Writing a Book in 30 Evenings

As mentioned I have written a book. Looking through my notes I have around 30 versions, one for each significant session of working on it. I have been asked to share tips on writing a book, so here you go, Simon. The key lessons are:

1. Set a Recurring Time and Space
2. Unique Content – Reference the Rest
3. Storyline and Flow
4. The opposite of passive voice is not an aggressive voice
5. LeanPub’bing

Set a Recurring Time and Space

One of my book’s themes was moving something from a hunch to a hard truth. And the same really applies here. When I finished my master’s degree while working (back in 2002), I had two slots a week at a “study office”. From that, I learned that not all study days are equally productive “on paper” – but that’s ok. Each session had its purpose.

Similarly for my book project. I set a weekly evening booking in my Calendar – family chores were arranged around it. After dinner, I work start working on the book and work for 2-2½ hours. I used my personal computer in my work-from-home setup.

Unique Content – Reference the Rest

There is so much great content out there already, my focus was on writing about my experience and my vision of better test strategies. But to do that I needed to stand on the shoulders of others to set the scene and describe the techniques I applied.

While writing I did want to bring in loads of existing content to elaborate and provide a foundation for my thinking. While editing I removed most of it, partly because I didn’t want to sound like a high school book report (thank you for that one Tristan). What I did leave in were quotes, recommendations, and listings of the work of others. The book is full of footnotes directly on the page (as compared to end notes) to highlight everyone in context.

Storyline and Flow

Initially, I outlined the chapters and subchapters and it was important to get the right “flow” and storyline into the content. My base model was inspired by “Situation, Complication, Question, Answer” from the guide “How to present to executives” (StaffEng Book) and similar lessons on taking the first steps.

• This is the situation and challenges
• These are the techniques, we can build on
• These are the first steps, where the techniques are used

One thing I have worked a lot on is the flow of the text: Sections would be 4-6 lines long, with empty lines in between. I also worked to reduce “dangling lines”, so no two lines would linger into the next page. No pages should be text only, so quotes and illustrations are important for readability – as well as making the book content visible. Lastly, I worked a lot on having one section end with words that tap into the next section.

The below recommendation is cool, I could have done that too.

15 years ago my PhD advisor taught me One Weird Trick for editing your own writing. Edit **back to front**, paragraph by paragraph. I still use it and it still surprises me how well it works. When I get my students to do it, it often blows their minds. Try it!

— Arvind Narayanan (@random_walker) October 16, 2022

The opposite of passive voice is not an aggressive voice

Often I started my “book evening” by reading the book from the start all over again. As I’m not a native English writer, I installed Grammarly and paid for the premium version for a period to rewrite phrases that were in a passive form. Fun Fact: the opposite of passive voice, is not an aggressive voice but an active voice.

Have proofread quite a few books for my friends in space. Couple of Stage Mom top tips:
– Avoid colloquial language for global readers
– Know your audience. If for beginners, use footnotes or end notes
– Don’t overuse passive voice
– Tell stories from your experience! pic.twitter.com/sehtnM5bRx

— Tristan Lombard 🇺🇦 (@TristanLombard2) October 2, 2022

The tool you use to write your book isn’t that important. I used Google Docs with embedded Google Drawings, others might prefer Word or other editing platforms. The biggest challenge in publishing was getting the embedded pictures in a resolution that could be printed by the print shop. The book exists in a printed format – but it’s primarily an electronic book.

LeanPub’bing

Self-publishing on LeanPub is intuitive and easy, it also has tools for incremental versions, previews, and updates. Let people sign up for it in advance with price suggestions. That allows you to set a price on the book based on audience-based quotes.

They also have a great system for coupons. I have coupons for those that helped in preparing the book, those I have referenced, and those that participated in the virtual launch. Let me know with the phrase “LeanPubbing” if you want a coupon too.

#266 – Retraining Yourself for the Future

The local university college has a big sign outside saying: “Retrain Yourself for the Future“. The thing is – what is offered is at best years behind the current practice in the industry. If you certify towards a body of knowledge, you forget about the learning journey and only on the outcome. Innovation yet happens in many ways – and industry practitioners are only one form to train for.

Imagine That Things Can Be Different

One of the key skills of a knowledge worker – and testing people are knowledge workers – is to imagine that things can be different. I have written previously how to recruit for curiosity – and contributed to the book of “21st-century skills for testers“. But apparently I have missed to highlight the key skill of imagining that things can be different.

Something About Leadership

17yo: Dad, do you not know how old I am - and what I can do myself? 
Me: Oh, I know buddy. As you are learning new stuff, I am unlearning to help you

While this quote from my kitchen about a week ago, as all to do with the young man learning the ropes of life and me unlearning to always to help them and their 15yo sibling out – there is an key parallel to leadership and building self reliance in teams. My role these days are less about direction and (micro)managing a team of testers on a project, more about enabling others to succeed with their testing both in the delivery teams and in the board room.

Career paths for testing specialists

I believe it is possible to have challenging opportunities and career advancement within the broad field of testing – for all kinds of people and backgrounds.

I’m probably both spoiled and privileged, so see down below for context of the following model. It is a model for career paths that is in active use as of writing. Some might consider it old fashioned or limited, but I do hope that you can learn a bit from it with regards to defining career paths for testing specialists.

Let’s look at the following titles:

• Tester,
  • prepares test cases in a test case management tool
  • performs the testing activity
• Technical Test Analyst,
  • prepares and initiate engineered tests
• Test Manager,
  • prepares test plans, test strategies
  • lead the testing activity

You might have other titles at your place – the point is to identify the titles and not take the work areas too literally. On smaller delivery teams the testing specialist is both the analyst, test manager and the one performing the tests. On larger projects there may be more testing professionals with more defined roles/titles. On other projects the test managers job is more around leading SMEs in testing (and less the testers).

Notice that the test manager manages the testing, they are not a people/line manager of the testing specialists. All the testing professionals may have the same manager or be distributed into the delivery teams. That usually depends on if the company’s focus is on consultancy/projects or on products/deliveries.

There are strong trends that much test engineering is a developers discipline and that management of testing is more about coaching. Still some development organisations strive with having exploratory testers on all teams, where they dig into the specific domain and application. But the field is not all dead yet, and many organisations will have the above titles represented for years.

Based on the titles above you can identify the work usually being done, but not the skill level or span of control. This is where we usually add (promotion) levels like:

• Junior
• Advanced/Associate
• Senior
• Principal

Do use the promotions that your company uses for developers (and similar titles) and other roles! If you have ninja developers as a formal promotion level over lead developers, the by all means add that to your testing titles as well. Do insist and argue! If you fail, move away and let that company deal with not wanting to improve their people. (having the option to turn away can be a privilege too).

The levels of formal training could follow the levels of promotion. ISTQB training is one approach that is similarly scaled. That can be helpful if your organisation has a quest for certificates (for some business reason). Certificates are though just a race to the bottom.

The advancement from one level to the next could be on the basis of independence of the person. A junior level is an entry level and will usually require that the person tries it out and have a skills mentor. Advance and associate levels apply the know-how consistently on one project/delivery team.

The higher up the level, the more teams the person can apply the knowledge to at the same time (span of control, see also the law of raspberry jam). Alternatively it could also be to be able to generalize practices learned in one project and apply it to a project/delivery team that works in a different way. Senior and principal roles is more into the strategic work or work as a adviser. They could be the advisers on bids & tenders for new projects or be more of an test architect working with implementing principles for the testing activities.

Context: I work in the Danish IT outsourcing sector in a global IT company of 3000+ people. The software testing team working across projects is 30+ people (globally). The title “promotions” are used consistently in the company for various job titles: Developers, project managers etc. I have applied a similar model for 20+ testing people at other outsourcing companies and the job titles are consistent with similar software development companies in Denmark.

Denmark is a country where trust in others is very high, where there is a high wealth equality level (Gini) and where privileges are equal privileges. In the company 30% is female, with many female “middle managers” and also high in the technical hierarchy.

Recruit for Curiosity

Recruiting for testing roles these days should be mostly about curiosity, problem-solving and less about productivity and text book knowledge. Recruit for right brain skills – not so much operational process jockeys. 

Recently at UKSTAR 2018 Simon Prior talked about their investigation into University programs and their rare courses in testing. This lead to their twitter discussion under the tag: #makeAtester where the top responses of skills required was curiosity. Quite in line with the State of Testing Survey 2017 that lists key communication skills as most looked for when hiring for testing roles. Both surveys establish that testers are knowledge works.

Similarly HFresearch have compiled an analysis that even on a management level the trend is to hire for creative thinkers over “operational experts that improve business performance and productivity”.  Talent focus should be on right brain thinkers over – The wonks who spend all day staring at spreadsheets, focused on execution “left-brained” activities are less in demand .

But where do we find curiosity training?

If that is the skills we are looking for perhaps we should stop looking at university programs in computer science or engineering, when we want to recruit testers. I have a computer science master degree, and that was really theoretical and while it somewhat focused on problem solving, the lesson was rarely about thinking outside the box.

I think I would rather hire people with business domain skills and train testing theory, than hire a process jockey with no experiences in besides textbook examples. That’s also how I came into testing myself, practical activities first – formal training later.

Perhaps it’s not as such important to have an university degree to get into testing. Though it helps 🙂 A diverse background is important, I know of librarians, laboratory technicians and humanities majors that bring good competencies to the testing field.

