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Featuring deep conversations with thought leaders, innovators, rule-breakers, and the causal geniuses we discover inside Swell.
Deborah Pardes
@DBPardes · 2:38
THE EVIL TESTER! Behind the code - join a discussion of what it really means to test software and find the bugs!
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So that's why I wanted to start this conversation with you today. Thank you so much for hanging out with us. And in addition to doing your incredible swells, focusing on this swell, which is more about you and how you got into this and what it's like to be you. So my first question is it feels a little bit like a LinkedIn question, but I do want to hear about your training
Alan Richardson
@eviltester · 4:55
And software engineering covers the entire scope of building software. So from the requirements through to the design through to the programming and through to the testing. And actually, when we were learning at that point, testing was one of the minor parts. It wasn't really covered. It certainly wasn't covered at University. There were books on testing. They'd been written in the 70s, and they were primarily written for programmers so programmers could learn how to test
Deborah Pardes
@DBPardes · 1:22
It just sounds so if I didn't have a career and I always had a proclivity towards that, I'd be like, wow, maybe I want to go into this world because it just sounds like a puzzle. I guess my question about serendipity comes up because of my life in the kitchen. Sometimes you make a mistake and you discover something new. Have you ever been in a situation where you've discovered a bug and you've gone through it and it's definitely a bug?
Alan Richardson
@eviltester · 4:39
I actually have left bugs in as features in some of my applications, but that's because a lot of my applications are for training purposes. So they're deliberately buggy. So I've written games that are deliberately buggy. I've written applications that are deliberately buggy because people are supposed to test them and find the bugs. And some of the best bugs in those applications are serendipitous
Deborah Pardes
@DBPardes · 1:38
And all of sudden a things are changing inside. And I think I want to talk a little bit about timeline with you, because it's fascinating to be in a sandbox in the space of discovery and how expansive you are as a person and those you work with who understand your language. But on the other side of that are people who don't live in that paradigm. They live in a paradigm with market demands and schedules and roadmaps and releases and launches
Alan Richardson
@eviltester · 4:59
We think we know what we're going to build then we start building it. We learn that the technology is right that it's not going to work this way and it's very hard to estimate in those ways so we change the way we develop to allow the learning to take place
Deborah Pardes
@DBPardes · 2:30
And you're so beautifully just took us there. You're such a great teacher. And I do think as someone who knows nothing about your world, these last few bits of conversation back and forth, I've just seen so much of an overlay of what you do that makes sense for me as a creative person, as someone who problem solves from a creative angle. How creative you are and how creative the world you're in is, how it's like a slinky
Sudha Varadarajan
@sudha · 1:21
So I just want to know if it's just me or if it's the truth in all projects. But I have generally found that it takes twice the time to test something that it takes to develop it. I don't know why we always plan for four weeks of coding and two weeks of testing, but the reality is if you have four weeks of coding, then it is eight weeks of testing or at least something like that, six to eight weeks at a minimum
Alan Richardson
@eviltester · 3:27
Hi Sudha yes, really interesting how people view the time it will take for things and any time. If I am asked how long will it take you to test X? My immediate answer if in most projects when we do that is swell, how long is it going to take? You develop it or program it? It's going to take that time. So I will just take four weeks to build this. All right. It's going to take me four weeks to test this
Alan Richardson
@eviltester · 1:13
I think the key thing is the more that we bring our individuality into any of these rules and disciplines, the more we can make a difference because we have a huge amount of body of knowledge that we can draw upon. But the one thing that body of knowledge doesn't cover is us. And what we bring in our unique experiences. The more we do that to anything, the more we try and pull ideas from other areas, the more swell enhance our unique ability
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