This break from writing was not intentional and it was not really a break since I was really busy with tons of PractiTest work and some additional heavy-duty chores related to caring for 2 small children during their summer vacations.   But there was also a positive side to this pause since it gave me a chance to reflect on what I’ve written on the blog so far, the subjects I’ve covered and those I haven’t gotten to yet.

I did something interesting, using “wordle” (a very cool app!) I generated a word map of the blog’s content:

Word Cloud for the QABlog

It was no surprise that the word TESTING came so strong and central, but there were also some other words that took an important place and I want to take this chance to review them.


SHARE – Sharing is (almost) always positive, but in Software Development and specially in Agile Teams it becomes one of the biggest success or failure factors.
I am currently reading “Agile Testing” by Lisa Crispin and Janet Gregory and it covers this point broadly with many reasons why sharing and collaboration are two of the most important factors for succeeding in agile processes.  By the way, the book is a great read and I recommend it even to testers who are not part of Agile Teams.


TIME – If I had 3 wishes they would be happiness for my kids, world peace, and a 32 hour day!  Time is one of our most valuable assets and so we need to learn to manage it correctly.
But managing time is not enough, we also need to learn to respect it, both our time and that of our colleagues.  For me personally the biggest time waster is context switching. When I stop what I’m doing to read mails, answer IM’s or phone calls, or even when someone walks up to me to ask “just one small question” it takes me between 5 to 10 minutes to reach the level of concentration I was before the interrupt.  If you do this 2 or 3 times an hour you end up spending half the time just getting to restart your work.  Can you relate to this?


THINK – this is a big one!
Most of us don’t really think as much as we’d like to accept, we are mostly busy reacting to what is going on around us.
To really think we need to take a time-out, breath deeply for a couple of minutes and clear our heads from all the urgent things in order to focus on the important ones (notice that most times the urgent things are not necessarily the most important ones!).  When was the last time you did this??
Whenever we take the time to THINK we use our resources better by investing them on the tasks that are really needed.  It’s a shame we don’t get to do this more often…


DEVELOPERS – these guys and galls are our biggest allies, and yet they’re also the ones with whom we tend to be most in-conflict during our projects.
Our relationship with developers makes me think about the classic book “Men are from Mars & Women are from Venus” by John Grey.  In fact we need to understand that the issues between developers and testers are mainly linked to the fact that we are 2 different species (or at the least belong to 2 different cultures) and in order to communicate and work together we need to understand and respect the principles of the other side, what’s important for each of us, and how each one approaches problems and challenges in his own way.
The key lies in understanding & communicating with your colleagues- just like in all types of relationships.


PERSPECTIVE – one of my personal favorites and closely related to thinking.
When you are in the middle of the forest it becomes too hard to look at the trees.  Perspective allows us to take a new look at the issues we are working on and check for new and interesting stuff even in the places we’ve already visited multiple times before.
Gaining perspective is relatively easy, you just need to fully focus your attention on another subject for some time and then revisit your previous task.  Just by switching context you will be able to see things under a different light.
I use this all the time: when testing to make sure I really covered all the important scenarios; when trying to solve problems by looking for different approaches that may give a better result; and even when in I find myself arguing with a colleague when I take time-off to cool down and think about the stuff that is really important.  Give it a try, and tell me if it worked for you!


Lastly an interesting pairing of words that came out of the random image:
GOOD SCENARIOS – something I have not talked about much in the blog but a subject I think I will write about in the near future


I am hoping that now that summer vacations are reaching their end, and after having released some pretty amazing stuff in PractiTest that we were working on for a number of weeks, I will have some more time in my hands to continue posting more regularly…

Related posts:

1. When you think you’ve done enough, go for a walk and then think again
2. Testing the image in the mirror
   - or -
   Why a good tester needs to be Self-Critical?

[ NOTE: By "test" in the title I aim at the broader meaning of testing that includes all the activities around learning, planning, exploring, reporting, and obviously checking the application in order to understand if it works properly and/or find bugs on it. In this sense you could easily replace TEST with WORK and it would still mean the same.]


Last week someone sent me a link to a video by Jason Fried, co-founder of 37Signals, called “Why You Can’t Work at Work“. I’ve followed Jason’s writings for a while and most of the time I agree with his comments and ideas, but this specific short video really hit the nail for me.

What do you do with your time in the office?

So I did a short back-of-the-envelop calculation of a “typical tester workday” and I came up with the following time distribution (that I am guessing you can relate to it too):

TOTAL TIME IN THE OFFICE   ~   10 hours a day

- Morning setup (small-talk with peers, coffee & cereal)   ~   15 min
- Morning emails, news & blogs   ~   45 min
- Meetings (avg of 3 meetings  a day)   ~   3 hours
- Lunch   ~   1 hour
- Time helping others in their tasks   ~   1 hour
- Working distractions (mails, calls, “can you come for a sec…“)   ~   1 hour
- Other distractions during the day (calls, coffee, bathroom breaks)   ~   1 hour
Total Non-Working Time During The Day   ~   8 hours

ACTUAL WORKING (TESTING) TIME   ~   2 hours a day

What can you do about it?

As with most problems in life, I think the first step towards your solution is to realize you have a problem…  Then the second step is to start treating your time as something with value (to you if not to all the Organization).

What does this mean in practice?  Look for the things wasting your time and try to eliminate them or at least reduce them from your workday.

Let’s take meetings as an example:
- Don’t accept every meeting you are invited to, make sure there is a reason for you to attend (sometimes you can be more effective by simply reading the meeting summary or reviewing a document off-line)
- Demand that meetings be kept short! Who said a meeting should be 1 hour long? Why not 30 min?? Why not 20 min???
- If you feel you are not adding or getting any benefit from the meeting be polite but assertive and excuse yourself from the session.

And there are plenty of things you can do around meetings and many other time-wasters once you understand that time is your most valuable asset.

Set time aside to Do Work!

If your main problem is that you don’t find time to work, then schedule specific time-boxes in your agenda where you set aside time to work.  Try to do this when you are most productive; for me this is during the morning until around 11:00 and then from 3 to 5 in the afternoon, but this is usually different for everyone.

You need to make sure to communicate to the rest of the world that you don’t want to be bothered or interrupted during your work-time.  A good way of doing this is by posting a sign like this one in your door or desk:
If you work on an open-space or in a room with many people get a good set of head-phones (sometimes your employer may even agree to pay for them!) and find the music that let’s you concentrate on your tasks and work.

Let people know when you can be interrupted

This is a tricky one but if you want people to leave you alone to work, you also need to make sure to leave time aside to be interrupted or consulted.

For example, if you take breaks every hour (like I do) try to make them “on-the-hour” and let people know that they have 5 minutes at the beginning of each hour when they can come to ask questions.

You also need to work with non-interrupt communication mechanisms.  We use email for things that are not urgent, or IM for more urgent stuff.  I make sure that whenever I take my on-the-hour-break I check all the IM messages I had up to now, and at least 4 to 5 time a day I scan (not review!) my mailbox to see if there is something I need to attend to.

BTW, there are many people out-there who think you should go over your email once or maximum two times a day, I find this a little hard to do…

Work with the correct methodology and the tools that will help you be efficient

Email is a good example of this, when you ask co-workers to send you non-urgent requests via email instead of coming to bother you “live”.  But when you are talking directly about testing this becomes more a specific tool & method question.

Make sure your bugs are correctly written so that developers won’t come asking unnecessary questions.  All the information should be in the bug report itself!

Work with a system where your developers can automatically see the test and the steps you ran to find and reproduce the bug (I can think of at least one QA Management tool for this )

Execute your tests and give visibility to your manager so that she has all the information accessible to her all the time, don’t make her come to you seeking answers every time someone asks  a question about the test cycle or status of the product.  In short, make sure the people who depend on your work to do theirs can get all their information from the supporting testing tools and don’t require you to provide them information or even worst to interpret the information you already gave.

Telecommute

Many places don’t allow you to work off-site, but if you can get your manager to accept try to telecommute once every 2 to 4 weeks.  The amount of uninterrupted work you can do from work or from a  public library is amazing.  I also think that changing the work-atmosphere once in a while can trigger great work results.

In short…

Treat your time and your work as a valuable asset.  Once you respect it yourself it will be easier to ask others to do the same.

No related posts.

It all started while talking about parenting…

I had a short chat with James Bach the other day.  We didn’t talk about testing, certifications or software development; we talked about the challenges of being a good father, a more challenging task than any software project I’ve ever seen.

After that I tweeted with James and he sent me a very encouraging message saying (don’t remember the exact words but along the lines of) that he thought I would be a good father since I was self-critical.

The term SELF-CRITICAL got me thinking.
I started by analyzing how my self-criticism has helped me in almost every aspect of my adult and professional life.  Then I looked at the people around me, and realized that I was (and still am) able to work and communicate better with those in my environment who are able to auto-evaluate themselves and accept criticism more openly.

My conclusion was that the most valuable asset a self-critical person brings into a relationship is his ability to improve it by dynamically learning from the wins and losses, and evolving as the circumstances continue to change all around us.

What does this has to do with Testing?!

Well, the trivial answer is that it has EVERYTHING to do with testing!
The tester is the player in the development team that needs this quality more than anyone else.  The main reasons for this being that:

1.  Testing is a constant-learning activity.  As you run your tests, you analyze the result and evaluate them in light of your previous assumptions, in order to modify and even re-determine your testing path(/s).  The only way to do this effectively is if you are constantly open to self learning and ready to throw away your previous assumptions based on the feedback you get.

and

2.  You will never be able to provide good and deep criticism to the people around you if you are not able to accept such feedback yourself.

The most brilliant testers I’ve worked with share at least one common trait: they’re happy to learn from their mistakes, and are always willing to learn from what others tell them about what they were doing wrong and how to do it better.  Once you start accepting criticism freely you develop the ability not only to give and accept it from others, but also to give it to yourself and get it by constantly questioning if you are doing the right things.

So what is self-criticism?

It is the realization you are not expected to be perfect, since apparently no one is.
It is also the “permission” to make mistakes and errors in fair judgment, as long as you are willing to learn from them in order to make a better future.

It doesn’t mean that there are no consequences to your mistakes, but that these consequences don’t mean you cannot correct your actions the next time you have a chance to do it right.

Going back to raising kids, self-criticism might be the most important instinct we posses and one of the things we need to help develop in our kids; it is the principle that allows us to learn to walk by letting go, falling down and trying it again, realizing that falling-down doesn’t really matter in the long run.

Related posts:

1. A chance to take a look back
2. My Top 6 Tester Qualities during a Job Interview

2. Common Sense – As testers many times we need to make decisions based on incomplete pieces of information, the only way to succeed in this task is by having a good level of intelligence and common sense.  I don’t think every tester needs to be a genius (it won’t hurt either), but the candidate needs to at least display the ability to think and reach conclusions even when he doesn’t have all the data in his hands by extrapolating and “tying loose ends” in order to draw for himself a clearer and bigger picture.

3. Communication Skills – This is a must for most jobs, the ability to explain and communicate an idea to someone who is not in your immediate working context.  This is even more imperative of a tester who needs to explain non-trivial things like bugs, tests, and even potential risks related to the technical tasks they perform to people such as Developers, Managers, Product Owners or even Customers that will need to make important decisions based on these explanations.

4. Knowledge (basic or advanced) of Testing - If you want to be a tester make sure to understand what testing is about (at least in theory!!!).  Today there is no excuse for not having some idea about the principles of testing since everything (and I mean everything!) can be found on the Internet by doing a quick Google search.   If you want to go even further you can gain practical experience by joining some of the crowdsourcing testing communities such as UTest, WeekendTesters, or The SoftwareTestingClub Crowd

5. Some Knowledge of the Company they are Interviewing for – It may sound strange but I always want to know the person in front of me is curious enough to learn (even a little) about the company they are interviewing for.  In my mind anyone who comes to a company without knowing their basic business is not interested enough in order to get the job at hand.

6. Truthfulness – This last one is maybe the most important one for me, I need to trust the person in front of me.  If during the interview I reach the conclusion he is making things up and lying just to please me then I won’t be able to trust him in the future.
I will always be willing to compromise on some of the other attributes as long as I feel the person in front of me will be able to fill the gaps by investing his time and efforts, but if someone is not truthful then I won’t be able to trust him or his work.


Lastly, and to make sure I paint the whole picture, I always give extra-points for technical knowledge in the field in question, and this may even be a requisite if I am looking for an expert test engineer in a specific field such as load, security, etc.; but most of the times this is one of the attributes with less weight in my interviews.


So this is MY list, if someone has other stuff to add feel free to add bellow, it may even help me to improve my interviews and the way I select the people I work with in my projects!

Related posts:

1. How to survive your Job as a Start-Up tester
2. what makes a good tester?
3. Testing the image in the mirror
   - or -
   Why a good tester needs to be Self-Critical?

I read a blog by James Whittaker analyzing how for him Software Testing is still stuck in the 90s while the rest of the (technological) world has evolved greatly.  Today I will disagree with Mr. Whittaker since I think we as testers have not thrown all we’ve done away and we have seen real advancement in many areas of our work field.

As he writes in his post, back in 1990 I was a 16 year old high-school student, and as he says I didn’t have an email address (I will say that even in Costa Rica I did have a PC computer running Windows).  To tell the truth I only started doing software testing around 1997, but I still have a clear reference point and can definitely see how the Testing Profession has evolved in these last 10-13 years.

Methodological Testing

We can talk about important methodological advances with the implementation and proliferation of testing techniques such as ET and even some more complex techniques that are still been developed and perfected such as Model Based Testing.

As a tester and a test manager I have seen how we evolved from working as an ad-hoc,  unorganized and (at least in my mind) unprofessional bunch of “button-clickers”; and became professionals in the areas of risk analysis, user advocacy and both structured and heuristically testing techniques.

Not to mention what the current Agile (r)evolution is doing not only to the Development world in general, but to the testing profession in particular.

Testing Tools

When we look back at the subject of the tools we use in testing we can see that many of the “magical-record-replay” solutions that tool makers tried to sell to us felt short from the empty promises made on demos & presentations.

But we have also seen how these same functional automation tools evolved, and how the object recognition approach they were based on became very useful technology.   If you follow this area closely you can see how new approaches such as Keyword Driven Testing provide a more robust solution (still far from perfect), and how we have expanded the reach of the automated testing realm to include more and more business experts to collaborate with our day-to-day work.  Additionally we can see how today we have excellent free tools such as Selenium or Watir (to name only 2!) that make this area more economically accessible to all.

Test Management has also evolved from a science based on excel-sheets and emails, to advanced QA Management Platforms that allow us to seamlessly manage teams and processes regardless if they are all located in a single room, or dispersed over the world in 3 continents and separated by 15 time-zones.

And finally we can look at the advances in load testing tools with the low level analysis that can be reached today with some of the most advanced tools out there, allowing us not only to determine bottle-necks but show the specific areas in the system where they occur.  This is far from the load testing results of “500 users it works – 510 it crashes” that we were able to provide 10 years ago.

The Testing Career & Global Community

Lastly, and to cut it short since we can continue providing examples for a long time we can also talk about the career of the software tester.

What used to be a 1-2 year span before you became a real developer, product manager, or support engineer; became a legitimate career for many excellent professionals who see themselves growing and developing as testers.

Just the increasing amount of professional paths you can take within testing, each with its specialization and challenges, make testing more and more attractive for many engineers that either enter testing directly from school or get into testing after spending time doing development and looking for a more interesting and challenging career path.

Add to this the expanding online tester communities (for example the SoftwareTestingClub) that let you connect, share and learn from many great professionals around the globe and you get additional positive momentum that is already taking our profession higher and higher, day after day!

Maybe its time to turn on the lights

I have no doubt that the overall value we testers generate today is a lot more than that we did 10, 15 or 20 years ago.

So, I think that many of the people who still think we are stuck in the 90s and that most of what we’ve done has been spent and thrown away without really advancing our profession or the way we work today, are suffering from some sort of myopia or lack of perspective.  Maybe a good way for them to come out of the dark ages of testing would be simply by turning on the lights and taking a good look around.

Related posts:

1. Coffee, Nature & Software Testing…

I love making weird connections between apparently unrelated stuff.  This morning I was watching a Monty Python short in YouTube and it reminded me of one of the most important lessons in group communications.

So here is the short – http://bit.ly/daIENg

And for those who didn’t make the automatic connection, the important communication lesson is to understand how to pass along information to each of our Stakeholders based on their specific needs and communication channels.

In our case this means to know what information is useful (bugs, tests, coverage, risks, etc?) and in what format is the appropriate (graphs, tables, written reports, dashboards, etc) for each one of our Main Stakeholders.

And remember to always look on the bright side of life…

Related posts:

1. Using your Kitchen as a Communication Channel
2. Testing Intelligence, a case for Intelligent Testing
3. Testing Outputs that generate added value to the Organization