Author Archives: John Ruberto

Voter Fraud Detection Scheme

Our nation has been built on principles, such as “consent of the governed” – leading to free and fair elections and “freedom from unreasonable search” – which leads to personal privacy. The right of us Americans to vote is paramount, and we use a secret ballot to choose our leaders.

Recently, a clash between these principles has arisen. Allegations of voter fraud have come up in recent elections, well, allegations of voter fraud probably happen with every election, but it’s been a persistent issue. The federal government recently asked for data from the states about the voter’s and their votes. Most states are not going to comply, citing voter privacy.

When there is a clash of principles, we should first see if we could find a solution that meets both principles. If that doesn’t work, we should prioritize the principles and decide which one is more important, then apply the greater principle.

I believe that we can protect both principles in this case, free and fair elections and protect voter privacy, by using technology and a simple process.

First, the voter data is kept at all times by the states. The states do not need to provide the detailed records to the federal government. Instead, states will transform their data into a tokenized form – and only provide the tokenized data to the federal government.

This is how most password systems work – the password is not stored in a database, but the password is tokenized and only that encrypted form is stored. To check passwords, the same encryption method is used and compared to the encrypted version. So, the same type of process is used here – voting records are encrypted and compared.

If there is a match, meaning that the same person voted in multiple states, then the governments involved (the federal and each of the states involved) can investigate the matter further.

I created a prototype and published to github.

Testers Adding Value to Unit Tests

Development practices like Test-Driven Development can lead to high levels of Unit Test coverage. Sometimes, the team reaches 100% statement coverage. How can testers add value when the code is “fully covered”?

Example of a project with 100% Unit Test Coverage

I provide a few examples in this Sticky Minds article:

Review unit tests for missing cases. Just because the code is fully executed doesn’t mean all of the cases are used which might cause the code to fail.

Review unit tests against the product requirements. The unit tests will check that the code works as the developer intended. Sometimes, you can verify that the functionality meets the requirements.

Review the unit tests themselves. Having 100% coverage for unit tests means that the code was executed during a test, not that the tests are good, or even test anything. Check that the assertions are valid and useful.

Review Exception Handling. Unit testing is a good way to test the exception handling because the developer has full control of the mocked environment and can simulate the exceptions. These exceptions are difficult to inject in other types of testing, so making sure the unit tests do a good job is important.

Other ideas? Great, please check out the article and leave a comment either here or there.

Bugs: To Track or Not To Track

Every now and then, I hear a debate about whether we should track bugs or just focus on fixing them.

One point of view is that tracking bugs is a waste of time. The focus should just be on fixing the issues, as quickly as they happen. You don’t build up a large backlog of bugs if you just fix them as they are found. This is argued as a healthy mindset to keep quality high at all times. Tracking bugs, and keeping a drag of legacy bugs around, is wasted effort because it cost time and money and does nothing itself to improve the customer experience.

On the flip side, tracking bugs is vital. You need to make sure that bugs don’t fall through the cracks, and the bug fixes have proper verification and regression testing, and you have a set of data about bugs to make improvements in the process.

My point of view, anytime there is a debate between doing “this” or “that”, the right answer is usually “both”. There are situations where simplicity and efficiency are most appropriate and situations where tracking and data collection are appropriate.

Testing and review are a feedback loop. Someone creates something and someone evaluates that work and provides feedback. Some of these loops are “inner loops”, where the feedback cycle is very quick and very direct. The “outer loops” are longer, have more people involved.

Test Driven Development illustrates an example of an inner loop, where the cycle is “write a failing test”, “code until the test passes”, then “refactor”. Its clearly inefficient to write bugs for the failing tests, the developer us using this method to develop to the code – he/she doesn’t need to track the (intentional) bugs.

The customer support process is an obvious example of an outer loop. When customers find bugs and report them to us, we should make sure those bugs are addressed with the proper priority and that we do a root cause analysis to learn from the mistakes.

