daily post

Should feel like an intellectual exercise between friends

From one of my favorite books – How google works

“Intellectual” – testing the limits of a candidates thinking capacity

Can they dissect a problem in smaller questions to answer

Do they enjoy the process

“Friends” – the candidate must feel comfortable and open to speak their mind

Interviewers coming across as authoritative figures or assertive are less likely to foster that environment

I have seen wonders happening when the other person is open in sharing what they are ‘really’ thinking

Don’t judge any answer on the spot, come across as helping and empathetic

That goes a long way in helping the ‘real person’ come out and talk

More than often it’s not but it must

There are a couple of reasons for this from my understanding

Automation results are not important since they might not be checking an important part of the test strategy

Or the effort is in some way being duplicated

Or there is not enough by in from the complete team on this

Whatever the case may be, it should be considered important

Which will not happen IMHO unless the push comes from upper management

More on that here:

https://goo.gl/yYuWSv

Years ago I had to make this choice, between staying open or closing

That’s when I started believing in sharing and caring and till date is one of my strongest values

I was at a crossroad between closing my knowledge to myself to safeguard safety of my job

Or opening up, risking my job (what I thought) but spreading the good which I always have been passionate about

It was faith that helped me stand firm, despite seeing imminent harm coming my way

I decided to keep spreading good because

All that’s up to me is choosing between the right and tough path, or the easy and wrong path

The result was never really in my hands, it has been and always will be as God decided

All I can have is believe and faith

But once I walked this path,

It all reciprocated back in many times more

The result was far better than could have imagined

This is more of a reminder for me than to anyone else

Keep sharing, keep caring and keep believing..

It’s going to be a far more rewarding life than locking yourself into a tomb of selfishness

Whenever making a decision, default state should be open

The TCP/IP protocol case in point

Just by keeping it open, the internet was born

Another example, Jenkins

Keeping it open to connect and open source, it’s the most common CI tool and brought about the concept way early than it’s time

We usually have our default state as closed, under special circumstance we open it up

This strategy is not as effective anymore in this age

I’ve learned you need both detail and a minimal version

I’m always big time on logging test results

I am happy when our results provide sufficient debug information

So the engineer can figure out the problem just by looking at the log files

For which you will need screenshots of errors (in UI’s case)

Also the results need to be ‘readable’ and ‘similar’ to the test cases rest of the team is used to

And lastly, recently I’ve felt I need two versions, the detailed report with screenshots of errors

And a smaller version for archiving purposes

Helps to go back and see what test was failing 6 months earlier while diagnosing a problem

More here:
https://goo.gl/z2g9ui

From the age of craftsman to industrialism and back to craftsman

A few hundred years ago there were no Jobs, because no one employed anyone (like today)

It was the age of craftsmanship, each person used to sell their skill individually

Came along the industrial revolution and we needed ‘obedient and intelligent clerks’ to do the same task day in and out

With time we’ve become smart enough to automate any process which is repeatable

Hence all those workers doing the same job day in and out will be replaced by machines

But craftsman are now on the rise, we look for ‘innovation’, ‘newness’ which is not repeatable (Credits: Seth Godin)

In the context for testing, are we doing ‘innovation’, or just mundane repeatable tasks..

Testing IMHO is anything but a repeatable set of instructions

Thoughts?

#RedefiningSoftwareQuality

And by connect I mean talk to them in person?

I don’t know who is the least, but software engineers are surely are one of the last to talk

We’d rather spend more time typing it on some form of electronic media instead of talking to the person

Using technology is good, but typing to someone down he hall is not cool..

80% communication is through body language

A research showed 86% of sales pitch outcomes were predicted correctly without hearing a WORD of what was being said

More on communication and Engineers here:

One of them could be to use Jenkins running multiple Agent nodes

That means yes there are other ways (other than Jenkins)

Agent nodes in Jenkins (more commonly referred to as slave nodes) are used run ‘jobs’ on multiple environments

And there are a lot of different ways you can do this setup

From having multiple physical machines, to VMs to dockerized environments to cloud hostings or SaaS services (Sauce Labs)

The variables I’d consider against each:
– Upfront cost and time
– Vs on-going / maintenance cost and time
– Scalability in the long term
– Support for all needed environments
– Team skill set / learning curve

Everyone has a preference, in some cases I found VMs did a good job

However my preference would be for Docker, and if budget allows hosting services

Anything else you’d add to the equation?

Which unfortunately dimishes with age

I see my kids as toddlers are curuious every second they are awake

Sometimes I wonder what happens to us as we grow, where does this urge to explore and learn go

There can be many things attributed to it, from educational methods to the society at large

What’s important is to keep the fire alive

Stay foolish, stay hungry to learn, explore and share

You can be old at 18 by stopping to learn and explore

Or you can be young at 60 by staying hungry and willing to learn and evolve

Remember when it took ages to setup localhost servers like TomCat back in the day?

I am amazed how that process has changed by now

Created a front end application in Angular 4 a few months ago

Before starting I was dreading from the localhost server installation

To my surprize, NPM did the whole thing in the blink of an eye..

I call this abstraction over abstraction

Libraries and whole frameworks have been developed smoothening the process

Now you can spend less time making code bases compatible with one another and focusing more time on the architecture and logic