What tester are you? /s

Let’s see what kind of tester you are, answer the 3 questions below and find you profile description at the bottom.

You start testing and the product has obvious problems even with the “happy path”, both cosmetic and very obvious bugs are everywhere, what do you do?

1. I send the product build back and don’t touch it because it is not testable and back to facebook for the day!
2. I log 124 bugs in extreme detail, one for every problem I encounter. If somebody after 3 days asks me why I am not finished yet, I respond that I am logging bugs and testing is not complete.
3. I go talk to the developer that made the last check in and ask him why he didn’t test his product. If he says, “because you are supposed to do that” I talk to him about the incredible amount of waste he is creating by delaying the feedback on the product and not testing it himself. I sit down with him, ask him to test the product and fix the issues we find together in a continuous loop until we both are quite happy with the result.
   I then explain to him that if the feedback for each of the issues has to come from a different party (me) the delays in the detect fix retest rate will create a massive amount of waste. I encourage him to test his application before sending it to me and as we are at it I suggest the next time we test it and fix it together.
4. I tweet to the world how idiotic my developers are and include screenshots of the errors. I spend 2 hours defending my point on social media and catching my interlocutors on inappropriate use of terms to prove my point.

You have been sitting idle on your chair for over an hour because there is a delay in the build you want to test, what do you do?

1. Yippee I have time to browse the web and watch some videos on youtube! I hope their problem persists for a while, the new Game of Thrones season is awesome!
2. I look at my test plan, change it a bit, add some graphics, get a coffee and start reading that testing book I always wanted to read.
3. I have been out of my desk already for 50 minutes. 10 minutes idle time is waste, our customers are getting our product later than they should.They say there is a problem with the build, let me see if I can help out. I go and offer my help to my teams’ developers. They might need me to rebuild a machine to check something or to try something quickly to debug the problem. I get stuck into it, wow, I even learn something about it! I might even resolve the problem altogether using my strong critical thinking skills and looking at the problem from a different perspective. I help, we solve the problem and, yes, now I can test it! Chances are that while troubleshooting the problem I have already gathered a lot of information on the product that will support and supplement my testing.
4. If developers are idiots there is nothing I can do, I will spend this time blogging about how to become a better tester and how testing is the most important thin g in the universe, much more complex than development by the way.

Developers have nothing to do because the analyst has been sick and there are no refined user stories in the backlog, you just finished testing, what do you do?

1. BINGO! I might as well re-start House of Cards
2. I start complaining and moaning about how this company sucks and about how better it would be if I was the decision maker here. We need to hire more analysts and testers of course! I then go back to writing more test cases even if there is nothing to test. I might also create some fancy SQL query to extract lovely bug lists to show to management with graphs and all.
3. Great opportunity for learning a bit more about how business analysis works. In the previous weeks I have been helping the analyst and I think I can get the job done. I organise a meeting with the team and we start breaking down user stories, as soon as we have a couple ready we can start working. I will replenish the backlog until the flow is reestablished, using WIP limits will help me understand how much work I need to do on this.
4. There is nothing to do, if development activities are foreign to me, imagine how I feel about doing something that is even further away from my testing world. I am here to find bugs and provide information to stakeholders, not write user stories, hire more analysts if you don’t want this to happen.

RESULTS

If most of your answers are 1, you are a slacker that happened to be doing testing. Why don’t you find a job you enjoy doing instead of trying to avoid the one you have?

If most of your answers are 2, you are an old time tester that spent the last 15 years in a bubble far away from the evolving world. Nothing outside your little testing world is worth consideration, after all you know better than anybody else and why should you improve?

If most of your answers are 3, keep on doing what you’re doing, you and your company will be OK

If most of your answers are 4, I know who you are 🙂

 

 

 

Talk to me for God’s sake

If you remember this, you’re old

E-mail is a great tool, it was the first killer app of the Internet, that directly demonstrated the intrinsic value of the network well before the web became useful.

Before e-mail, people that lived far away could communicate through slow traditional mail, expensive phone lines or simply travelling and meeting each other somewhere. The competitive advantage of e-mail was huge and as a consequence its adoption was fast and furious.

It was a no-brainer for any company to use it. We can save time and money with little or no effort, yippeee!

Being an e-mail salesman was the easiest job in the world, I was one.

But, hang on a second, why the hell would you use e-mail if you have to ask a question to your team mate sitting next to you?

