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Showing posts from December, 2009

Testing and Biking: Part 2 - License plate heuristic

Last week on the way back home I and my wife Sunitha found us lost in an area which I was not familiar with. It was around 12am. I could hardly see a pedestrian or other vehicles on the road (in our country we still do not use GPS :)). Sunitha was worried since it was getting late and we could hardly position where we were. I thought I shall park my bike on the left side of the road, and try finding some help. When I was about to park I saw a lady rider on her motorbike zip past me. I noticed her license plate and it was of my area KA-XX. I told my wife let’s follow her she might lead us to a road familiar since her license plate is from the same area. We followed her and she rightfully took us to the road we were heading for. Wow! Following the license plate did work. Later I started thinking more on this license plate heuristic and I chalked out points, why this worked so well at that point. 1. Time: The time I chose to follow the bike with similar license plate was around 12:00

Testing and Biking

I love touring on motor bikes, one of the things that fascinates me about it is - it’s very hard to anticipate what the next challenge could be. There is hardly any information available on road conditions, re-fuelling stations, repair/puncture shops, medical facility, etc. Add to it the randomness when riding a bike, a dog could appear from no where, a bus might hit brakes all of a sudden, an auto might turn left without any indication, a villager could be crossing the highway with his cattle’s, etc. Let me ask you this: Which training school teaches how to respond to such situations? If it wasn't taught anywhere how did we learn? There are a number of ways we learnt it and I am trying to list them and draw parallels to testing of why most of us fail to self teach testing? Get curious about it: I first got curious to learn about it because I wanted to do it. When I read the biking portals and their travelogues, met bikers, heard them share their experiences about their biking tri