{"id":252,"date":"2011-03-20T13:16:20","date_gmt":"2011-03-20T11:16:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.asym.dk\/?p=252"},"modified":"2011-03-20T13:16:20","modified_gmt":"2011-03-20T11:16:20","slug":"the-communicative-power-of-counting","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.asym.dk\/index.php\/2011\/03\/20\/the-communicative-power-of-counting\/","title":{"rendered":"The Communicative Power of Counting"},"content":{"rendered":"

Michael posted the following two comments on Twitter shortly after I published this post: <\/em><\/p>\n

There’s nothing wrong with using numbers to add colour or warrant to a story. Problems start when numbers *become* the story.
\nJust as the map is not the territory, the numbers are not the story. I don’t think we are in opposition there.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I agree, we’re not in opposition. Consider this post an elaboration of a different perspective – inspired by Michaels tweets.<\/em>
\n
\n<\/em>
\nMichael Bolton<\/a> posted some thought provoking Tweets<\/a> the last few days:<\/p>\n

Trying to measure quality into a product is like measuring height into a basket ball player.
\nCounting yesterday’s passing test cases is as relevant to the project as counting yesterday’s good weather is to the picnic
\nCounting test cases is like counting stories in today’s newspaper: the number tells you *nothing* you need to know.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Michael is a Tester with capital T and he is correct. But in this blog post, I’ll be in opposition to Michael. Not to prove that he’s wrong, not out of disrespect, but to make a point that while counting will not make us happy<\/a> (or good testers), it can be a useful activity.
\nNumbers illustrate<\/em> things about reality. They can also illustrate something about the state of a project.
\nA number can be a very bold statement with a lot of impact. The following (made up) statement illustrates this: The test team executed 50 test cases and reported 40 defects. Defect reporting trend did not lower over time. We estimate there’s 80% probablity that there are still unfound critical defects in the system.<\/em>
\n80%? Where did that come from. And what are critical <\/em>bugs?
\nActually, the exact number is not that important. Probabilities are often not correct at all, but people have learnt to relate the word “probability” to a certain meaning telling us something about a possible future (200 years ago it had a static meaning, by the way, but that’s another story).
\nBut that’s okay: If this statement represents my gut feeling <\/em>as a tester, then it’s my obligation to communicate it to my manager so he can use it to make an informed decision about whether it’s safe to release the product to production now.
\nAfter all, my manger depends on me as a tester to take these decisions. If he disagrees with me and says \u201doh, but only few of the defects you found are really critical\u201d<\/em>, then fine with me \u2013 he may have a much better view of what’s important with this product than I have as a test consultant \u2013 and in any case: he’s taking the resonsbility. And if he’s rejecting the statement, we can go through the testing and issues we found together. I’ll be happy to do so. But often managers are too busy to do that.
\nCommunicating test results in detail is usually easy, but assisting a project manager making a quality assessment is really difficult. The fundamental problem is that as testers, by the time we’ve finished our testing, we have only turned known unknowns<\/a> into known knowns. The yet unknown unknowns are still left for future discovery.
\nTest leadership is to a large extent about leading testers into the unknown, mapping it as we go along, discovering as much of it as possible. Testers find previously unknown knowledge. A talented \u201dinformation digger\u201d can also contribute by turning \u201dforgotten unknowns\u201d into known unknowns. (I’ll get along to defining \u201dforgotten unknowns\u201d in a forthcoming blog entry, for now you’ll have to beleive that it’s something real.)
\nCounting won’t help much there. In fact it could lead us off the discovery path <\/em>and into a state of false comfort, which will lead to missing discoveries.
\nBut when I have an important message which I need to communicate rapidly, I count!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Michael posted the following two comments on Twitter shortly after I published this post: There’s nothing wrong with using numbers to add colour or warrant to a story. Problems start when numbers *become* the story. Just as the map is not the territory, the numbers are not the story. I don’t think we are in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[3],"tags":[10,22,34],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.asym.dk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/252"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.asym.dk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.asym.dk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.asym.dk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.asym.dk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=252"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.asym.dk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/252\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.asym.dk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=252"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.asym.dk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=252"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.asym.dk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=252"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}