daily post

There is a lot that goes into building a great team,

IMHO hiring the ‘right’ people and then giving them freedom are key ingredients.

The ‘right’ people may not be just highly skilled, but also have the right attitude and social skills.

Giving freedom is even harder part. But remember, your building a great team to ‘think’ and give you solutions, not so you tell them what to do.

Giving freedom not only leads to good decisions, but also increases ownership in the team

When they are taking decision, then they try their best to make it a success – if you decide on their behalf, there’s less ownership.

And all of that leads to good quality. Ultimately quality is not something you paint on top – it’s the way you build software determines the quality.

#RedefiningSoftwareQuality #AgileTransformation #TeamBuilding #Hiring

“Default to open” (from how google works by Eric Schmidt)

Many of us designing platforms, gathering information / insights, generating product documentation, source code – the default state is to keep it all secure location

Then we start thinking about giving access on ‘need basis’ and ask people of ‘evidence’ why they need access

At first this may seem like common sense and harmless, but before you know you have all sorts of things under lock and key

Different project source codes, product documentation, analysis, features being developed, CI pipeline test results… and the list goes on

This stifles progress and engineers to do their job well, most of their time then is spent ‘unblocking’ themselves.

The default setting to EVERYTHING should be ‘OPEN’, not ‘CLOSED’.

Engineers in your teams are not hired to do dummy jobs like building walls, they are hired to THINK

And if you want to help them take good decisions, they need to be exposed to first hand information / stats & figures.

To have true autonomy, you should have free flow of information.

#RedefiningSoftwareQuality #AgileTransformation #Transformation

Today I learned positivity has a special place in ‘being’ agile.

Unless your team does not have a positive vibe, they wouldn’t be able to self-organize and be productive.

From my personal experience, when I’m feeling down my productivity starts to dwindle.

For many of us, we are driven by our past experiences and most of us don’t expect really great things at work. We’re just waiting to find something negative and start with our rant.

If we treat “The past as a place of reference, not a place of residence” [1] things would be a lot better.

“The past is a place of learning, not a place of living” [1] – live in the present with a positive attitude!

[1] Roy T. Bennett

#AgileTransformation #Positivity

Flakiness kills automation..

The worst team I’ve seen, their scripts flakiness was around 70 – 80% !

With that kind of failure rate, looking at the reports was impossible, so instead they saved ‘error’ messages from the AUT separately and look only at those

That was an extreme, but more than often I see teams having inadequate details in their reports

I’m happy to see over years reporting libraries have improved, still sometimes come across teams not doing it well.

Further on automation test reports in the linked article (first comment)

#TestAutomation #TestReport

Crystallize your target state, but plan for only few weeks ahead..

The mistake I’ve made in the past is to plan every step of the way on how to reach the target state.

Being agile, to me, means have a very clear picture of where you want to go but only plan the steps you’ll take in the next few sprints.

We’re bad at planning and cannot predict very well, so plan just enough.

For this to work, management and the team need a little faith.

You’ll get there, but by taking small steps in the right direction and course correcting, not by planning every step of the way’.

#RedefiningSoftwareQuality #AgileTransformation #Agile

Should tester’s learn programming? And is it just for automation?

IMHO, every software engineer should be able to program, and it’s not just for automation,

Rather the ability to understand production code and how the control flow works across the tech stack.

Not everyone has to be a wiz at the whole architecture, but not completely clueless either –

IMHO the justification of: “I test just like the user, hence I have no need of knowing how the product technically works” is extremely wrong

Every software engineer should have the capability to look at code and make sense out of it.

#RedefiningSoftwareQuality #TechnologicalExcellence #Automation #Transformation

Most common calculation of Automation ROI:

Savings = Manual execution time * no. of times expected to run

Except, this doesn’t give any real value..

These tests we are calculating under time ‘saved’, mostly never get tested!

A lot of times testers just try to fit in whatever they can in the given time duration, and many of these tests just cannot be done

The real value of automation is the quick feedback you get

Instead of regression issues being reported weeks later, devs get instant feedback and takes a lot less to fix the issue.

Automation does save effort, but not in the way we usually calculate it.

Details on this and other ROI calculation aspects in the linked blog post

Don’t write code just good enough for releasing today,

But so it’s usable & maintainable a year later.

There are quite a few short cuts teams take under the pretense of Agile, this is one of them

Agile does not mean to release work which will have to be redone again, or with tech debt

Smaller release cycles never meant bad quality, and yes bad coding practice IS bad code quality

#RedefiningSoftwareQuality #Programming #CodeQuality

Job Seekers, Here’s what I call a “Unicorn employee”:

1. Hands on technical skills

• Has sufficient technical background and exposure to the job that needs to be done.
• Ability to demonstrate that knowledge

2. Is a Natural leader

• Mostly ends up leading people
• Ability to rally people behind a cause, not through authority, but by motivating them

3. Can communicate

• Ability to express themselves clearly to engineers and senior management (two very different set of skills)

I know, as engineers we dislike too much talking, or leading people.

From employers perspective: at certain level you need people with these skills, and are extremely rare to find

Unlike unicorns, these people do exist. so:

Become them, search for them, hire them and look after them , they are the drivers of your company.

#RedefiningSoftwareQuality #Hiring #JobSearch #CareerAdvice

“Testing IS a technical skill”, if there is no code involved, does not mean it’s not technical..

There are two extremes, one says testing is a mystical unique art which you are born with, either you have it or not

The other extreme says it’s not really a skill, it’s more of a chore you do, no learning required

IMHO both ends of the spectrum are wrong, it’s a technical skill which MUST be LEARNED and EXPERIENCED in (I call this #TestingAcumen).

So, if your a developer and will be involved in testing activities: testing is a skill you have to LEARN and PRACTICE, you don’t just wing it.

And for testers, more than half of them I meet are horrible at testing. If you’r a tester, just having ‘tester’ in the title does not mean you might be good at testing.

Testing is not an innate gift you were born with. It’s again a skill you have to lean & practice.

I’m all for agile transformation, that’s what I do on a daily basis, but not building your team’s testing skill and hoping your CI/CD is going to do some AutoMagic is a fallacy..

#RedefiningSoftwareQuality #QualityTransformation #Testing #AgileTransformation #DevOps #ContinuousTesting