Testing on the Toilet

I'm a big fan of Google's internal series called Testing on the Toilet, in which we post Software Testing hints in the bathroom stalls. It's sometimes difficult to effectively write something that fits the TOtT style: it has to be informative, succinct, and comprehensible, to be blunt, readers are only there for a minute or two while they do their business. So most of the articles have to be short and useful. That said, I wrote a small article last year and it made the rounds through the company reading rooms. It took a surprising amount of work to write that small article, requiring several revisions, lots of feedback, and I practiced removing two words where just one would do.

Early in 2007, Google started its public testing blog, and today I see that the article I wrote, "Time is Random" is on there. It's not mind-blowing, but it fits nicely on a single sheet of paper, and applies to areas well beyond keeping time. Dependency injection need not have a framework, sometimes you just need to add a parameter.

Given the nature of the work I do at Google, it's rare that anything I do is seen by the general public, so I just wanted to toot my horn.