A conversation is cheaper than e-mail, a conversation is faster than e-mail, a conversation includes much more information than e-mail, a conversation will finish there and then with a solution.

Let me try to sell my new product: Internal e-mail For Lazy Asses©

Send mail one more time

Dear co-located colleagues,

Internal e-mail For Lazy Asses© will allow you to avoid getting up your arse all day while you’re comfortably coding and watching the deep youtubes

In the likely event you suddenly lost your tongue or had your mouth welded by accident, you will still be able to communicate with your team mates and be productive!

You will be able to demonstrate you are working on something while actually not giving a shit about it, because, let’s be honest, if you did, you would go and talk to your colleague and not sit on your arse for days waiting for an answer that you haven’t got in 3 days.

You will be able to avoid troubleshooting or even bother thinking about a problem if you forward it to your full team!

You will be able to conceal your body language so that nobody will know you haven’t got a clue about what you’re talking about; when suspicion arises, you can attach old confusing and obscure threads that will implicitly demonstrate you have known the topic all along

Somebody else will eventually do your work, yippeeee!

So, are you buying it?

CIAC – Certified Ignorant And Curious

Madrid Is a beautiful city

Speaking and learning about other people’s ideas at a conference is an incredibly energizing activity for me. The reason, I believe, is the fact that I am naturally very curious; people’s thoughts and ideas generally satisfy my curiosity at least for a few hours.

On Wednesday evening, in Madrid, I was involved in the ExpoQA “Great debate” where speakers, sponsors and the conference goers discussed various topics in an open session.

Inevitably the topic of “Professional Certification” was touched.

I briefly made my point by saying that I am not one for certifications because I believe that what the Greek philosopher Socrates said: “I’m the smartest man in Athens because I know that I know nothing”. For me learning is a continuous activity and the most important element is the acknowledgement of ignorance rather than the certification of knowledge.

The discussion went on with the sponsors making some good points pro certifications and some interesting insights from the conference participants.

On the flight back from Madrid I thought about it a bit more and eventually decided I am going to start certifying Ignorant people. What I mean with ignorant people, is:

people that are aware that learning is a continuous activity and can never end. People that, no matter how much they know about a subject, have the humbleness to listen to all voices, including the ones that they don’t like, because they believe there is always a chance they might learn something. These people, know that they don’t know and are driven by curiosity in their continuous search for knowledge.

I started by certifying myself

I had a quick chat with with Socrates on Skype, he liked the idea and that’s why I am here presenting to you the CIAC certification.

Do you want to become a Certified Ignorant And Curious professional?

Add a comment to this post or mail me directly with one sentence where you clearly demonstrate you are a humble ignorant in search of knowledge. You can also tweet your sentence using the tag #IknowThatIdontKnow including my twitter handle (@augeva)

If you are successful, you will receive a prestigious certificate signed by me and Socrates.

No industry benefits, no costs associated, it doesn’t need renewal, you can print the certificate, frame it and proudly display it in your office!

Little Tim and the messy house

The messy kitchen

A cute little boy, Tim, lives in a messy house.

In the morning Tim’s mum, Tina, spends an hour looking for rubbish in the house, when she finds some, she writes a note on a piece of paper where she describes the steps that she followed when she found it, and sticks the note in one of 5 different drawers. Each drawer is labelled “Severity 1”,  “Severity 2” and so on down to “Severity 5”.

Tina and Tim’s uncle Bob, meet every evening to discuss the daily findings and after arguing for a good while they agree on how to file the notes written during the day into 5 folders with labels “Priority 1”, “Priority 2” and so on up to “Priority 5”.

Tim’s father, Oleg, every morning picks the folder with label “Priority 1” reads the notes Tina wrote, follows the steps, finds the rubbish and throws it in the bin. He then writes an extra note on the piece of paper saying that he has thrown the rubbish in the bin. If the Priority 1 folder is empty, Oleg picks the Priority 2 folder and follows the same process. Some times Oleg cannot find Tina’s rubbish even when following her written steps, in this case he adds a note saying “there is no rubbish there!”. Sometimes Tina takes it personally and Oleg sleeps in the spare room. Oleg barely ever opens the folders with Priority 3 to 5. Such folders are bursting with new and old notes from many years back.

