Recently I participated in a local “coffee shop meet-up” along with photographers, coaches, entrepreneurs and start-ups. We could agree that coaches as well as testers give indirect value to the business – but while staff coaching could be individually sold to carpenters and hairdressers – (software) testing could not. Afterwards I challenged my self to think otherwise!

• Anyone know a business which isn’t a tech business these days?
• Anyone know a business which doesn’t have risks?
• Anyone know a business which doesn’t need information to guide decisions?

Good testing is an information and exploration activity – to find risks and present information to the stakeholders. Usually it’s easy to find the known risks to entrepreneurs – but good testing can test for unknown unknowns – even if there is no product or “just” a minimum viable product:

“The minimum viable product is that version of a new product which allows a team to collect the maximum amount of validated learning about customers with the least effort.” The definition’s use of the words maximum and minimum means it is decidedly not formulaic. It requires judgment to figure out, for any given context, what MVP makes sense.

Similarly minimum viable testing is an effort, that allows the team to collect tacit and explicit learning about the solution, given the context. Go look for it in your context - Testing can add business value to any project state

Related: Acceptance is more than what can be measured , You call that testing – how can that add value,

There are five broad choices for you to take if you are a test lead or test manager:

1. Provide advice to the business leaders, as an independent agent cajole project leadership and review performance
2. Take control of the knowledge required to define and build systems. Demand clarity and precision in requirements
3. Help agile projects to recognise and react to risks, coach and mentor and manage testing
4. Manage the information flow between the key groups and continuous integration system, control change and delivery
5. Manage outsourced and offshore teams, manage relationships

It’s probably 6) All of the above

Something silly

Sure, recognize the stars – but spread the goodwill. Even heroes needs help. Make every team member feel that they contributed. Try when you lead to reach out to everybody over the course of the project/months days. Recognize them all and say thank you.

Once I was a leader at a children summer camp. Every evening we would make a mentioning of the fun stories of the day. Obviously some of the kids where more “fun” than the others, but we kept a rooster to make sure all were mentioned – perhaps just with a little thing. It meant a lot to be mentioned, even for something silly…

Keith Klain put’s it this way in The Testing Planet 10 – Leadership issue: “Leadership in Testing – What really Matters”:  I want my team to take ALL the credit because they are the ones doing all the work!  I would rephrase this to: I want to praise the teams I help succeed, but I also need to know that I am part of the team that get’s the praise .  

Strip me of all my power, my titles, my roles – and hand them to those that need it to have the courage to stand up, or that needs it to grow. I know I stand on the shoulders of software testing giants (like Keith), I may not reach high compared to them – but I can still lift someone else up, so that we together reach even further. We all have to start somewhere…

more on http://www.lovisastahl.com/eng_con.html

A project usually has to be on Schedule, or at least on agreed schedule.

A project usually has to be on target regarding Costs, or at least agreed costs.

It is an ancient IT project manager mantra, to control these parameters using change requests and change management – typically due to events during the project. It takes to long, it’s too buggy, it costs more etc. etc. To change one parameter – you have to change one of the others. In example (and strictly in some context) – even adding more testcases will increase cost or influence the schedule (discuss).

But there are plenty of examples (of Government IT projects) that are on schedule, on cost, on quality – yet they fail the timing and after a number of years delivers a system on an obsolete platform [true story]. More recent examples – bank D launches their banking app first, get all the press – and a month later bank N comes around – on agreed schedule, agreed costs, agreed quality… and get very little of the “hype”.

When contemplating the business decisions - what seems right now right now might be wrong later - considering the Timing.

Acceptance criteria are more than what can be measured, An Expected Gathering

…

I’ll fix this later :-)

I have experienced situations where the solution was delivered, even though the criteria where not met. The so-called Go-NoGo meeting, was usually a Go-Go, and jokingly called so. I have also experienced that the business deferred a fix for a critical defect in production. That even if a planned release fulfilled the elaborate acceptance criteria – the delivery was cancelled. It was a major enterprise release that was technically to spec – yet because of other business risks, it was postponed.

 As a tester you may experience this where all the automatic Factory Acceptance tests (FAT) pass, but the system still fails to react. I had to text “FAT failed” to someone recently, but it auto-corrected to “FART failed“. Indeed if all the requirements pass and but the system fails to deliver – it is a fart.

The challenge is that not everything that can be measured counts, and not everything that counts can measured. 

And that’s not even considering that 100% testcases passed is a metric that makes no sense. Quality is not only the amount of specific attributes, as ISO/IEEE standards may lead you to measure, but a relationship “something that matters – to someone who matters – at sometime“. If you only look at the measurable - you miss half of the story.

