How having a mentor / coach helps a tester be lead in a better path?

The context of this blogpost is captured here. In short, this is a part of Q & A i did with Women Testers website recently on the topic of careers and beyond. The questions were asked mostly by people who were at the early stages of their career. The series can be located at: https://www.womentesters.com/q-and-a-with-anuj-magazine-part-2/

Q) How having a mentor / coach helps a tester be lead in a better path?

[Anuj] Let’s see what role a good mentor plays. As I have seen, a good mentor:

1. helps you become as good as you can be.

2. observes, judges and guides (in that order).

3. asks the right questions at the right time. A mentor uses questions as a tool to bring you closer to solution.

4. will not give you all the answers but still teach you how to think.

5. helps you see the mirror through which you can judge your performance.

6. know how to break down performance into its critical individual components and suggest a plan for ailing components.

7. focus less on themselves and more on the mentees.

8. Helps mentees find blind spots in the performance.

A few years back, I enrolled myself in toastmasters club. The toastmasters club is focused on improving the public speaking skills. One of the effective mechanisms used in toastmasters club to improve public speaking skills is to break-down the frequent problems ailing communication in different buckets and then you receive an quantifiable feedback from judges on what went right and what went wrong.

The mere act of a few dedicated people dissecting your speech and providing you feedback enables you to improve communication skills that otherwise would need painfully longer to achieve.

Atul Gawande a renowned surgeon brought about remarkable improvement in his surgery skills by onboarding a coach who could give him feedback by observing live during an operation. Before Atul came up with this idea, he had been doing operations for around a decade, had done 2000 plus operations. He could have comforted himself feeling that he is an expert but he chose to extend the boundaries and seek feedback.

As he says in his inspirational article, goes on to say-

“Knowledge of disease and the science of treatment are always evolving. We have to keep developing our capabilities and avoid falling behind. So the training inculcates an ethic of perfectionism. Expertise is thought to be not a static condition but one that doctors must build and sustain for themselves.”

Isn’t the situation explained in this quote very similar to information technology (and by virtue of it, software testing) profession?

To stay relevant, we are having to build capabilities faster than the rate at which technology is changing. And we cannot achieve the career velocity by just reading the books or taking training courses. A good mentor helps fill the performance gaps that we feel does not even exist.

A couple of more perspectives to consider:

1. As much as good mentoring can help us scale new heights, it bears repeating that bad mentoring can make professionals worse. Choose your mentors wisely.

2. Good mentors can make you uncomfortable. It can be intimidating to think that someone is observing you, judging you and more often will give feedback that may make you look incompetent. For a mentoring relationship to work, it is the job of a mentee to give confidence to the mentor that he/she will be a good recipient of the feedback.

I am from a different background, I did my engineering in Electronics and Communications and I am working as an Exploratory tester, do you think me staying in testing field is productive?

The context of this blogpost is captured here. In short, this is a part of Q & A i did with Women Testers website recently on the topic of careers and beyond. The questions were asked mostly by people who were at the early stages of their career. The series can be located at: https://www.womentesters.com/q-and-a-with-anuj-magazine-part-2/

Q: I am from a different background, I did my engineering in Electronics and Communications and I am working as an Exploratory tester, do you think me staying in testing field is productive? Will my career be adventurously continuing as a tester or will I face any difficulties in the future? Nevertheless, I currently love the job I am doing but little confused so help me out with this.

[Anuj Mark Twain once said that “I have never let my schooling interfere with my education”.

Depending upon the way you look at it, educational qualifications can be your best ally or the worst enemy. More often, I have come across the people who just let go of wonderful opportunities because they weren’t formally trained in the subject of the opportunity or the subject didn’t comply with their formal education. Both these views eventually prove disastrous in the context of career planning and severely limits what one can achieve.

I do hold firm the belief that ‘Educational qualifications aren’t the end, but the means to a greater end’. The role that educational qualification play in the eventual success of human beings is nowhere closer to the role that traits like ‘loving what you do’, ‘passion’, ‘does your job allow you to live in the moment’, ‘having a point of view’, ‘negotiating your own success’, ‘managing upwards’, ‘embracing non-linearity in thinking about careers’, ‘creating positive differentiation’ and a lot more takes.

