“Swim” System

The “Swim” System for User-Oriented Presentation of Test-Case Results pdf

Ward via matrix This pdf was our "anti modeling" approach for understanding and participating in long-running conversations of consequence.

At issue in its first application: committer election where arguments could be made as well as votes cast and changed. Once elected, IBM and others would trust their production code to the decisions a new committer would make.

A voter would be presented with a choice. A common question would be "what will happen if I press this button?" We would answer by offering a variety of scenarios where various emails are sent and other participants react. We knew this is what would happen because we ran the simulations with the deployed code on the production database (but with temporary tables).

Here the code was the model. If the model didn't answer a question it would be because we hadn't considered the case and didn't know what would happen. After Ward left Eclipse, he no longer had access to the elections but he did have access to the test suites that drove this analysis. A few months later Ward noticed someone had added a description of what would happen if a candidate or voter changed email addresses in the middle of an election.

⇒ Wiki-31