasons for reading!

• Keeping on top of a fast-moving world. The business world moves fast–incredibly fast now that everything is globally connected–and you can’t afford not to keep up. If you want to make the most impact in your company, you need to stay on top and always be one step ahead of your competition (and that includes your colleagues).
• You can’t move up in your career without learning new skills. If the last knowledge you gained was at university, you’re putting yourself at a serious disadvantage. Computer science students learn very little (if anything) at university on topics such as management, team-building, business life, and all the little things that are important in higher-level job roles.  Prove to your boss that you have these skills by putting into action what you learn from your reading.
• Staying clued-in is crucial to future success. You should constantly be reading innovative material, such as new business theories (and old theories) and programming techniques. Technical innovation is happening everywhere, at a faster rate than you imagine. Staying on-top of it all is important, otherwise your skill set becomes obsolete and hence you become obsolete.
• Reading web editorial just isn’t the same thing. Books are written to a high standard, with well-formulated, solid arguments. I find the value so much higher than most things I read on the web. Books are about devoting a large period of time to reading one philosophy, to one train of thought, to really pushing yourself in and understanding every aspect of a system. Web pages, on the other hand–things like this blog entry–are things that you spend a few minutes reading and then forget about it, taking out and remembering at most only one or two interesting tidbits of information.

By the way, I still believe NUnit is the best unit-testing tool out there–and it’s years ahead of competing products.

In my view, the big difference between unit-testing and functional test is this: in unit-testing, when a test fails, the product code is then fixed almost instantaneously–the NUnit tests are a developer’s tool and used to make sure his or her code is correct. But when used for product verification, passing and failing tests are merely used to show the state of the product.

If one of our NUnit tests suddenly starts failing, it is not fixed straight away. Instead, we raise a bug in our bug-tracking system and it then passes through the usual bug-fixing cycle. This means that a bug may not be fixed for weeks, months or even until the next major software release.

The problem, then, lies with reporting. I don’t want to set failing tests to Ignore; likewise, I don’t want them always to appear in our reports as failing. I want to be able to mark the tests as failing and I want to mark it with details of the bug I’ve raised. Even more importantly, because we run our tests on a range of platforms, I want to mark which platform the tests are failing on.

So for me, the big new feature of NUnit 2.4 is not the new assert syntax, it’s the new user-extensible attributes. The new PropertyAttribute allows me to attach information to my tests, and most importantly (and this is new) I get the property written out to the report XML.

What I can then do is use this information in my reports to colour test results as one of the following:

• Green when a test passes;
• Red when a test is failing for the first time;
• Orange when a test is failing but we’ve already raised a bug to track the issue;
• Blue when a test is passing but is marked as failing (i.e. the bug is fixed).

This is test heaven. The test analyst–who crucially may not even be a coder–can arrive in the office at 9am and have a report on his desk, and known immediately the state of the product.

So, on to the code. Here’s how I can mark my tests:

[Test]
[FailsOn(FailedPlatform.SqlServer2000)]
[Bug("#12345")]
[Priority(Priority.Core)]

This extra information appears in the XML report like this:

<categories>
<category name=”CorePriority” />
</categories>
<properties>
<property name=”FailsOn” value=”SqlServer2000″ />
<property name=”Bug” value=”#12345″ />
</properties>

Note that the Priority derives from the category attribute, so I can tell NUnit “I only want to run Core and High priority tests please.”

The final stage is to use some XSLT to transform this into a pretty report… and hey presto, we have a fantastic functional test system.

Many thanks to the NUnit guys for another superb release.

Of course, there’s already loads of products out there that do what I’m talking about, but I want to forget about those for a minute and just think about what we really need–and then evaluate the products later.

1. Multiple products capability
   Should go without saying but without it, your whole system is pretty crippled. I have product A and product B and they both need tracked.
2. User roles and workflows
   Something key to productivity gains, in my view, is distinct user roles to split those who write tests, those who run them, those who automate them, etc. Central to the workflow idea is that each user as an Inbox which acts as a to-do list. So, once an analyst has created or modified a test case, it can then arrive in the automator’s Inbox, ready for automation.
3. Test automation support
   This is, for me, the holy grail of test management. I want my test management system to know about my automated tests, and which test cases they relate to in the system. I want it to be able to run them via NUnit or whatever. I want the system to automatically write skeleton C# method code for each new test case I create. I want it to take NUnit report files and do something useful with them. Did anybody do this yet? Nope, I don’t think so.
4. Release branching
   By this I mean, I should be able to say, “this product has a new branched, version x.” At that point, all the test cases are linked to the new product branch, with simple and quick methods for replacing tests which require modification due to functional changes.
5. Test cases linked back to functional requirements
   There’s so many reasons why this is important. For a start, it’s a good checklist when developing tests. But also, when you create a new product release branch, you can merge old functional requirements with new functional requirements, and this can automatically flag test cases for fixing. For example, if you say “requirement R1 is now replaced with R2” (which is a functional change) then all tests that are linked to R1 are automatically flagged for fixing.
6. Minimum amount of effort required to do anything
   The input forms and views into the data should be designed to allow any action to be done in as few as clicks and key presses as possible. In fact, a good system would allow the user to design his or her own forms, depending on what he or she wants.
7. Multiple categorization of tests
   This really comes back to functional requirements. Right now in my workplace we have a spreadsheet for each functional area. This is silly: there are cross-cutting concerns that appear in every spreadsheet (such as Unicode tests and performance tests). The user of a test management system should be able to say “show me all Unicode tests” and not have to look through each spreadsheet. So the multiple categorization is a definite must.