A lot of times I observe the LinkedIn profiles that tend to put the name of a recent certification they achieved next to their names. I have nothing against people doing certifications but by putting the name of certifications next to your name, you are sending signal to the entire world that your own brand is weak and you have to rely on a mere certification to give you visibility and differentiation. Don’t make educational qualifications your identity, you identity is defined by the factors bigger than educational qualifications such as the nature of problems you choose to solve, how well you execute and how well you communicate the impact you have created.

In summary, don’t let your electronics and communications degree self-limit you and come in the way of your success. Rather use it as a means to achieve something more meaningful in life.

Regarding the other part of your question ‘Will my career be adventurously continuing as a tester or will I face any difficulties in the future?’

I don’t really have a crystal ball to see your future but I do have a perspective to offer here. I learned from one of my mentors that:

‘Don’t be fooled into thinking that you have a lifelong career at any moment’.

What he meant by this was that, with all the changes happening around us careers can further be broken down into multiple micro-careers. A micro-career may last 2-3 years or even more depending on the shelf-life the skill under question. In testing or any other profession, one should be clever enough to figure out when to reinvent self. Reinvention in a career context is an act of unlearning what you know and fill yourself with newer skills and capabilities that can serve you for may be 2-3 more years and continue this cycle. A career span of 30-35 years will bring with it own sort of difficulties at times. Our goal shouldn’t be to avoid difficulties when faced but to be tenacious enough to try and find the way out of them.

For Women Testers, do you advice moving into technical role or management role as she moves forward in her career ?

The context of this blogpost is captured here. In short, this is a part of Q & A i did with Women Testers website recently on the topic of careers and beyond. The questions were asked mostly by people who were at the early stages of their career. The series can be located at: https://www.womentesters.com/q-and-a-with-anuj-part-1/

Q) For Women Testers, do you advice moving into technical role or management role as she moves forward in her career ?

[Anuj] Let me start by sharing 2 stories with you:

I recently ran Singapore full marathon. It was a gruelling course of 42.195 km with a very hot and humid conditions. In such a course, one seeks inspiration from fellow runners to keep at course and continue going. Many a times during the run, I looked up to female runners who were running better and strongly than I was.

A couple of years back a wrote this article: “What testers can learn from my wife” in Women testers website. In this story, I narrate how my wife inspires me professionally everyday. Being a woman in an extremely male dominated automobile industry, she managed to successfully carve a niche for herself, despite many odds facing her. She took-up and excelled in both management and technical path.

What I am trying to allude towards is that I don’t believe that gender should even be a factor in deciding or limiting yourself to choose any career path of your chose. Of course, there may be challenges in certain paths, but isn’t that true for anything worth doing in life.

One heuristic you can try choosing between technical and management role: If you like being with yourself more, try technical path. If you like being with people more, try management path. However, this heuristics is only valid for early stages in the career. As one grows towards more senior roles, even the technical roles need more and more social skills and management/leadership roles need more and more technical skills.

In summary, no career path is written in stone. Following 4 steps can help you reach your potential.

1.identify your strengths,

2.show appetite for experimentation,

3.if things don’t go as per your liking don’t hesitate to change course.

4.go to step#1.

I don’t see career paths from the lens of gender.

If I join as a SDET today, where should I see myself after 10 years?

The context of this blogpost is captured here. In short, this is a part of Q & A i did with Women Testers website recently on the topic of careers and beyond. The questions were asked mostly by people who were at the early stages of their career. The series can be located at: https://www.womentesters.com/q-and-a-with-anuj-part-1/

Q: If I join as a SDET today, where should I see myself after 10 years?

[Anuj] In the next 10 years, you should see yourself as a CEO of an organization making immense impact on the company, employees and society. 

What distinguishes us humans from other living species in the power to dream. Why waste this power by choosing to dream small. One promise we should make to ourselves is that whenever we think of future, it is bigger, bolder and better, much better than today. 

There is one more perspective I would like to offer on this subject. When we think of ten year career horizons, we generally tend to think growing vertically i.e. if I am an SDET now, I would be Senior SDET in 2 years, then Staff SDET and so on. There is nothing wrong in thinking vertically except for the fact that vertical plans for careers tend to be self-limiting. What I mean by self-limiting is that designations trap you into thinking that reaching next level is the only goal you should have even if you are capable and are performing at much higher levels. 

If you consider any industry leader you admire and look at their career profiles, I bet they wouldn’t have reached where they have reached by just following organization’s laid down career frameworks. They may have followed that a bit but more than that they would traversed horizontally and chartered their own unique paths.