This stylized diagram illustrates the relationship between the TDD inner loop and the customer support outer loop.

Stylized SDLC showing an inner loop of TDD and an outer loop of Customer Support

Here are some examples of practices used in development and testing, along with how I generally recommend we track the issues and how we capture the learning from the mistakes. Of course, your mileage may vary based on your industry, product, and any regulatory requirements.

Practices	Bug tracking	Learning
Inner Loops · Personal Code review · Peer review/buddy check · Unit tests & debugging · Failing tests in TDD · Parallel testing with a buddy	No formal tracking, just fix the bug	Learning and improvement is a personal endeavor
Medium Loops · Failures in tests on feature branch (CI, Build verification, etc.) · Bugs found inside a sprint – on a story being implemented · Non-real-time code review (using a tool, email, etc.)	Lightweight tracking. A simple list on a wiki/whiteboard, post-it notes, or some lightweight tracking with just open/closed state.	Learning and improvement happen as a team, usually using the sprint retrospective.
Outer Loops · Failures in tests on trunk/main branch (CI, Build verification, etc.) · Bugs found after a sprint (regression testing, hardening tests) · In general, bugs found outside the immediate dev team for those features · Customer-reported bugs · Bugs found during certification tests · Bugs found by outside testers (crowdsource, off-shore, etc.)	Bug tracking system that has a workflow and meta-data like priority, severity, state, and the normal fields. Capturing RCA information in the tracking system is useful.	Learning and improvement is part of the continuous improvement program. Root cause Analysis for the important bugs (customer found, etc.)

These guidelines have been formed by my experiences, and are meant to balance the best quality, continuous learning, team empowerment, and efficiency.

The Software Quality Engineering Leader

4 P’s and a T

I frequently describe the role of a Quality Engineering Leader as 4-P’s and a T. The 4 P’s are People, Product, Process, Project, and the T stands for Technology. This is a good prompt to write it down.

I’ve developed this model leading quality engineering teams in several Silicon Valley organizations, which lead to several common elements in the context. We are building software, services, and products in a competitive market, servicing many customers. We use agile development methodologies and iterative releases. Our focus is delivering high quality, at speed. To accomplish these goals, we need to build quality in rather than test it in. We believe that prevention and finding issues early is better than finding them late.

The Quality Engineering Leader is a close partner with the development leader, the product owner, and customer support team. The Quality Engineering Leader is someone who is passionate about delivering great quality outcomes to our customers. They will bring an engineering mindset – which means to help build quality in at all stages of the Software Development Life-cycle. They will also be a strong leader, with the influence to paint a vision of quality which leads to change in teams that are not necessarily in their direct control.

The Quality Engineering leader demonstrates a balance across several dimensions:

People Leadership: Able to attract and recruit strong Quality Engineers, and help them be the best that they can be professionally. Help deploy the right people to the projects, so the projects are successful, while finding the right projects for each person to help them develop their career.

Product Advocacy: Understand how our products improve our customer’s lives & businesses – and help the team build the right offering in addition to building it right. Being the customer advocate in the development squads helps us build the products that our customers love.

Process Leadership: Be current on the latest quality engineering practices and be able to apply the right practice to our situation. Have a well thought out strategy for when to automate, how to automate, where to automate, and what is best left to the humans. Another aspect of process leadership is to help the engineering teams repeat success again and again instead of relying on heroics.

Project Management: Organize our work to focus on the most important items, and be transparent to our stakeholders. . Help the wider team make the necessary trade-offs between time, features, and investment. Track progress of the work and resolve the inevitable issues that pop up in every project.

Technology Focus: Able to understand our technologies sufficiently to lead an engineering team, helping the team make the best decisions when it comes to technology, and ask the right questions. Stay current on the emerging technologies and platforms that are important to our products.

The typical front-line leader will be solid in 2-3 of these dimensions and developing/growing in the balance.

This is an edited version of my LinkedIn article with the same title.