I recently had an opportunity to talk at Amadeus Inc.'s
internal learning forum. I got an invite to talk sometime in Nov. 2015 but some
of the prior commitments made me to defer delivering the talk till
11th-Jan-2016. In the end, I was glad that I made it and enjoyed delivering the
talk, which I titled as- "Taking
the Plunge- Lessons Learned in an Evolving Testing Career". It was an
hour long talk that I had themed more based on my experiences. In this session,
I focused on some of the mistakes that i have made in my career and shared a
perspective on how not to do stuff.
I have long observed that in most of the conferences, the
professionals do well to share the innovation and creative stuff they are
doing. There is nothing wrong in this sharing but what i find dearly missing is
that there are almost no talks focused on sharing the mistakes that
professionals have done.
I do considering sharing mistakes as an apt means to
contributing back to the profession because sharing them, in a way, makes sure
that the next generation of professionals won't do the same mistakes as you
have done and hence leading to betterment. One day, i do hope to see a
conference organized in which people just share their mistakes and talk about
how they went about correcting them. Always sharing achievements and super
efforts is plain boring and if repeatedly done, becomes less inspiring too.
Below is the summary of key points that i spoke.
Key points I shared:
Opening thoughts:
1. Taking the plunge means-
Venture something, commit oneself,
To begin an unfamiliar venture, especially after hesitating
To decide to do something
To devote oneself to or undertake an activity earnestly or wholeheartedly
2. Two main ways to contribute back to one’s profession,
Do
innovations and share with others
Do
mistakes and share with others.
Having
been in conference circles for a long time, what I noticed was that people are
sharing their innovations but they aren't doing as much on sharing the mistakes
front. I just feel that has to change for the betterment of the profession.
3. The hard thing is not making mistake and correcting it.
The hard thing is making mistake, correcting it and be open, bold and
courageous to share the learnings with others.
Some of the factors
that makes one great- professionally:
4. Greatness in testing or any other profession is not a
matter of doing exceedingly well for a session or a day or a year. It’s a
career thing.
5. “Will someone else (not you) attempt to acknowledge your
own legacy?
6. A viable test for greatness- "Are you the reason
people join Software testing?"
Basic thoughts on
Software testing:
7. No Job is inferior or superior, only our thinking is.
9. Good
engineers first understand the “why” and the “what”, bad engineers jump
straight to the “how”.
9. Fact: Software testing is not complete till it is
communicated
10. If I want to get better at testing, I must read and
apply plenty of testing books alone. This a wrong notion.
11. Learn broadly, Apply specifically
People relationships
do matter at work:
12. Good relationship tip: If you want something from
someone, never reach out to them for the first time when you need that very
thing.
13. Good relationship tip: Use Praise genuinely, intelligently
and at the right time
What trends are
impacting Software testing? (Will write separate blogs to explain these)
14. Amazon
makes changes to production every 11.6 seconds on average in May of 2011.
Facebook releases to production twice a day. Many Google services see
releases multiple times a week, and almost everything in Google
is developed on mainline. Continuous delivery is the buzz word.
15. One of the main uses of continuous delivery is to ensure
we are building functionality that really delivers the expected customer
value. The idea is that- even if you build a project on time, on budget
and with high quality, it still isn’t sure to be a success if the customers
don’t consider it valuable.
16. Gmail was launched in 2004 and was in beta till 2007.
Users did bulk of testing.
17. Companies doing code reviews post push to production. It
was unheard of earlier but is happening now. From
Quora's engineering site-At Quora, we
generally do post-commit code reviews. That is, the code goes out live in
production first and someone comes and reviews the code later. To give you an
idea of the scale, yesterday 48 of us pushed code 187 times in total.
Post-commit reviews are great since they unblock the author to push code and
move on to other tasks.
18. Software testing facing pressure from Revolutionary
development methods like lean start-up, Rapid release velocity like in the case
of Amazon, Architecture evolution like Platform style architecture, Software
appearance evolution like the advent of invisible software, And the direction
from visionaries.
19. Consumers are fast taking up the role of testers.
20. Automation becoming mandatory part of test job
description.
21. Will software eat software testing ?
22. What got you here won't get you there ? The skills of
past that made us successful may not make us successful in future too.
23. The core question everyone should ask is- “what am I
doing to prepare myself, my practice, and my company for this new reality?”
24. If the company grows, then there may come a time later
down the line when the company outgrows an employee because the employee still
has the same skill set that he had when he first joined. Employees need to
develop foresight to avoid this trap.
Manager-Subordinate
relationship
25. Manager-Employee relationship is one of the most talked
about, yet ironically one of the least understood relationship. Almost everyone
you know is a boss to some people and subordinate to some other. We play dual
roles in the organizations i.e. that of subordinate and that of a boss.
26. The two core questions- a) What does your boss owe you?
b) What do you owe your boss?
27. When your consciousness and focus in any relationship is
driven by what the other person owes you that what you owe that person, that is
asymmetry. Asymmetry means you are giving less than what you take out of that
relationship. This asymmetry exists in most of subordinate-employee
relationship and is the root cause of strife and disappointment. Hence, it is
important for any good subordinate to think about the boss’s needs as much as
he or she would like the boss to think of his or her needs.
28. There is a great deal of literature available on how to
be a good leader or a manager but very less information that exists on how to
be a good subordinate.
29. Aristotle once remarked- “The true test of a first class
mind is the ability to hold two diametrically opposite thoughts in the mind and
yet be able to function.”
Thoughts on Career
management:
30. The most dangerous phrase in the language is "we've
always done it this way."
31. When was the last time you did something that completely
changed the course of the way you test?
32. Can you write your own version of “Lessons learned in
Software testing”?
33. We are becoming slightly obsolete every single day.
34. "Life is on an incline. You either go
up, or you come down."
35. A normal career is around 30-35 years or around 8085
days or around 1820 weekends. One of the weekends just passed by, other one is
coming. Respect time and how you use it, it’s just constantly passing by. Doing
more in a stipulated time leads to satisfaction, Doing less leads to regret.
Choose your path wisely!
