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Autism Traits Prove Valuable for Software Testing
Back in 2009 we ran a story about a Chicago based non-profit company that trained high-functioning autistic people to be software testers. Two years later Aspiritech has grown to offer services in Belgium, Japan and Israel. Autistic debuggers are used by large clients like Oracle and Microsoft and have proven to be so good in fact that companies are now recruiting to meet demand. From the article: "Aspiritech's board of directors includes social service providers, therapists, a vocational expert and a software engineer. The nonprofit also received start-up advice and consultation from Keita Suzuki, who has co-founded a similar company, called Kaien, in Japan. Aspiritech has hired and trained seven recruits with Asperger's syndrome. These recruits have since worked on software-testing projects for smartphone and cloud-computing applications. Aspiritech now offers functional-, compatibility- and regression-testing, as well as test-case development, with experience in cloud-computing platforms including Salesforce."
Is just recruit people who bought minecraft. It's really part of the same population set, but these one's are already used to using computers for 10 hours a day doing the same repetitive thing over and over.
Not to mention for con artists scamming gullible parents of children with autism into believing widely used vaccines caused their kids' disorder, rather than the genes they pass on to said children.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
do well at software testing. That's really the story here. Autism is irreverent. This very idea is based upon a lot of wrong information about people with Autism.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Wasn't this an episode of Ghost in the Shell?
Now out side debuggers / testers do have there up's and downs but at times having ones that are in the same place as the people doing the coding is better with less trun around time.
Now I hope that they are being payed for the long hours with full over time pay.
http://www.deredactie.be/permalink/1.1086311 if you speak Dutch, since they advertised in the local paper for people with autism.
I always thought those QA folks were special.
What.. what language are you typing in? It *looks* like english but I actually stroked three times trying to make sense of it.
I have asperger.. I'm glad that there's more & more peeps who see that its not a disability; but rather a unique way of looking at the world.
Its really not the same worldpicture you 'normals' see... I can really get upset if i see 'wrongs' in this world. Just as i feel in a way that it's the same as seeing 'wrongs' in software or hardware. I wont be able to put it behind me; or just to buy something to make me feel good... Or just accept that my boss says its the rigth thing; or that there's no money or something 'reasonable' like that.
You talk about training.. Its not training; its in the core being who you are. Are you dedicated enough to spend ALL your energy (&that's the same amount of energy that you have) in trying to get the job done.. to find ALL the things that are wrong with something? (& not be at home spending time on your cat/girl/man/car/career/whatever).
Peeps who have the same as i have, generally can focus ALL of their attention to the project they are dedicated to. Totally emerce yourself in a project; even if it takes longer than you think; even if it means skipping a few days of sleep..
I'm sure you are a dedicated individual; that has the ability to do his/her job right.. But i generally don't see the (not negatively meant) singlemindedness/focus i can put in something that interest me.
I can see that there are cases that let Asperger's syndrome be an advantage (the same way as i have seen it being a disadvantage in my life sometimes) when checking out something.
Too bad you dismiss it as irrelevant. Maybe someday in the future you will understand the pro's and cons of someone with asperger.
I'm glad my current employer understands... I do know she's happy that i'm there; even though i sometimes do things 'normals' dont expect, or do. & sometimes i cost more of her energy..
I also know that i've saved the company a lot of resources just because i happen to think 'out of the box' & do things my way; not the way peeps expect you to be/perform.
Maybe it's over-self-diagnosed, but there's a proper clinical diagnosis, and it's a serious condition. The person with Asperger's does have significant strengths, though, and they tend to align with technology skills, so there's no real surprise here to those who know about Aperger's.
Quidnam Latine loqui modo coepi?
Seriously, I'm pretty sure Autism traits are just generally valuable in many programming and computer related situations, and it is not at all uncommon for engineers to have some basic Autistic traits. I kinda thought this was common knowledge.
Still, it's nice seeing an effort to integrate some of those have have more social issues into productive jobs.
Asperger's is a mild form of autism. One of it's characteristics is that the people who have it focus very intently on what they're doing for extended periods of time. As a result, they make excellent programmers and testers because they'll put in hours without even realizing the time has gone by.
