Hi Reader, happy new year! Welcome to the first pie mail of 2021!

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I hope you all got some kind of break, and are feeling refreshed for the upcoming year. I feel like there's going to be a lot happening!

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For me, I've been away camping, and had a good amount of time to switch off. This is my first day back at work and I'm looking forward to getting stuck in!

Anyway, here's the first pie mail for the year!

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🧩 Puzzle time 🧩

Just a short one this time, because I haven't spent much time in front of a computer over the last few weeks!

Before the break, I was trying to create a Date variable in Javascript.

I did it like this:

var myDate = new Date(2020,01,01);

What date would you expect this variable to be set to?

Spoiler: it's not 01 Jan 2020 (try it in your Chrome dev tools)

What would I have to do to create a date that's set to 01 Jan 2020?

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✨ Some interesting links ✨

Blamelessness, post-mortems, and office culture

Randstad interviewed Pete Goodman from Pushpay about some of the things that make their engineering culture tick. Definitely worth a watch. It's a forty five minute video, but there's also a ten minute highlights version if you're short on time.

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Lessons learned transitioning to agile

The Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast interviewed Katrina Clokie about her thoughts on testing and leadership in an agile environment. Katrina is one of my favourite people to listen to, and she drops some wisdom in this one. Check it out!

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Cyberpunk 2077

Just before Christmas, the highly anticipated video game Cyberpunk 2077 was released - and not long after that, PS4 and XBox One players were offered refunds because it was so incredibly buggy.

It's fascinating to think what might have led to this being released in such a state. Without knowing what goes on behind the scenes, we can only guess.

I'm curious to other peoples thoughts? What do you think happened? As a tester, how would you prevent this happening in your own organisation? Could you prevent it?

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Writing good error messages

I like this blog post from Shawn Wang about writing error messages that "don't make you think". What makes a good error message? What makes a bad one? Do you test your error messages?

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🎓 This week I learned... 🎓

…the rules of cricket (according to my three year old)

Over the summer, the Pakistan cricket team have been touring New Zealand.

My three year old son watched a bit of it on TV, and was captivated.

The next day, he wanted to play, so I hunted down our plastic beach cricket set. I threw him a few easy balls, he hit them, it was fun.

It was interesting seeing what he had (or hadn’t) learned about cricket from an hour of watching it on television.

• He knew the goal of the game was to hit the ball and score points.
• He knew that some hits scored ‘four’ or ‘six’ points - but not why.
• He knew you need wickets - but he didn’t know what for.
• He assumed that the team with the bat was always “New Zealand”, and the team fielding was always “Pakistan”.

So we ended up playing this quirky version of cricket. Only “New Zealand” got to bat, “fours” and “sixes” were given out arbitrarily, and it was very difficult to get anyone out.

My three year old couldn’t learn all the rules of cricket by watching it for an hour. It makes me think about testing software. Because in the same way, you can’t learn all about about a piece of software by using it for an hour.

But it’s a tempting thing to do! I’ve recognised it in myself plenty of times. I’m supposed to test a product - so I use it for a bit, and then make all these assumptions about how it’s supposed to work.

Which often turns out to be a mistake - because I could be missing context of how it is used. Or, I might not understand how one part of the product affects another. Or, I might make an incorrect assumption about the product architecture.

Learning is a huge part of testing. Our little game of cricket was a nice reminder to spend as much time as I can learning about a product. The more I learn, the less I make assumptions, and less assumptions make me a better tester!

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🎪 Events coming up 🎪

A few cool things coming up to make 2021 awesome!

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Remote Leadership in a COVID world (Jan 14, 10am NZT)

ExpertTalks Auckland is hosting Dr Monika Sumra to talk about what leadership looks like in this new (for some), remote way of working. It's being hosted remotely (obviously), so it should be easy for most people to attend.

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Introduction to GitHub Actions (Jan 28, 8am NZT)

GitHub actions are a relatively new addition to GitHub, for automating workflows. Join Angie Jones as she talks to Brian Douglas from GitHub about this feature, and how it can be used for test automation. I hope to learn some new tricks from this one!

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AppSecNZ (Auckland, Feb 12-13)

Probably the event I'm most excited about!

​AppSecNZ conference (formerly OWASP day) is coming! A free conference day, all about security. I don’t think the lineup has been announced yet, but it is certainly going to be great.

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TestCraftCamp (March 13, online, CET)

​TestCraftCamp is an online unconference - a conference where the content is driven by the attendees. I think the timezone isn't going to work out for me sadly - but if you're in a timezone closer to The Netherlands, then it's for you! Let me know how it goes!

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👋 Thanks for reading! 👋

Yay! It's great to be back. Hope everybody is well, let me know how you're doing and what you're excited for this year! More pie mail?

Don't forget, you can always reach out to me on LinkedIn or Twitter, too.

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Cheers,

James a.k.a. JPie 🥧

​https://jpie.nz​

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