Maybe the testers in his team are doing too good of a job?

Because, you know, if testers are finding enough of “those bugs” (the ones that should be caught and controlled by unit tests and not by testers weeks after the code was originally written), maybe some developers are just not “feeling the pressure” and can’t really get that they should be writing tests for their code. If testers are very good, things just work out fine in the end… sort of. And of course, the problem here is the trailing “sort of”.
I know I’m biased, but in my view there is a ton of bugs that should never be seen by someone that is not the developer itself. Testers should deal with more complex, interesting, user-centred bugs. Non-trivial cases. Suboptimal UIs. Implementation disagreements between developers and stakeholders. That kind of thing. It’s simply a waste of time and resources that testers have to deal with silly, easy-to-avoid bugs on a daily basis. Not to mention that teams shouldn’t have to wait for days or weeks until they find basic bugs via exploratory testing. Or that a lot of those are much, much quicker to test with unit tests than having to create the whole fixture/environment for them to be found with exploratory testing.
My current conclusion is that pushing on the UI/usability side is not only good for the user, but it’s likely to produce better code as it will be, on average, more complex and will have to be better controlled by QA (code review, less ad-hoc design, …) and automated tests. Maybe developers will start hating me for that, but hopefully users will thank me.

• Software automated testing 123, an entry-level talk about software automated testing. Why you should be doing it (if you’re not already), some advice for test writing, some basic concepts and some basic examples (in Perl, but I trust it shouldn’t be too hard to follow even if you don’t know the language).
• Taming the Snake: Python unit tests, another entry-level talk, but this time about Python unit testing specifically. How to write xUnit style tests with unittest, some advice and conventions and some notes on how to use the excellent nosetests tool.
• Introduction to Debian packaging, divided in four sessions: Introduction, Packaging a simple app, Backporting software and Packaging tools.

Just a quick note about them: the slides shouldn’t be too hard to understand without me talking, but of course you’ll lose some stuff that is not written down, some twists, clarifications of what I mean exactly by different things and whatnot. In particular, the “They. don’t. make. sense. Don’t. write. them” stuff refers to tests that don’t have a reliable/controlled environment to run into. I feel really strong about them, so I wanted to dedicate a few more seconds to smashing the idea that they’re ok, hence the extra slides :-)

Enjoy them, and please send me any comments you have about them!

The talks themselves went pretty good I think, although I’d have preferred more people attending. I guess it was normal that there were less people than I’m used to, since the Linköping office is much smaller. But anyway. The Debian course went quite well and some people got started packaging stuff almost right away. The other talks were an introduction to automated testing (advocacy and arguments for it, advice, basic examples and small rant about a different kind of QA), which went ok, and an entry-level talk about unit testing in Python (thanks Ask and Batiste for the information and reviewing the slides!), which went very well. I’ll try to get the slides for all the talks available somewhere.

About the city itself, it’s a charming little part of Sweden where:

• Restaurants have insanely different prices for food whether it’s for lunch or dinner. Typical prices for lunch are 80 SEK (around 8 EUR) and typical prices for dinner are around 250 SEK just the main course!
• Restaurants usually serve some Swedish dish for lunch… and I mean every restaurant, meaning all the Greek, Vietnamese, etc. Considering “real” Swedish restaurants are very expensive, you usually go to those foreign cuisine ones when you actually want to eat Swedish food.
• Restaurants typically have some salad (that you have to take yourself) while you wait for the food… and some coffee, tea and cookies (that obviously you have to take yourself) for the end.
• Related to this, restaurants are usually very self-service. I thought service in Norway sucked, but boy was I wrong, at least there is some service. And: there were typically long but pretty-fast-moving queues, and there was this one place where you didn’t even get the food on the table after ordering at the bar; instead, you were given some gadget with some wireless receiver, and when your food was ready it’d beep so you knew you had to go to some special place and fetch your food. Is it really cheaper maintaining some gadgets than hiring a waiter? I guess so.
• The restrictions on the amount of alcohol that can be bought outside the special Government booze stores are even harder than in Norway. You can only buy booze with up to 3.5% alcohol outside “Systembolaget”. Now that is sad. And I was complaining about Norway’s 5%.
• Partly because of that (I assume/hope) the Swedish “cider” you get in Sweden is even sweeter and worse and the Swedish cider you get in Norway.
• We went to this nice student pub… which was literally for students. They actually checked your student id, but each student could bring one non-student along. Once you were “identified” as a non-student-coming-with-a-student, you’d get a stamp on your hand so you wouldn’t have to bring along the student when you ordered again. Also, the place was so very slow it was almost funny. One of the good sides was that they had what I thought it was the only decent Swedish cider… but after checking just now, it seems it’s actually American. Bummer. And the name of it was funny too: “Hardcore Cider”.
• Right before leaving the office on Friday there was a small gathering in the canteen (the “Friday Beer”), where they had a Dreamcast with one of the most awesome games I’ve seen in a long while: The Typing of the Dead, a version of The House of the Dead 2 in which you kill the zombies by typing words that appear on the screen, instead of aiming and shooting with a gun: