Friday, November 30, 2018

Open Source and the New World of Creator Responsibility









There was a great example of that this week.




Thursday, November 29, 2018

Forced Consistency Across Teams

The first thing I taught to our latest 15-year-old trainee was what we believe that rules and processes need to be built with a core principle in mind: trust.

If someone might commit a crime, we don't put everyone in jail.

Many of the corporate processes and principles are an illustration of people really not getting this idea.

We make people clock in and out of work so that we know they worked. Except in this industry, time at place of work is a ridiculous metric. I should know, I've just had two weeks of motivational issues where I was at work and performed really bad (to my standards).

We make people write test cases and tick the box as they complete them, because, quoting an old manager of mine "no one in their right mind would test if they were not monitored in this detail" Well, I did. And still do. And I love it. The devs loved it as soon as it wasn't tick-the-box.

We introduce common practices and processes for teams with very different skillsets and background, even if there was no common problem those solve.

When I look at processes and practices, I note that I have personal preferences. I prefer no estimates, no Jira, end-to-end visibility and sense of ownership, understanding and solving problems. I recognize that everyone in my team has their own personal preferences, and I respect their preferences as I expect them to respect mine. I do compromises, like spend my time suffering with Jira just because they still haven't figured out that it isn't making them better. And they experiment with whatever ideas we all interject into the efforts of trying to make things better.

What inspired me to write this is a discussion about my personal dislike for definition of done.

I believe definition of done is a great tool for building a common understanding for a team on what they try to mean when they say done. I've used it, multiple times.

I've come to think of it as "definition of done for now"-

I've learned that a deeper version of it is risk-based definition of done for now, even within one team. Cookie cutter templates rarely work for other than getting started.

I've experienced over and over again how forcing definition of done over many teams for reasons of consistency is short-sighted. First you have to understand if the teams are consistent, or if some are steps ahead of others, and approaching the same problem with a different solution could actually improve things more.

As with any practices and processes, I don't accept that it would be our only option for improvement. Using time on one thing is time away from something else - the idea of opportunity cost. If Definition of Done would help us make sense in a messy multi team setting, would any other approaches work? Could you redesign the team compositions to force the architecture you aspire that would drive down the dependencies, leveraging Conway's law? Could you instead of a Definition of Done (there are plenty of examples what this contains), describe your team's responsibilities in some other format that would enable you to see a dimension DoD misses?

Using Jira states the different way is hardly the reason why developers find it hard to start working on a new component. Looking at the code and its structures is a much more likely reason. Lack of documentation and training is a much more likely reason.

Go for consistency when it solves a problem without introducing bigger ones. Putting everyone in jail because one might rob the bank tends to be a bigger problem.

The Broken Phone Effect

I was totally upset with a colleague of mine, and to ease my heart, I ranted about them to my manager. Like that colleague just reminded me today, it is so hard to understand people like me who would just talk about problems without expecting a solution. And this rant was like that. I wasn't expecting an action. I just needed to talk.

Like so many times, I found that the metadata of what type of request was coming in from me did not go through. When my communication headers included the metadata asking for a sympathetic ear, and a mirror to bounce things off, they only received the default: When presented a problem, solution is in order.

The solution however was particularly good this time. They suggested that I'd go and talk to my colleague. I did. It felt overwhelming and difficult. But it was a start of many great conversations where we built trust on one another, now knowing that we could constructively talk about anything and everything.

So I distilled my lesson. When I had something I felt strong enough to rant to another person, perhaps taking the extra step and talking to them directly, not about what *they do* but about what *I feel*, was a path worth taking.

With this lesson in mind, I've asked many people to talk to me directly when I'm involved in how *they feel*. I believe they cannot tell me what to do, but they can help me understand how what I do makes them feel and I may choose to work on my behaviors, or at least help them understand how I make sense of the world. Remembering how hard those steps are, I appreciate that many people choose avoidance. I still choose avoidance in righteous anger when I feel neither my status nor the past agreements justify me taking the first step. The word "emotional labor" comes to mind. Bridging in disagreements requires that, and I'm tired of it being expected it is my duty to perform it for the others.

Over the years as I have been blogging, people have reached out to tell they've been through what I write about. While I write for myself, I also write for people like myself. People who aspire to change themselves, change the results they contribute, change the world in some small way. My stories are not factual representations of events, but they are personal intertwining of many experiences that allow me to shine light to a relevant experience.

When my manager calls me telling I should not say "Google me", I wish the person I offended would have had the guts to talk about this without the broken phone effect. I could have explained that I mean that you will find articles I've written, research I've done and that I did google your background enough to see that you are talking to someone who knows something of this stuff. Assume good intent. I rarely say things to insult.

If you have something to say, talk to me about it. If you don't but changed your ways for the better anyway, I'm fine with you being annoyed with me and avoiding me. Mutual loss, but we both have options.

A great option is to break the broken phone effect and just deal with your own stuff instead of sending a messenger. It might have a second order positive impact.

I tried, I failed, I succeeded. I learned. Can you say the same? FAIL is a first attempt in learning and takes a significant amount of courage.

Tuesday, November 27, 2018

Pay to Speak and Why Non-Profit Does Not Mean What You Think

Four years ago, I started a conference as an experiment in figuring out how a tech conference could be more fair to speakers. I had experienced many sleepless nights trying to figure out what were my values as a mother of two in allocating the family money to Pay to Speak at conferences, just because it was something I personally aspired for.

