About Jeff Nyman
Anything I put here is an approximation of the truth. You're getting a particular view of myself ... and it's the view I'm choosing to present to you. If you've never met me before in person, please realize I'm not the same in person as I am in writing. That's because I can only put part of myself down into words.
If you have met me before in person then I'd ask you to consider that the view you've formed that way and the view you come to by reading what I say here may, in fact, both be true. I'd advise that you not automatically discard either viewpoint when they conflict or accept either as truth when they agree.
Here we’ll pick up from the first post and get to work with our machine learning, specifically focusing on getting a data set, exploring it a bit, and then doing some processing on the data to get it into a … Continue reading →
This series will be part of my ongoing topic around machine learning. In these posts my goal is to allow you to deep dive into a common example for those first starting out in the subject. By the end of … Continue reading →
I believe that semantics matter. I do realize not all semantics matter equally. But, still: semantics matter. It’s disappointing when otherwise intelligent people seem to dismiss something simply because they feel it’s just semantics. Let’s talk about this.
If you are going to have an AI that “does testing” — as opposed to some other activity like analysis or pattern recognition — you are going to have to move from a focus solely on perception and add the … Continue reading →
In this post I want to explore how a theory of constraints can be combined with cost of mistake curves to consider how testing operates, first and foremost, around the concept of design. Keeping design cheap at all times is … Continue reading →
I get asked this a lot. I’ve been doing some form of testing since the early 1990s and while my initial opportunities were provided by chance, my career was one of choice. Rather than say why I stay in testing, … Continue reading →
My contention is that specialist testers know enough to not use the term “non-functional.” And if they are in environments where this term is used, they seek to shift people from this vocabulary. This is one of the ways that … Continue reading →
I’ve talked about interviewing testers before and I’ve talked specifically about hiring test specialists. Here I’m going to try to be a bit more concise, yet also a bit more expansive, about exactly what I think it means to look … Continue reading →
I periodically find myself questioning the extent to which it makes sense to blog. I find it’s healthy to go through these periods of reflection and introspection. I often find it’s even healthier to expose these thoughts to others.
I recently talked about a focus on being able to test an AI before you trust an AI to test for you. Here I want to provide a bit more focus on how worth it this idea might be. But … Continue reading →
A lot of testers are talking about how to use artificial intelligence (AI) or machine learning (ML) to be the next biggest thing in the test tooling industry. Many are in what seem to be a lemming-like hurry to abdicate … Continue reading →
The general idea of a prison of representation is when you are locked into some means or method of being understood. This means of “being locked” can come from the past and, interestingly enough, from the future. I believe testing, … Continue reading →
As a specialist tester, one has been doing this since the early 1990s, it’s interesting to follow the contours of a notoriously fractious discipline. A discipline that is often populated by articulate but frustratingly argumentative practitioners. I say “frustratingly” not … Continue reading →
We made it! The final post in the testability series. Here we bring the Benchmarker application to a reasonable close. Then we’ll take a bit of time to briefly cover the journey we’ve taken together here.