It has been at least a month that most of us have been working from home. Covid19 has moved a full circle around the world constantly mutating, affecting some places seriously and some much lesser. An error is what possibly caused the world to massively change in the last few months. Some of us are seeing the ill effects of this while nature given a breather has become pristine. Well, errors however painful they seem are necessary and useful. Hmmm, bugs are good!

 

It is interesting that error is what made humans possible in the first place. Without noise, evolution would stagnate, an endless series of perfect copies, incapable of change. But because DNA is susceptible to change – where mutations in the code itself or transcription mistakes during replication – natural selection has a constant source of new possibilities to test. Most of the time, these errors lead to disastrous outcomes, or have no effect whatsoever. But every now and then, a mutation opens up a new wing of adjacent possible. From an evolutionary perspective, it’s not enough to say “to err is human”. Error is what made humans possible in the first place” Steven Johnson says in his lovely book “Where good ideas come from-The seven patterns of innovation”. The chapter on “Errors” in this book is a fascinating read. This week’s expandMind article summarises key ideas from this outlining how erroneous hunch changed history, how contamination is useful, how being wrong forces you to explore, how paradigm shifts with anomalies and how error transforms into insight. Bet you will like this article “Errors are useful, innovate using them” interesting. 

 

Why do bugs happen in software? The beEnriched article this week outlines eight reasons for this and suggests being sensitive and aware to causes of errors is useful in doing SmartQA and delivering clean code. After all, doing SmartQA is not just finding issues, but sharpening one’s senses to be able to smell these and spot them from afar or near before they hit us. It is about elevating QA to be far more valuable to business success. Check out Sensitivity and awareness.

 

In this week’s smartbits, Zulfikar Deen says how needing a business mindset is key to working as a value adding partner to  IT group of an enterprise. Check out the 298-second video “Business mindset“.

 

Check out this week’s poster “It is not about finding bugs. It is being participative in the whole process of development” at SmartQA home page.