I Work With a Pedant

[Mich the Tester]

This might help your argument

Yep, I shall read that. I've also read Taleb's work on the tail risks of the highly improbable, and I try to make the connection in testing. A 'highly improbable' test case can expose a more fundamental weakness in design.

[suityou01]

Additional :

MTT, the human body is a complex thing so your example may not be a fair comparison. Always the simplest solution is the best. Perhaps they are trying to do something really, really straightforward that works in 99% of cases and meets the deadline.

No synapses, go nerve endings. Something as simple is SASGuru on a good day. Whack it and it works.

Quality, or the definition therein is relative. This pedant's idea of quality might be way over and above what is needed. Perhaps a happy medium is needed?

Why deliver the whole leg and fully articulating knee joint when a bionic spatula will do?

[Gittins Gal]

Too late. The role of 'edge cases' and 'borderline scenarios' is often misunderstood; it's not about what happens when some incredibly improbable set of imagined circumstances come together, but about exploring the possibilities. An edge case can expose a weakness that might actually occur in more probable circumstances. But then, if you've read about exploratory testing and systems thinking, instead of ISTQB and ISO9000 unthinking, you will know that.

It's a bit like the doctor hitting you under your knee with a rubber hammer and watching what happens. People don't hit you under the knee every day with a rubber hammer, so the test isn't to find out what happens when somebody spontaneously takes a rubber hammer and hits you, but it can give an indication that something is worth more investigation.

My advice as to how to make use of your pedant is to listen carefully to his reasoning and ask him to demonstrate on a real system how something can go wrong.

Maybe edge case was the wrong term to use, especially when there are testers listening in!

As an example, I injected some JavaScript from a server control - to do this you register the script using a unique key. In this instance I used a string literal as the key. His argument was that we should be dynamically building the key to ensure uniqueness. Well, yes it's best practice but in a piece of code that is completely self contained and will only ever inject this one script then why bother? Why introduce extra logic? It isn't going to break anything and we need to get this out the door pronto.

Another obsession of his is people on slow connections. He took time out to redesign buttons on another part of the site (for which he had no remit) to change the colour of their backgrounds while the page was loading so the user could read the button text.

Again, fair enough but the whole site is a warts and all application and his fine tuning everything is just holding us up.

Fortunately, the client is aware of this as I have his ear on this one.

[Mich the Tester]

Additional :

MTT, the human body is a complex thing so your example may not be a fair comparison.

The skeletal and nervous system (below the neck) isn't really all that complex; the brain is extremely complicated, with some notable exceptions.

[suityou01]

The skeletal and nervous system (below the neck) isn't really all that complex; the brain is extremely complicated, with some notable exceptions.

I took the same approach to requirements gathering for a small client recently. The resounding consensus on here was don't bring all that big company stuffed shirt mumbo jumbo into a small company as they won't appreciate it.

So is it possible to be just as over zealous in a testing world?

"No ma'am, the shuttle is not ready for launch as they delivered the wrong colour napkins"

[Mich the Tester]

Maybe edge case was the wrong term to use, especially when there are testers listening in!

As an example, I injected some JavaScript from a server control - to do this you register the script using a unique key. In this instance I used a string literal as the key. His argument was that we should be dynamically building the key to ensure uniqueness. Well, yes it's best practice but in a piece of code that is completely self contained and will only ever inject this one script then why bother? Why introduce extra logic? It isn't going to break anything and we need to get this out the door pronto.

Script can often be injected from a GUI; that can form a security risk. It's one of the basic tests that security testers execute a I understand it; I'm not a security testing expert though. Sometimes I inject bits of html or even sql in a GUI and watch what happens. Some interesting stuff here;

http://testobsessed.com/wp-content/u...eatsheetv1.pdf

[Mich the Tester]

So is it possible to be just as over zealous in a testing world?

Of course it is, but if you have a pedant on the team, why not use him to your advantage instead of dismissing his thoughts out of hand?

[suityou01]

Maybe edge case was the wrong term to use, especially when there are testers listening in!

As an example, I injected some JavaScript from a server control - to do this you register the script using a unique key. In this instance I used a string literal as the key. His argument was that we should be dynamically building the key to ensure uniqueness. Well, yes it's best practice but in a piece of code that is completely self contained and will only ever inject this one script then why bother? Why introduce extra logic? It isn't going to break anything and we need to get this out the door pronto.

Another obsession of his is people on slow connections. He took time out to redesign buttons on another part of the site (for which he had no remit) to change the colour of their backgrounds while the page was loading so the user could read the button text.

Again, fair enough but the whole site is a warts and all application and his fine tuning everything is just holding us up.

Fortunately, the client is aware of this as I have his ear on this one.

What does your architect say? Is it your call to make that this code is completely self contained?

[Gittins Gal]

Script can often be injected from a GUI; that can form a security risk. It's one of the basic tests that security testers execute a I understand it; I'm not a security testing expert though. Sometimes I inject bits of html or even sql in a GUI and watch what happens. Some interesting stuff here;

http://testobsessed.com/wp-content/u...eatsheetv1.pdf

Again, my bad. Not injected as such but rendered server side so no security issues here.

[suityou01]

Of course it is, but if you have a pedant on the team, why not use him to your advantage instead of dismissing his thoughts out of hand?

Hence my suggestion of a triage process for the edge cases.

1) Raise case
2) Analyse
3) Escalate or bin

Nothing fancy. A spreadsheet would do in the interim.