How to tell if your Testers are left-handed.

How to tell if your Testers are left-handed.

Something a little different this time, and purely for fun 🙂

I believe that the world is a right-handed conspiracy. As a committed Lefty, I struggle daily with things like scissors, corkscrews and peanut-butter jars. On the other hand, I\’m one of the few people who can write things down and use a computer mouse at the same time. Go figure…..

I was trawling through some user-generated test data the other day (and that\’s about as fun as my life gets right now), and noticed something a bit odd. You see, when asked to input some data, *any* data into a text box, most people with put something like:

\”This is some test text\”

…or perhaps even:

\”I hate testing software. It really blows…\”

If your rest team are *really* inventive, you might even get:

\”The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.\”

…but such occurances are rare, and god forbid that you should actually get the sort of meaningful data that you would have liked. THAT\’ll teach you to be more stringent on you test plans 🙂

But I digress.

What I saw in my test data was this:

\”jkhjkhjkh ihjkhjkh\”

..and this:

\”hjgjhghjgj hgjhg hjghj hjg hj hj jh hj\”

..and even this:

\”sdas. Zxczxcz\”

This set me thinking as to why these specific characters, in a string that was supposed to be random, and I came upon the thought that these patterns were because of the dominant hand of the tester who inputted the data. Think about it. When you drum your fingers impatiently, you would normally use your dominant hand. I see no reason why this would not equally apply to idly-typed text.

The characters J, H, K and I are all on the right hand side of a standard US / UK keyboard. S, D, A, S, Z, X, and C are all on the left.

So the testers were a mix of left- and right-handed (with a strong bias for right, if the test data is to be believed). Or perhaps they were all right-handed, and a couple of them were trying to write down their input strings whilst typing… or eating a sandwich… or whatever you do at your desk that ties up a hand for a few moments.

Anywho, I do know that in the team I\’m in at the moment, there\’s about a 75/25 split between right- and left-handed, which is higher than the statistical distribution average. Mayber left-handed people really hate testing. Or perhaps they\’re a little bit more creative (which is why we make such good DBAs).

Back soon…