The business needs

• fit for purpose (requirements) and fit for use (business context) [ITIL v3]
• to solve a business problem – ff the problem isn’t solved, the product doesn’t work. (Even of all the tests are green). [Ben Simo]
• information from testing to aid in making business decisions

You can follow some of the processes all of the time,

and all of the processes some of the time

- but you cannot follow all the processes all of the time.

the processes are more what you’d call ”guidelines” 

When you ask that way several powerful things immediately occur–especially for the other person: 

• you instantly convey respect.
• you instantly convey trust
• you instantly convey you’re willing to listen

And then, best of all, you get to say two more incredibly powerfull words: Thank you

[ 10 Things Extraordinary People Say Every Day | Inc.com, Jeff Haden, January 2013 ]

• “Here’s what I’m thinking.”
• “I was wrong.”
• “That was awesome.”
• “You’re welcome.”
• “Can you help me?”
• “I’m sorry.”
• “Can you show me?”
• “Let me give you a hand.”
• “I love you.”
• … Nothing.

And in the process you’ll show vulnerability, respect, and a willingness to listen–which, by the way, are all qualities of a great leader.

it is increasingly a worker’s greatest skill, not his average skill level, that matters. As capitalism has grown more adept at disaggregating tasks, workers can focus on what they do best, and managers are challenged to make room for brilliant, if difficult, outliers. 

This march toward greater specialization, combined with the pressing need for expertise in science, technology, engineering and mathematics, so-called STEM workers, suggests that the prospects for (knowledge *) workers will be on the rise in the coming decades. If the market can forgive people’s weaknesses, then they will rise to the level of their natural gifts.

…

The above is from  The Autism Advantage - I have replaced the word “autistic” at the * with KNOWLEDGE and it’s probably true for most knowledge jobs – including software testing

[ Hire Autistic People; Here's Why | inc.com | January 3, 2013]

“It will be an economic failure if the new wave of high school graduates can’t be employed. All these kids have talent and ability and a tremendous capacity to contribute. We have to stop thinking that all employees have to be the same, with the same skills, the same attributes.”

…

For example, anything very repetitious and detail-oriented, work that requires great visual memory for the spotting of anomalies. You might not often think of someone with autism in terms of communication but they can be fantastic at understanding rules-bound communication, where it matters exactly what can and can’t be said to whom. 

[ The Autism Advantage | New York Times | November 29 2012]

This emerging understanding of autism may change attitudes toward autistic workers. But intelligence, even superior intelligence, isn’t enough to get or keep a job. Modern office culture — with its unwritten rules of behavior, its fluid and socially demanding work spaces — can be hostile territory for autistic people, who do better in predictable environments and who tend to be clumsy at shaping their priorities around other people’s requirements.

See also: The Geeks and Nerds Syndrome Who has excellent memory and strong attention to detail

I’m mostly worried about the last one.

• Information I am assumed to have, but I don’t
• Expectations to me, that are not expressed
• Considerations that I aught to take, but I can’t see
• Things I should remember, but I didn’t

and the consequence being  frustration that I am the one not knowing. #gofigure

See also Eating wicked problems for breakfast, Even superheros need help, How to spot defects Innovation is about the unknown – deal with it  All oracles are failable

The students in the LEGO lab (at my alma mater will try out the LEGO Mindstorms NXT series to learn about robots. First the industrial ones, that have a deterministic program, secondly about self-controlling agents. Compare it to the difference between an industrial robot in and assembly line – and a toy seal for psychological care treatments for trauma patients: One is sequenced and in a known environment , and the other reactive and don’t know the environment in advance. Reminds me of routinized and bespoke activities,  Testing AND Checking,  left and right side of the brain. Computer Science students in this course struggle to control the robot environment, but quickly learn that the real world is not ideal. They have to test and experiment, calibrate and think outside the LEGO box.

Similarly JEZ HUMBLE, talked about ”What is value?“. A huge whiteboard of prioritized and estimated SCRUM tasks is not customer value in itself – it’s a tool to discuss the value for the client/Product Owner/Sponser/ the-guy-paying-for-it. Awesome is value. To get awesome – set a business model hypothesis and test it. Make the smallest viable product (When “minimal viable product” doesn’t work, the story of apple). But remember they are people too – even oracles can be wrong, and set up a measurement that will be counterproductive. Management only focus on “cost” because it’s easier to measure – test the business idea and what you care about: delivering valuable software solutions.

It’s not the talk, it’s the learning.

It’s not the CS class, it’s the experience.

It’s not the test, it’s the idea.

…

See also: Testers are developers too – and the other way around, dealing with uncertainty

[Disclaimer: I had press access to GOTO-Arhus2012 on behalf on GOTOCON]