In summary:

1. You are capable of reaching at unprecedented heights in your career in 10 years time provided you choose to aim higher at the first step.

2. Follow career paths laid down by organizations as a guidance at best but not the only way to grow. Successful people create their own paths however difficult it may be.

3. Like everything around you, within next 10 years the SDET role itself would have undergone transformation for good or bad. It’s best to have a pulse of what’s happening around you, have informed opinion about the future and change course as needed.

As a tester without dev/coding skills, how to become a technical tester with programming skills?

The context of this blogpost is captured here. In short, this is a part of Q & A i did with Women Testers website recently on the topic of careers and beyond. The questions were asked mostly by people who were at the early stages of their career. The series can be located at: https://www.womentesters.com/q-and-a-with-anuj-part-1/

Q: As a tester without dev/coding skills, how to become a technical tester with programming skills?

[Anuj] Let me first get the question right before getting to the answer.
To me, the phrase ‘Technical tester’ is an oxymoron.

In today’s day and age, everyone associated with software business are supposed to be sufficiently technical.

In my own career, I have interacted with professionals from spectrum of roles and functions. As example, one may argue that salespeople can escape with minimal technical skills. But the best sales people I have seen are the ones who are technically very articulate (among other skills)) and can strike rich conversations with customers. This, for a tester it’s a given that she has to be technically deep in the chosen area of expertise and technically broad in other related areas.

2. Second thing that I would like to correct in the question is the association of word ‘technical’ with only programming skills. Before you get me wrong, programming skills are without doubt important but they just aren’t the “only” technical skills out there. Right from your product architecture, APIs, underlying operating system, interactions with external systems, security, performance- there are innumerable ways to slice and dice technical skills. So I would encourage testers to have a holistic view of skills rather than looking at it from a narrow lens.

With this context established, I really see the problem expressed in this question as being mindset challenge and learning or learnability challenge. Allow me to explain it a bit:

A cursory glance at the way our society operates will reveal that as a humans, we are experts at categorizing ourselves in as many granular ways as possible. An example, we subconsciously categorize people based on city they come from, the way they speak, based on religion and so many ways. This thinking is just the byproduct of society we live in and I am not trying to be judgemental about it. It is what it is.

But professionally the problem happens when we start applying such thinking at work. We use the society imposed template to look at the jobs and start categorizing them. We start thinking I am a manual tester and programming is developers responsibility or managers job is to encourage the team unless she does it, I won’t show initiative. This is the mindset aspect of question that I was talking about. If we apply this template to our jobs, we give away control of situations to the forces beyond us. So the first thing to do to become a better at anything you want to do (in this case, programming) is to instill belief in self that it is my responsibility to become a better at a desired skill, it is my job, I am not doing a favor on myself by learning- my future paycheck depends upon how I learn. Would strongly urge to shun categorization mindset.

Secondly, I talked about it being a learnability challenge. What I mean by that it most of us want to learn skills but we don’t see “learning how to learn’ as a skill. That ‘i want to learn programming language’ is a skill based learning mindset. If you twist this question to ‘How quickly can I become a world class programmer” it will invariably force you to think through the learning methods you should apply to get to the goal in minimal possible time.
Most people like to learn via books, via internet sites, joining classes and that is fine. But the problem becomes if you continue leveraging just these means but remain underinvested in evolving other learning methods that can give you better investment from time. 70:20:10 model of learning addresses this challenge well. It simply states that 10% of all learning happens via formal education like classes, books, online tutorials. 30% of learning happens via modes called as social learning, which includes mentoring, spending active time with people who are great at what you aspire to become and 70% of learning happens on the job, when we work on live projects, take on challenges head on while working under time pressures etc.

The irony is that more often we spend 80% of time learning via formal education means, which really impacts 10% of learning surface. So there is a need to look at learning from fresh lens and invert the way we think about it.

Let me summarize the answer in 5 actionable tweets:
1. As a tester, you are expected to be technical. There is no ambiguity about it.
2. Being technical, doesn’t just include programming but a wide variety of skills based on context of your project/area.

3. Shun the categorization mindset. It is solely your responsibility to get better at your chosen area of expertise. Choose to stay in control of your learning.

4. Don’t just narrowly focus on what you wish to learn. Invest your time in learning how to learn effectively.
5. Don’t just learn from books, online/face to face trainings. Get a mentor. Spend ample time learning from experts. Pick a live project that is much beyond your current skills and persevere to execute it till the end.

