Last week I showed that the whole math needs to be re-invented, as I proofed that that 1 is indeed equal to 2, thereby boiling down all maths to just -1, 0, and 1. There were some replies, and it was interesting to see that the testers you read my blog entry were indeed critical enough to challenge the proof. Simon Morley, Chad Patrick and Matt Heusser did a great job to counter-proof that there is no such real number, so that between that number and 1 there isn’t any additional real number. So, the proof I showed was in fact flawed right from the start.

Here is a mathematical proof I came over during my eleventh grade in the year 1996.

Let x be the biggest real number below 1:

    x < 1
=> 1-x > 0
=> 1/(1-x) > 0
=> 2/(1-x) > 0
=> 0 < (1-x)/2
=> x < x + (1-x)/2

since x is the biggest real number below 1, we may conclude

(x < ) 1 <= x + (1-x)/2
(between x and 1 there is no real number)
=> 1-x < = (1-x)/2
=> 1/(1-x) >= 2/(1-x)
=> 1 >= 2
=> 1 > 2 or 1 = 2
q.e.d.

Since 1 is surely not any larger than 2 we may follow that 1 must be equal to 2. That said, the whole mathematics need to be renewed. Since 1+1=2 we can now follow that 2+2=1, since both are interchangeable. Therefore we just have to deal with ones for all positive numbers. Everything is equal to one, just as I proofed.

Now, you can either stick to believe me on this proof and help me in re-defining the mathematics field, or you can challenge the proof that I just showed you. So, either you have to forget everything you learned about calculations in the past 20 (or so) years, or you can start to investigate the flaws of this proof.

It’s the same with other, not so obvious things in our lives. You can either start to believe the evidence you get presented, or start to challenge it, or to challenge it, or maybe to challenge it, or just to challenge it, or even stick with challenging it. Take your pick.

Recently I sat down and asked our bug database about my last four years of being a software tester. Here are some statistics I found in it:

Bug counts

This makes 91 bugs per year, or 1.75 per week. 68.96% of the bugs I opened got fixed, 9.07& are invalid, 7.42% are duplicated, 4.4% will not be fixed, 3.85% could not be reproduced, while nearly 5% of the bugs I opened are still either new, someone works at them or they needed to be reopened.

What does this tell you about me as a tester? Am I a good tester? A bad one? A mediocre? Were my bug reports always clear? Did they motivate the responsible developer to fix them? How did the bad reports distribute over the years?

Now, these are the more interesting questions to ask in order to make any sense on whether I am a good tester or not. Mere bug counts or percentage values do not reveal anything about this. So, rather than managing by the numbers, maybe manage by working with the individuals. The famous paper on software engineering metrics from Kaner and Bond has more on this.

The Software Testing Club put up the latest episode from my little testing fable called The Deliberate Tester.

After Peter got introduced to session-based Exploratory Testing in the first episode, he got introduced into software test automation in the second episode. Now, in the third episode Peter is faced with the trade-off between the two.

For the next episodes I started to give Peter a first test challenge that he shall conduct. I am really looking forward on this one.