Tina spends an hour a day rechecking the Priority folders to see if her husband has added his notes. When she finds one, she will follow her own steps to make sure that Oleg has removed the rubbish from where it was as he said he did. If he did it, she will shred the original note, if the rubbish is still there she will add a note at the bottom saying, “the rubbish is still there, please go and pick it up!”. She will spend some more time adding some extra information on how to find the piece of rubbish. Sometimes, while she is tracking some old rubbish she finds some new, in this case she creates another note and adds it to a drawer.

For each piece of rubbish, a report was filed neatly

From time to time uncle Bob calls around asking for rubbish reports and rubbish removal trends. In these occasions Tina and Oleg spend the night up counting and recounting, moving sorting and drawing before they send a detailed rubbish status report.

Strangely enough, no matter how hard Tina and Oleg work at identifying, filing, removing, reporting and trending rubbish, the house is always full of shit and uncle Bob is always angry. Tim’s parents are obsessed in finding new rubbish but they don’t pay much attention to family members dropping chewing gums on the floor, fish and chips wrapping paper in the socks drawer, beer cans in the washing machine and so on. After all Tina will find the rubbish and following their fool proof process they will remove it!

One day Tim calls her parents and Uncle and sits them down for a chat. He suggests to stop throwing rubbish on the floor and messing up the house so that they can reduce the amount of time spent finding, removing filing and trending the rubbish. He also suggests to get rid of the folders labelled Priority 3, 4 and 5 as nobody has done any work on them and after all the existence of a minuscule speck of dust on the bathroom floor is not going to make their life uncomfortable. He also suggests that Tina calls Oleg as soon as she finds some rubbish so that he can remove it straight away, without the need for adding notes.

Uncle Bob tells Tim that what he says is nonsense, because the family are following a best practice approach for rubbish management and in agreement with Tina and Oleg locks him up in a mental facility.

Everybody lived unhappy ever after.

Have I eventually gone bonkers and started talking nonsense?

No, I haven’t suddenly gone crazy. I am Tim and I want to change the world.

Stop moaning – Be the change!

You feel like this

People moan, it’s a natural thing. It is a way of reacting to difficult situations where we are not able to change outcomes. By moaning, we feel some relief in sharing our discomfort with our friends, family and colleagues.

I confess; I have a problem with moaners because I don’t believe there is anything positive about it and it doesn’t really cut it for me. If I am not happy about something and moan about it, I normally become angrier rather than feeling any better. If I am really unhappy about something I would rather rant for 5 minutes, than moan all my life.

People see you like this

I am sorry to say it, but testers are in my experience the worst category of moaners in IT, maybe at pair with tech support people, but I’ll focus on testers here because I am one.

Testers moan about developers that don’t understand the customers, moan about business analysts that can’t write requirements, moan about managers that don’t give them enough resources, moan because they talk and people don’t listen, moan because sometimes they are paid less than developers, moan because the environment is not working, moan because they find bugs, moan because they don’t find bugs, moan because the application is delivered late to them, moan because the quality of the application is not to their standard and find just about another thousand reasons to moan about.

While I can understand moaning coming from a junior or mid-level tester that has say 1 to 8 years’ experience, I cannot understand, accept or condone a tester calling himself a “senior practitioner” that moans about any of the above.

Senior practitioners are like moaning rock stars, they have all they need but keep on moaning

One simple reason: a real test practitioner is able to face up to every single one of the moaning causing issues and is well able to change them.

Dear senior test practitioner, It is not acceptable that if management doesn’t give you enough resources, you are not able to influence them into understanding that they are making a mistake and need to release more resources, it is not acceptable that the developers don’t understand the needs of the customers and you are not able to come up with a solution that can minimize or even completely resolve the issue.

It’s NOT acceptable.

If you want to call yourself a senior practitioner, then act like one; influence and change the environment you are not happy with. What’s the point in moaning? You will bring down the rest of the team with your negative whiney attitude, won’t resolve anything and will piss off everybody else outside your team that is so unlucky to have to listen to you.

Senior Moaner – “Yes but management don’t understand!”

This is the ultimate answer of every senior moaner. The reality is different though, in fact 60% of the moaners didn’t even talk to managers to suggest a solution, 15% of them have tried and failed because they weren’t able to make their point and influence management, 20% have tried but management were right all along and they keep on moaning hiding the truth, finally 5% of them have tried repeatedly and appropriately to influence managers, but management are actually stupid and don’t understand.

Moaners Distribution among Senior Test Practitioners

Now look at that chart, where are you? If you are in the 5% that already did everything they could, but hit a rubber wall, then I suggest you change job before your moaning alienates you from the rest of your team mates, your wife and friends, in the other 95%, simply stop moaning, do something meaningful with your job, be brave and BE THE CHANGE you moan about!

