You don’t have to be a boss to be a leader

It’s really that simple, yet awesomely profound. And a typical Gerald Weinberg quote, like my other favorites of their points:

• No matter how it looks at first, it’s always a people problem (The second law of consulting)
• You’ll never accomplish anything if you care who gets the credit
• Things are the way they are because they got that way
• Quality is value to some person

Regarding the last quote; which was later extended with “who matters, at some time“. Once I had an argument about how to deliver quality. The other side held towards IEEE definition of delivering the expected. But even when they did, they failed to see that the unmeasured and irrational parts affected the value to the customer. I agree completely with The Cowboy Tester that knowing works of Weinberg is a measure of seriousness.

For many of us learning whether or not you know about @JerryWeinberg is a kpi for how serious you are about testing as a career and craft. You don’t have to agree with him, but you should know him.

— TheCowboyTester (@cowboytesting) August 8, 2018

Weinberg worked not only with testing, but among other things also consulting and organisational change management. I did not know that when reading “Making Sense of Change Management” (Cameron & Green 2012). I literally jumped up and started laughing while reading the quite serious elaborations to the Satir Change model – the authors found that Quality Software Management: Anticipating Change (1997) is a “masterly book on change, but with a title that might not appeal to everyone“. It might not appeal to change scholars, but definitely appealed indirectly to a lot of people in testing.

Recently (August 2018) Jerry died aged 84. Not a boss – yet a leader.