Month: December 2015

It’s the start of a new project. Everyone is throwing in design ideas. Lot of excitement. Bit of a buzz. High level architecture is taking shape. Wire diagrams for the GUI are nearly finished. ‘This’ system will talk to ‘that’ system. You know which systems are storing the different pieces of data. Front end will be mobile iOS and Android. We’ll use a REST api to talk to the back end. The design is looking good. And everybody’s off. All beavering away. All building their own little bit of the system. Won’t be long before we put all the different parts of the system together for the first time. See it all working as a system. Sure… we’ll find a...

Chesley Sullenberger, the pilot who landed an Airbus A320 on the Hudson explained in an interview that “Everything we know in aviation, every rule in the rule book, every procedure we have, we know because someone somewhere died…. We have purchased at great cost, lessons literally bought with blood that we have to preserve as institutional knowledge and pass on to succeeding generations. We cannot have the moral failure of forgetting these lessons and then having to relearn them.” How would our practice of software testing improve and our discipline be enhanced if mistakes we made resulted in people dying? For some of us they can and do result in people dying. In many industries like medical devices and air...