Testing and Medicine

Lately I have been thinking about testing in areas outside programming. This time I will tackle the area of Medicine.

Medicine

One problem is that you can’t do a unit test without killing the subject. The issue is that you can’t isolate your heart from the rest of the system. It is an area where you are doing maintenance, Doctors don’t build bodies; they have to keep the bodies designed by God or Nature in good working order. Sure they have a limited opportunity to do some refactoring using surgery and medication; there is no Green Field Medicine. It is all maintenance work.

Medical tests appear to be closer to code metrics that the kind of testing we do in software. For example, we know that too much cholesterol in the blood is a bad thing that people with too much cholesterol are more likely to have heart attacks. Does cholesterol cause heart attacks? I don’t know, but based on what we know right now, we need to keep it down below a certain level. Same for blood sugar, blood pressure, etc. There is a correlation between what we are measuring and what we care about. Just like too many GO TO statements and long procedures tend to appear in rotten code.

Modivation

I got a bad cough in September and it has continued through November. I have seen more doctors in the last 2 ½ months than I have in the last 10 years.

Testing and The Law

I work in software where test is paramount (some would say that we've gone overboard and spend more time testing than getting real work done...a discussion for later). Well, anyway, I've been thinking about testing in other fields.

Legal

Here testing appears to be expensive. There are many legal documents out there but few are ever tested. By testing I mean brought before a judge or jury for a decision, and the test isn't complete until the appeal process is completed.

The result of the test is based on human interpretation of the document and the law. There are various theories of law and you may get a different result based on who hears the case.

Much of it is settled without testing. The two sides asset their position and the law and come to an agreement. It is often based on the strength or weakness of each side of the case.

Since the law is based on president, or what was decided before, some people will deliberately test a law (bring it to trial) in hopes of changing the law based on the decision - a test case.

Motivation

I am trading my condo for another one of greater than or equal value. Well, anyway, the other party dropped off the documents to complete the deal. Reading them got me thinking.

Test Data and Tea Leaves

When I am testing my own software (or someone else's for that matter), I tend to use name like

• Darth Smith
• Lisa Simpson
• OJ Simpson
• Jill Hill
• Garth Vader
• Darth Brooks
  
• Maryann *
• Shawn Carter
  

And street addresses like:

• Box 1
• PO Box 1111
  
• Box 1234
  
• 742 Evergreen Terrace
• 1313 Mockingbird Lane
• 1313 North 13th Street
• 234118 NE 12145th Avenue Court Suite 31712

And cities like

• LA
• Mockingbird Heights
• Springfield
• NYC
• Uppersex
• North South Bend
• Old Young America
• Terror Lake
• Darth's Church

There are only 50 US states and a dozen Canadian provinces and the State of Confusion, so I have less chance to improvise here.
Internet Data:

• dvader@deathstar.gov (some argue it should be dvader@deathstar.mil)
• a@b.c
• http://www.starfleet.edu
• jill@enemyster.bus
• helen@heckhole.co.uk
• http://www.nile.com
• null://foo.az
  

What can you tell about a developer or tester based on common test data.

• I use "LA" because it is easy, often grouped with "Box 1"
  
• The name "Jill" shows up often, my name is "Jack", do I need to say more.
• I'm old enough to think of "Darth" as a name and not a title.  I am more of a Star Wars geek than an Star Trek geek; there are times when "Kirk" shows up, so I am not a purist.  (I think I've even used Darth Spock at one point.)
  
• When I'm not in a hurry, I like to come up with the long complex addresses that are found in sprawling cities
• Sometimes I will play off existing existing domains like nile or enemyster and I tend to use upper level domains other than .com
• I watched too much TV as a kid.