- Why don't developers
test at the same time
that they do the development work?
(Energetic intro Music)
Why can't they do that?
If there are bugs it
means that the developer
hasn't actually checked that it works.
Can you hear the bias
in the sentence already?
If they're checking
If I develop my software I
tend to check that it works
as I design it.
But it's on a rare occasion
that comes to my mind
that I need to find the things
where it still doesn't work,
where it still might break.
And this is something,
you know Stephen King?
Who doesn't know Stephen King?
Who knows him?
Yeah, Stephen King wrote
an awesome book on writing,
it was about his profession.
Can I use your time, a
little bit more than an hour?
- [Audience Member] Please
- Can I get a nod here? Cool.
This is the last thing,
Stephen King wrote an
awesome book on writing,
about his profession.
He's by far one of the most
successful writers in the world.
So, OK J.K. Rowling is the most successful
fiction writer I think, at the moment.
Her books, the Harry Potters are like
competing with Bible
at the moment, I think.
So, Stephen King anyways,
he's really successful
and he knows about his profession.
And what he explained
in the book on writing
it was like his autobiography.
Is that when he does writing,
he goes into the room,
like he literally closes the
door when he does the writing.
He creates the new story.
He goes into the room and closes the door
and creates the new story.
And he needs to be like really focused
on actually making this
happen, emerging the story.
And then what happens after that
is that he puts the manuscript
aside for a few months.
And then, after a few months have passed
he might take the same manuscript
and start reading and
fixing mistakes and errors,
during the editing work.
Or he might have a professional
editor to work with him.
So basically Stephen King's stories
are Stephen King's stories but
the actual writing is
his editor's writing.
So there's a different person
who's done the editing,
checking that there are
no spelling mistakes,
or fact mistakes, and
this is the checking part.
And exploring the stories,
is there something inconsistent here?
And that's the work of the editor.
And Stephen says, that if he was supposed
to write the story, to write the book,
at the same time he does editing,
no story would ever have
emerged from his room.
So there is no way,
according to Stephen King,
to do the creative work that coding is,
this writing, this creating,
how you solve this problem,
what it means to coding,
this creative work.
And there is no way to
do that creative work,
and the editor's work at the same,
because that's when you
try to put your focus
in two places at the same time.
Creative process doesn't
work when you have to do
the very fine checking process.
And this is the reason why developers,
I would say, that developers
never should be demanded
to actually test their own products.
Developing, I think, developing
is an exploratory process.
A hunting process in a way
because I make changes to the code,
I compile it or I check if it works,
I make changes and I check if it works,
I compile it, I check.
And then I'm confident
that this is okay for me,
now it's time for the hunting part
or the test automation to go through
and I put it in the first control.
It's an exploratory process of developing.
But at the same time it's
impossible to hunt the bugs.
The same principal applies
to almost every creative work that we do.
And this is the reason
why I always suggest that
if you don't have testers on your team,
and want to demand that
developers do testing,
I suggest that you pre-decide
every week or every Spring,
that hey you be the
tester guy on Thursday.
You arrive at work with a tester hat on,
and you be the tester guy on Friday.
You don't do development on Friday,
you only challenge the
tasks from our developers,
or you only hunt for the
bugs that you have developed.
We pre-decide that there is a
testing day for every developer.
And it is a good idea to cycle the roles.
Do some kind of cycling
because every tester
when they walk through the
same forest several times,
they tend to get used
to, they build habits,
they get used to the
problems that they see.
But I'm going to conclude
by just asking this one question,
it's already familiar to you guys.
You can't get to answer because
you answered it previously.
Testing is to some, or quality insurance,
to some a total of two
activities and what are those?
- [Audience Member] Checking and hunting?
- Yeah, checking and hunting,
awesome you made it guys!
(Energetic outro music)