In a sense, Asperger's is almost the reverse of ADD.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Aspergers typically even has a distinctive gait, so it isn't as easy to claim as some non-specific "borderline autism" claim that is more likely bogus.
And in their defense, they're still dorks either way.
The most over-self-diagnosed conditions on the planet, thanks to the perceived ability to explain social awkwardness and claim a special area of brilliance.
That, and taking Aspergers frees up stat points for you to allocate elsewhere.
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The title says it all. It's just a logical extension of division of labor, really. Forget the current reprogenetics tendencies and the development of genetic screening of embryos; in short order we'll be making better workers. I can just imagine the advertisements for workers with genes turned off for boredom for repetitive low skill tasks, soldiers with atrophied brain areas responsible for emotion, and all the other goodies. Welcome to the new utopia/dystopia (depending on whether you're an employer or employee).
"Politicians and diapers must be changed often, and for the same reason."
Aspiritech's board of directors includes
social service providers, (?)
therapists, (?)
a vocational expert (1)
and a software engineer. (1)
Aspiritech has hired and trained seven recruits with Asperger's syndrome. (7)
Something is wrong with this picture.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
Maybe it's just me, but this reminds me of focus from Vinge's A Deepness in the Sky.
It gripped her hand gently. 'Regret is for humans,' it said.
Condition? I (and a lot of leading Asperger's advocates) think it's more a type of brain than a condition. I was in the waiting room one day while my son was in an Asperger's class, and noticed that three of us dads were discussing the nature of human consciousness. Not your standard dad discussion. Point being, we're a breed apart from the 'regular' dads.
The determined Real Programmer can write Fortran programs in any language.
...But not on Monday, definitely not on Monday. I'm an excellent tester...
Uh oh, fart.
...But not on Monday, definitely not on Monday. I'm an excellent driver...
Uh oh, fart.
I have asperger's syndrome, and I need no training for computers, I just learn about them. I learned PHP, C# C++, and Java at 13 (or was it earlier), and written my own cms using PHP and SQL. At 14 I started using MongoDB, for its usefulness in a cms.
A different type of brain would certainly be a condition of sorts.
By specifically using high functioning autistic people, you are already making the exemption that invalidates the whole concept. High functioning means that they can more or less function in a normal environment, doing normal work and living a normal work. Over 10% of the IT workforce I've been in the last 10 years, has been high functioning autistic people, including administrators, DBAs, penetration testers, indeed software testers, and even a team leader. Come back when you can use every "rain man" offered to you in your company and I'll start thinking you have done something out of the ordinary.
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
It's about a hundred dollars...
If my call is important, why am I talking to a recording?
Science never shows that some hypothesis is correct.
It's called falisfiability and falsification and without it our science simply isn't.
Ref.: https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Falsifiability
Yes it's overly strict, and on purpose, because so many people including "scientists" and "people who believe in science" just don't get it at all. The good thing is that they're all actually smart enough to get it if they're made aware of it (the wikipedia article isn't good since it doesn't point out how one would need absolute 'total knowledge' of _everything_ in order not to be strict and say "never", but it's a start).
People who don't get it make the superficially reasonable conclusion that "almost entirely certainly correct" can be treated as "proven"; the problem arises when they in practice go from "can" to "should" which they almost always do due to our human nature and which in short order easily sabotages the very concepts that define science including the scientific method.
That flaw is the root cause of the huge issues in pharmacology and medical science that has rendered much research/attempted research worthless and this situation has spread rather widely making inroads into other sciences making research generally untrustworthy even if peer reviewed and even if incorrectly repeated (not uncommon when a mistaken assumption becomes the norm) so it's an important, serious, and dangerous issue.
I thought everybody had Asperger's these days.
Nice honeypot for autistic grammar nazis, dude.
I would say that testing your own code is the worst thing to do, as you know how it works and will (possibly subconsciously) input data which will either work, or bomb out gracefully. By all means to some quick debugging yourself, but you need fresh eyes to test your system properly.
It just so happens that aspies seem to perform this task remarkably well.
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
We have a autistic guy on our development team, great at analysing complex problems and finding the root cause. Terrible at communicating that knowledge to others. Very challenging to work with at times takes a lot of managing.
