philk10

The expression probably was first used in plumbing in referring to tests for the detection of cracks, leaks or breaks in closed systems of pipes.[1] Pre-dating the term itself, smoke tests were performed to detect leaks in wooden sailing vessels at least as early as 1836. After making a slow fire in the bottom of the hold, Richard Henry Dana writes, "Wherever smoke was seen coming out we calked and pasted and, so far as we could, make the ship smoke tight." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smoke_testing_(mechanical)

( I used to moderate a s/w testing forum and one of the most common questions was "what is the difference between smoke and sanity testing" as this seemed to be used as an interview question...)

Rivaled the price of gold and was used on the most important figures eg the Virgin Mary - until a reward was offered for a synthetic version - https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-a-brief-histor...

" I try to lead by example by doing a relaxation class at lunchtime " - and once they've finished this class they are asking their workers to stay late and have they seen the KPIs and what are they going to do about it...

"Wearing a hoodie with the words “We use Math” " - well, use Math to work out that people working 100-120 hours a week is not productive

Reminds me of the Orange Juice test from Jerry Weinberg - https://www.intercom.com/blog/the-orange-juice-test/ - asking if a conference hotel can deal with 700 people who have to have freshly squeezed juice at 7am

I'm from Southport, NW England - not in the South and not even a port

I first read this as the cat becoming a steward and losing toes to frostbite...

You're missing out then, it's delicious

Better would be - HN is the dogs bollocks, other sites are just bollocks

Might also want to read up on the Post Office, Horizon and Fujitsu...

True story - I worked at a company where I got an angry email from the CEO telling me that 'agile was about giving the program a quick look over, our customers are better at finding bugs than we are'

( which was true only because but they didn't want to put any effort into finding bugs before release.)

QA isn't doing testing, a QA engineer might ask why the tester is testing those scenarios...

A more modern version of the 'out of office' reply from a translation service? https://www.theguardian.com/theguardian/2008/nov/01/5

Seems related to this - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38840907

One of the main Brexit promises was "“we send the EU £350 million a week – let's fund our NHS instead” - was a lie, was never going to happen and the NHS has got worse

I used to live near Heathrow and its flight path when it was flying and never got tired of seeing (and hearing) it

dupe? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38708099

previous - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38624344

A lot of people took it so they could put it on their CV/resume and get past the job filters, consultancies got their testers to do it so they could get past client filters ( from my experience when I was working in the UK)

The system is really effective, I wanted to work at a place where the cliche "everyone cares about quality" is actually true and I found it - devs test, designers test, I test, customer has the chance to test the latest build every 2 weeks so that we can check that our quality checks are aligning with theirs. It gets to be a game of 'can the devs get it past my checks' and 'can I find new ways to trip them up' which builds up confidence in each others skill levels.

Yep, I start off by entering nothing, then just spaces, then special characters and then finally get to entering some typical data

I started off as a dev, wanted to change to being a tester/QA but was told by the CEO that "the customers are better at finding bugs than we are so just give the app a quick look over and ship it out" - I left soon after that.

When I work with new devs I can often trip them up with basic tests of double-clicking, leading spaces, using the back button on Android. They then learn these and from then on these issues dont appear ( well, OK, it might take a couple of times of a ticket being rejected because of these but they do quickly learn all my tricks ) I don't get measured on bugs found so there's no pressure on me to find stupid bugs just to boost my figures.

That's pretty much my role - I don't write test cases, I'll explore the system and try to find issues that the devs have missed. Then they learn from what they missed so I have to explore more to find other types of issues.

the engineering team are usually great at writing tests that test their code, a good QA can test alongside them to find cases they've missed and issues that automated code tests can't find. The QA person doesn't have to spend time checking that the app basically works, they can be confident in that and spend their time testing for other 'qualities' But yes, I've known QA teams that will only find bugs that no one cares about or are never likely to happen - often because they are not trained on the product to be able to dig deep

the article references a team from Oklahoma State University

You going to do the Thatcher quote next ""The problem with Socialism is you eventually run out of other peoples' money." ?

Author is a she and also has pics of rice on the page "Another variation on rice with mixed frozen veg, 2013. That measly bowl was lunch and dinner."