TL;DR
In this post I will explain how I used my software testing craft in order to learn how to pet a cat.
Picture shows Sivka. She enjoys more than any other cat in my neighborhood to be pet. The issues is that starting the pet session is not an easy task. Sometimes I managed to do that, but most of the time she run away from me.
So I switch on my software testing skills. I compared the environment when I failed and when I succeeded in petting session. I crunched the testing data taking into account fact that Sivka could easily get frighten.
At that time I read excellent blog post from Berine Berger: The Inefficiency of Gifts and Software Metrics. In that blog post there is a link to Evaluating test plans using rubrics and in that paper he explains quality assessments.
Quality assessment are:
- judged based on characteristics
- empirical – verified by observation
- experiential – verified by experience
- usually reported in words
- usually contrasted with quantitative
In order to start petting session I needed to approach her much slower with my hand. But how much slower? I do not have any tools that could help me to measure the approach speed of my hand towards the Sivka. So I used quality assessment and real time feedback. I started my approach with one velocity, and adapted that velocity if I noticed that Sivka started to get frighten.
Now I know what is the approach speed of my hand. I do not have quantity value of that speed (to be written in test script or test case), but that speed is now written subconsciously in my brain, the greatest software testing tool!