Maybe evolution is one step ahead on this one.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
Autism helps testing:
1. You don't mind repeating your testing
2. You read the specifications and the code, you miss no tittle, not jot, you dot the letter i, each and every one; it's a side effect of autism
3. You don't read emotion from the developers at all and read their code and specifications without it. This is tremendously valuable because you don't make any assumptions about their code (as an a "aspy" I'm always asking developers is THAT what you really meant). As an aspy we know damn well most NTs don't actually mean exactly what they say - so we either apply it and show that the literal application is BUNK or we ask for clarification.
4. If testing is our 'obsession' then we'll do it well, you won't stop us. Aspys are known for doing specific jobs tremendously well and testing is just another example of a specific job.
The other thing, though, that will probably upset developers is that the good developers are generally SO autistic it's not funny. When one realises one is autistic it helps to communicate with other autistic people. The best thing is -- you can fairly well say what you damn well mean and it won't upset them...
DSL
I would say that testing your own code is the worst thing to do, as you know how it works and will (possibly subconsciously) input data which will either work, or bomb out gracefully. By all means to some quick debugging yourself, but you need fresh eyes to test your system properly.
It just so happens that aspies seem to perform this task remarkably well.
I found a bug in a Java servlet at a fortune-500 company that a TEAM of over 50 software engineers spent MONTHS of time and hundreds of thousands of dollars in equipment to try and find it, in order to fix it. Really, they only allowed a memory leak to last longer until the garbage collect cycled into a non-stop loop.
I found the bug in less than 5 minutes. Guess what happened to me after I found it? Anyone who didn't guess that I was "let go for mysterious reasons" doesn't have Asperger's ;)
No, he really did mean "irrelevant". It's just that you're talking to Scooby Doo.
I would say that testing your own code is the worst thing to do, as you know how it works and will (possibly subconsciously) input data which will either work, or bomb out gracefully.
Testing your own code should *always* be the first step in the testing process. Ideally, stepping through it line by line. It's precisely because you know how it works that you are the best person to do this. Knowing it will soon be handed over to a testing team can help eliminate any inherent bias you may have, but even if it doesn't, it should increase the quality of code that is being tested later in the process.
Indeed. By way of clarification: You should not be the only person to test your code.
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
Overtime pay? Does anybody in the industry get that anymore?
Condition? I (and a lot of leading Asperger's advocates) think it's more a type of brain than a condition. I was in the waiting room one day while my son was in an Asperger's class, and noticed that three of us dads were discussing the nature of human consciousness. Not your standard dad discussion. Point being, we're a breed apart from the 'regular' dads.
Wow, some middle-class, well-educated, bright and interested parents have children who perform less than brilliantly at school and in social activities, so they're diagnosed as having Asperger's. What a fucking surprise.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
I agree, it's like writing a book and then editing it yourself. You may be a fantastic editor otherwise, but when you spend so much time pouring over your own work, it's easy to miss errors.
My husband works for cPanel and they have people hired specifically for debugging the system. You don't see Nick Koston spending all his time doing it.
Hm, I wonder if they have seen this article? Sarah T in Houston TX
And now this company is on the look out for Cartman burgers, and we all need Jameson Irish Whiskey to make it through the day....
You can’t disprove a negative statement.
I can’t prove that vaccines don’t cause autism – there are exceptions.
I can’t prove that unicorns don’t exist – They are shy.
All we can say about both is that there is no positive proof about either.
And huge numbers of software engineers have proper clinical diagnosis. Yep, no surprise here, except maybe to the neurotypicals who thought they could program who are having Aspies debug their code.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
Any engineering manager with a bit of history can tell you that the really, really, really good engineers for one highly narrow topical area -- say, for example, optimizing FFT transforms on an obscure ARM architecture variant -- tend to not be entirely normal human beings. In truth, many of what we consider to be brilliant asocial geeks are probably high-functioning autistic spectrum people.
Yep, I've experienced that myself. Makes for an awfully choppy and long resume.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
Did anyone catch the last sentence? One benefit is "...providing a relaxed atmosphere that encourages the development of social skills." Since when did any job in IT become something that develops social skills?
Now I hope that they are being payed for the long hours with full over time pay.
I wish...unfortunately, many jobs in technical fields are exempt employees.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?