I’ve probably missed out loads of what I wanted to say–but it’s a good start anyway. Thoughts?

Don’t get me wrong; this is an amazing phone. 3.2 megapixel camera with a Carl Zeiss lens; automatic picture upload to your Flickr online photo album; miniSD support. But it had one obvious and really, really, really annoying fault. Every time I sent a text message, my phone would freeze for at least 30 seconds before I could use it again. The worst thing was that I would have to wait 30 seconds for the message to even begin to send. And of course, I’d have to wait to lock the phone before putting the phone back in my pocket. Imagine trying to send a quick text before jumping on the tube–”Just getting on the tube now… see you in 10″–only to realise you have to wait outside the station staring into space, like a man struck with a sudden bout of amnesia, not knowing whether you are coming or going.

Anyway. My point was that I decided to be proactive and went on the hunt for a software upgrade. Lo and behold, I found the SMS Accelerator via the Nokia N73 minisite. Nokia describe it thusly:

This application accelerates the sending of SMS messages. It is recommended that you install this application to prevent slowness in SMS sending, which may occur over time if you send lots of SMS messages.

Slowness? SLOWNESS? It’s a product fault. A priority one. I mean, seriously - you could at least try to make a big deal out of it. People are having trouble with this everywhere. (One person mentioned not receiving messages until the phone was restarted. That’s a different bug, when the Messaging app crashes and doesn’t automatically restart.)

Very telling was the Nokia tester on Symbian Freak who said:

1. They dont seem to take any note of the fault reports as I … reported the sms slow down issue {it never got sorted till this release} …

2. The testing period is quite short… out of all the phones I have tested the longest was for the N70 which was around 3mths!

It’s shocking how companies with such a large market share can be so careless. The faults I have experienced with my N73 have had me almost go back to my ageing Samsung D500 (which, by the way, is a fantasticly stable phone).

Get your act together, Nokia!

As an attempted solution to this problem, I’ve installed a wiki for our team to use as a knowledge base. It’s an ideal solution to a difficult problem. It can be viewed as a “how do I…” type resource, something that is definitely needed within our team.

The Problem
Here’s a run-down of the problems we were seeing.

• Test is where all new graduates start in our company: I’m one of them. Three to five graduates are hired each year and spend their first year in the Test incubator before moving into Development. The permanent test team is only six in number, including the test manager, so this basically boils down to a high staff turnover.
• The applications we use on a day-to-day basis are not easy to use. I’m pointing at you, Oracle. New starts have a hard time getting to grasp with that and WebSphere, WebLogic, and DB2, not to mention our own enterprise products. This is amplified by the fact that most graduates have little or no experience in the enterprise.
• Disparate documentation. I always had problems knowing where to look for a particular document. Is it on the Intranet? Probably not. Is it on the Test Team share? Probably - but which folder? And so the hunt begins. And it usually ends by going over to a senior test analyst and asking “how do I…?”. Which brings me on to…
• Experienced staff spend too much time answering questions from new starts. I’ve been an employee here for 9 months now and I’m still asking questions all the time. Thankfully the senior analysts here don’t mind helping out, but it’s a serious drain on their time. They’ll have to repeat this whole process when the new grads start in September.

The Solution
The problem is clear: the documentation is there, but there’s no order to it. Bringing order to documentation is hard; that’s why a wiki is perfectly suited to the task. Wikis allow structure to grow naturally; it imposes nothing and brings one of the the key benefits of the World Wide Web to your documentation.

Since we already use Ruby extensively here, I set up Ruby-based Instiki–which, incidentally, took all of about five minutes–and immediately started writing. Some of it is simply links to documents elsewhere, other stuff is little snippets that I’ve written to answer questions that I know are asked often.

The best thing is–it’s already growing fast and everybody here is adding to it. Time will tell if our new wiki solves the problem.