Looking at the way I felt about my immediate choices I had to make within my family, and the greater scheme of things in the community, I started actively looking at a theme I plugged #PayToSpeak. It was an observation that while conferences sell the possibility to come hear speakers teach what  they had learned, I found myself short of money as showing up at conferences was something where I was expected to pay my travel and accommodation. I paid, just like everyone else, building barely enough name to get to a point I could have a choice.

In the greater scheme of things, people like myself of with less privilege than what I had as a single mother of two, suffer more from #PayToSpeak. Also, where you work matters - some companies seek the visibility in your conferences and are willing to pick up the travel bill, while I personally have chosen to work in product companies that would choose to invest their visibility euros in other conferences than the ones I want to speak at.

So I created a sheet, and very recently upped it to a web site with a link to the sheet. It will move forward when I feel I have time and energy. But it serves a purpose already as it is. You can check out to learn about the theme.

Fairly regularly, I get conference representatives asking me to present them in a more positive light. CAST chairperson Maria Kedemo asking for improvements in the documents is not unusual.
However, I have not yet found a way of presenting information like this. As you may guess from the title of my post, being a non-profit is not as obvious tick box as you might think.

The difference of a non-profit and company as organizer is hard to describe. Both can organize the same conference. Both can organize it for the same price for participant. Both can choose to use most of the money to pay salaries for the organizers, and all expenses for the speakers. Both can choose to be #PayToSpeak. The only real difference is in what they can choose to do with the profits.

Remember, profit is what is left after all the costs. Salaries are costs. So even for a company, you don't have to end up making profit.

What non-profit do with the profit they raise is that  they run their cause. The cause for AST is admirable. They use the money they make in conferences in financially supporting small testing communities that need that money to bring in speakers, pay event organizing costs, start new events. AST played a core role in financially supporting my conference on year one, saving me from some of the financial stress taking a risk of going into organizing with them, rather than all by myself.

My conference uses the profits on supporting new speakers traveling to other #PayToSpeak conferences, and enabling people who aspire to speak to experience a conference they can't pay for. With the cost structure of always paying the speakers expenses and being uncertain about number of paying participants, the profits from the conference to use on the cause have not been very large.

Instead, my conference has served as an experimentation platform. I can now say that  while speakers are important, the sales and marketing effort is more important in a conference's success. I have found new respect for people who manage to run series of conferences with volunteers only, and for conferences that pay their organizers. The choices of what work / costs are worth paying from the conference budget are not easy, and will be versatile and hard to describe.

So I choose to only describe in my sheet the immediate impact for the speaker - what money out of pocket are they expected to find or what financial support they can expect to see, should they volunteer as speakers.

I dream of a world we we'd also have the money to compensate for used time for the speakers. That means that the audience - all of us - needs to have money to pay for those services. The world is more than half-full of people for whom their companies never paid a single tech conference. They might never get to go, or if they go, it is personal time off.

Tuesday, November 20, 2018

Stop Analyzing, Start Automating

I see systems. I guess we see things we like seeing, and I like seeing how the bits and pieces connect, what is clear and what is wrapped in mystery of promises of more learning in the future. I like seeing value, and users and flows. And pieces alone are part of that flow, but the promise comes together with the system.

For years, I've tested systems. I've figured out ingenious ways of seeing what changes, learning heuristics of what changes matter, all grounded on knowing why would anyone want to use this? Every moment testing an individual piece, as an exploratory tester, connects somehow to a greater purpose in the context of the system.

When I worked with a team of 10 developers with their only tester, we were doing daily releases without test automation, and it worked great. It worked great into slowly but steadily introducing test automation. But even without test automation, in contained the size of change. Each change would flow isolated through the pipeline with the manual steps. Just like coding was manual, testing was that too. Think, test, implement, test, think, release - a steady flow of features of value.

But now, the scale is different. Where I had 10 people before, I now have 100. And 100 developers, doing non-isolated changes merging to trunk as soon as they think they're ready is change at a pace one tester, even with  the ingenious ways of seeing things and knowing things, it is just too much. This is where test automation as documentation comes in. With executable documentation, test automation frees my energy to analyze on top of it, not all of it. I no longer need to analyze details, but trends. Clusters of changes. Driving forces for those changes. Risks in the system, and risks in the people creating those systems. Automation catches some of it - quite a lot of it. And what it does not catch, is a chance of identifying what the automation is missing. To document with test automation.

I find myself in places where automation at first is more of a wishful thinking than actual net of coverage. But learning, every day, and documenting with automation, it grows every day.

My analyzing changes on backlog visualization. If I can fix and forget, I would go there. But sometimes things need bigger focus. And as an exploratory tester and a system tester, I see what we miss. I label it, and ask for it.

I wouldn't know how to connect this stuff with reality if I did not spend time, hands on, with the systems we're building. The product works as external imagination, making my requests of what should be tested more practical. And while I prepare for the automation work, I just so happen to have already tested without the automation, found some problems and gotten them fixed.

We emphasize automation, for a reason. But in addition to folks who automate, we need folks who care for identifying things that take us further, make our automation do real testing. Not end to end, but covering a web of granular feedback mechanisms, so that we know when things are not right.

Saturday, November 10, 2018

New Speakers, New Stories - Agile Testing Days USA SpeakEasy Track










Changing the Discussion around Scope













Getting best ideas to win

There's a phrase I keep repeating to myself:
Best ideas win when you care about work over credit. 








Wednesday, November 7, 2018

Achievements of a Silo