Q & A with Women Testers on Careers and More

I recently got an email from Jyothi Rangaiah. She requested to capture my views on some of the intriguing questions asked by testers. More on questions a bit later.

Jyothi wears many hats and one which has impressed me the most in the spectacular work she has done in building https://www.womentesters.com/ - the knowledge website and the community. I am amazed at the way it has grown to have a rich content.

The questions that i answered eventually made it to women testers website and i am grateful to Jyothi to bee featured here. I was not as swift in answering the questions as i should have been due to unplanned travel commitments and the preparations that come with it. But Jyothi was rightly persistent and didn't give-up till she got the answers.

In the next few blogs, i would be sharing my responses to various questions that i answered. I would be provided the original link to the responses but since this is my personal blog i wanted to ensure that the readers get to read and help amplify the message, whatever good may be there.

Stay tuned to next few blogs.

Good Lessons Learned from a Chance Meeting with Utkarsh Rai

'Believe in Magic': this phrase caught my attention during a recent reading session with my son on a flight back to Bangalore. Both of us were taking turns to read a few pages of the book 'Geronimo Stilton - The Kingdom of Fantasy". The reason that phrase caught my attention wasn't just because of the richness and the meaning that phrase brought but also because it lead my mind to a recent interaction with one of finest leaders i have known.

I have known Utkarsh Rai for quite sometime, not personally but through his various public appearances, in panel talks and as a speaker. So when i got a chance to interact with him person, i couldn't let go of the opportunity. He has recently written a book named: The Fitness Currency: At Any Stage, At Any Age
I had a few exchanges, sharing comments about the book over social media that eventually led to this interaction.


I learned a few things that i wanted to share briefly here as below.

Always believe that something good is about to happen:
One of the things he shared during the conversation was this phrase:
"Always believe that something good is about to happen".

This is the phrase my attention drew towards while reading the book with my kid. I would explain the context in which he said this phrase in the next point, but in many ways i think believing in the positive phrases becomes a self-fulfilling prophecies. Funnily, this is true for most of the negative reinforcements that happens in our minds.
Our thoughts aren't stateless like HTTP is, they tend to have a positive state or a negative one. Left unchecked, the state naturally tend to gravitate towards negative one. Avoid that. Always believe in the magic that is about to happen.


Disrupt life, when the time is appropriate:
Utkarsh shared about his current life choices and used a phrase that "I have disrupted myself'. He said this as he had chosen an unchartered path where he was trying all that he wanted. As he was headed towards a future that was exciting yet unknown, he chose to respond to situation by believing that something good was always about to happen.


Leaving his lucrative job, he was trying his hand at different things like becoming an executive (certified) coach, becoming an actor, an accomplished author, trying to solidify online presence by creating online snippets of his book, among a few other things.
One of things that i had asked him during my online interactions was:

"About 40% done with the book, Utkarsh. Have an different kind of observation, indirectly related to book. I know that a thousands of people join gym mostly for health, fitness, which many achieve. But I was thinking about your motivation levels that you didn't just attain fitness but succeeded in being a thought leader (with this book as an example) in a field totally unknown to you. This is what I find amazing. At what stage in your journey did you think you should write this book ? Going by narrative in the book, appears like you were taking notes everyday about the conversations and learnings."
And i still find it amazing to see such rare ability to think big while mastering an unknown skill.

Master things you feel you are not good at:
As one of the passing mention in the conversation, he said that I want to do things that I feel I am not good at. He not only said this but also backed it up by saying that he as learned Kannada 60-70% even though he considered himself not good at learning languages. He said he did acting while in school, something he is working to rekindle. He hadn't done gym all his life but started that a couple of years (or less) back and ended up writing a book.
All of us have one life- either we can choose to live a routine, template like life not wiling to pick-up battle to beat inner demons or we live like kings, always willing to pick-up fight with the demons of mind who are working overtime to pull us back. He certainly chose the latter strategy to lead his life.

Even though it was for 30 min or so but it was a very enriching conversation for me. He was brutally honest at several instances such as admitting that the fact that he has photo-memory often comes in the way of his leading people (as people get impression that he always remembers their mistakes :-)). Another instance of such honesty was when he admitted that he tends to draw his energy from meeting people, which is something he misses in his current chosen path.

A memorable meeting for me and hopefully it was first of many such interactions in the future.