5 Reasons why best practices are bad for you

That’s me after talking to a best practice guy

1st reason: The hardest conversation you will ever have is with somebody that blindly believes a practice applies to every context and it is always valid, no matter what. There are 2 ways out of the conversation, agree with your interlocutor or kill him. I don’t like either option (even though I am often tempted by the second) so I end up trying my utmost to use reasoning and examples, but I miserably fail in 99.99% of the cases, eventually become exhausted and retreat in a personal comatose space where I refuse to discuss the issue any longer. #WinByExhaustion

2nd reason: Think religion. If you are roman catholic like me, then the Bible is your best practice manual. The Bible thinks for you, you simply follow and if you doubt something then you are an infidel that should be excommunicated (who cares?) or worse silenced and sometimes burnt at the stake, don’t you love it? Some names come to mind including Galileo Galilei that was intelligent enough to refuse his own belief, but  if you want a more detailed list have a peek here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_people_burned_as_heretics.

Is this what you do to different thinkers?

The thing is, you cannot innovate if you believe in best practices, because according to the best practice you don’t need to innovate. Did the roman catholic church evolve? Did they innovate? Fuck no! They are stuck to the day that poor Jesus Christ (God bless his soul) died on the cross and his followers started writing about him. #NoInnovation

They have them, they are very well hidden and they are too nice to use them against us: TRUTH

3rd reason: Best Practices are your #1 personal growth enemy. I see extremely intelligent people that have best practices so ingrained in their DNA that refuse to accept every valid reason, no matter what the evidence is. These people are the ones that will lag behind, because for example 20 years ago they might have said “what’s the fuss with this Internet thingy, business is run in factories and shops, you won’t make money with it, unless you are a porn site provider”. Today I hear financial experts saying “Forget about Bitcoin, money is money and people want it in their wallets and regulated banks”.
#GreatThinkingBro

4th reason: Best practices are the antithesis to kaizen, do I have to say more? #YoureStuck

Become Better, be the change

5th reason: Best practices deny men the greatest pleasure of them all, discovery. The day that you switch your brain from following the best practice is the day you might discover something awesome about yourself. The day you start listening to the person you are talking to without having the mental block of the best practice that doesn’t allow you to agree with him. That day you will grow. The day you will say “eureka!”. The day you will discover you are FUNDAMENTALLY WRONG. I love those moments, they make my brain go at 200 miles an hour and in a day I grow more than in 10 years.   #NoEureka!

Everything’s squared away

To finish I wanted to thank a few people that helped me reach the “eureka!” moments, you are the reason why I have evolved and I am a better person today than I was before.

In no particular order:

Monica Campardo, Emmet Townsend, Diego Armando Maradona, Roberto Lo Giacco, Gojko Adzic (twice!), Don Gabriele, Aunty “Zia” Enrica, Lisa Crispin and Janet Gregory (books), Mary Coyle, Giacomo Leopardi (poems), My high school Maths teacher (I don’t remember his name but was known among students as “il Roscio” => “The ginger”), Eric Ries (books), Barry O’Reilly and the other guys in ThoughtWorks, Jayne McCormack, My Brother Duccio, Evariste Galois (books), Gianluca Perazzoli, Gerard M. Weinberg (books), My lovely sister in law Luana, My Nana (highest amount of times), Martin Fowler (blog), Gandhi (life and quotes), Auntie Ada, Massimo Troisi (movies), Roy Phillips, Roberto Benigni (movies), Dan North, The “Dude” in the Big Lebowsky

I thank you all with all my heart for proving me FUNDAMENTALLY WRONG that day, and inspiring me to become a better person. I might have forgotten one or two, sorry folks.

Do you want to be in the list? Prove me FUNDAMENTALLY WRONG and give me a “eureka!” moment, I will love you forever!

The “Dude” proved me wrong when I thought I had to be a serious and stiff arsehole to be liked by people

The Cover Your Ass Manifesto

#ImRightUreWrong

We are uncovering better ways of covering our own ass by systematically documenting all we do and blaming others in the process.

Through this work we have come to value:

Being always right over delivering value
Accusing others over resolving a problem
Finger pointing over team support
Measuring anything to find somebody to blame over doing our job

That is, while there is value in the items on the right, we first cover our own ass and point fingers, then we rightfully go home and bitch about you.