Finding one higher education that focuses on building curiosity, whole picture thinkers is hard – perhaps dungeons and dragons, as also discussed at the conference?

Less Test Managers, More Test Coaches

One of the trends/shifts I experience in testing & test management in particular is the Test Coach as discussed initially here: The Shift-Coach Testing Trend (Oct, 2016). Recently (Aug 2017) it came up again in a Twitter thread, where Stephen Janaway stated the inspiration to the title of this blog post.

Less Test Managers and more coaches. That’s how I see it going.

Fittingly as they inspired the first post with the talk “How I Lost My Job As a Test Manager” presented at Test Bash 2015. This post is a further elaboration of the Shift-Coach test management trend. Here are some of my experiences:

• I have been assigned to an agile development team to introduce them to 3 Amigos, Test data driven test automation and such things. The purpose of my involvement was to enable the team to continue the practices without me, and without testers besides the business analyst / product owner (See The domain expert is the tester) as they are doing Shift-left. Similar to an agile or scrum coach, my approach was to look at it as a change in the way of working.
• Another project is an infrastructure project, there are no testers only technicians configuring Cisco routers that by software can replace firewalls, iron ports, VM servers and other network equipment. The project has to implement 80+ of these, so I setup both a test process and an ITIL change request process acting as a test and release manager – another quite frequent trend. I could continue in the project for the duration, but instead I setup guidance and leave when it’s sufficiently in place.

This might be similar to a test architect, a (internal) test consultant activity. It has nothing to do with diminishing testing. Rather I see it as more testing happening, something that would not have been done without the coaching from a test manager. It’s all about finding a test approach that is fit for the context.

Here are some things others have written:

• Katrina has written an excellent article on Test Manager vs. Test Coach that compares the traditional hierarchical test manager with a test coach of agile practices.
• “Gus” Evangelisti: writes about Test coach versus test specialist, impact on queues  comparing the differences in work output based on either a test coach guiding the team or a test specialist in the team
•  Paul Gerrard | Will The Test Leaders Stand Up (2013) pointed out that a future for the test manager could be in Help agile projects to recognize and react to risks, coach and mentor and manage testing (See Wither the test manager)
• Alan Page writes about having only feature teams, and no practice teams in The matrix organisation

The competence of the test coach is to have enough change management expertise (people skills) and test management expertise (domain skills) to know how to coach and facilitate the change. Should test coaches test too, perhaps when required, but not necessarily. The activity is primarily to up-skill the team to continue on their own.

The “Test Coach” is a trend similar to “shift-left” and all the other shifts in testing and test management. I see it as a pattern, and what I read from the threads and discussions is that many test managers gradually shift towards test coaches.

3 Sessions of Security Testing

One way to collaborate in a team is to achieve shared knowledge together. An example of this is the online activity of “30 days of testing” that The Ministry Of Testing has been putting out to the online community to participate it. My test team has a “Work Group / Special Interest Group” with regards to security testing, so when a 30 day challenge for security testing came up, we scheduled sessions to learn from the topics provided (see below).

As we are testing consultants doing work for our customers, we scheduled 3 sessions – initially for an hour. At the start of the hour we picked 4-5 topics from the list, and worked our way through them in a prioritized order – within the time box of the hour. Come to think of it we might as well have used the Lean Coffee format. As we have team members two places in DK and one place in PH, it was a skype call using screen sharing. After the call I  summarized sending out a “link mail” to all in the testing group (DK and PH). Evaluating the sessions we extend our ordinary scheduled WG meetings to make room for collaboratively investigate additional security testing topics.

12 From the list: ZAP, Google Gruyere, threat models, HTTP proxies, posture assessments, tiger boxes, recent hacks (elaborated by Troy Hunt), OWASP top 10, OWASP SQL injections, adding data integrity testing into a test plan, share ideas for security testing internally and externally, discuss security testing with regards to EU GDPR compliance.

7 Not on the list: Naughty Strings form GitHub, Bug Magnet plugin, How real persons names trick IT systems, how to be careful with custom license plates, DDoS attacks, IoT privacy failures, Chaos monkeys/Siamese army and little Bobby Tables:

XKCD: Exploits of a mom

To sum up, we have learned about: what tools that can make testing easier, where to read about vulnerabilities and and simple exploits, understand how personal data and logins are used and stored, how to pitch security testing based on fear of breaches and safety concerns, testing the requirements for “by design” security.

30 Days of Security Testing

Many Bits under the Bridge

I’ve been in the testing business for 14 years – when I started in late 2002 it was all about using HP Test Director 7.6 – in a browser… There was only one model of testing, v-model, and only one book of testing the ISEB (later ISTQB) vocabulary. And only one expected output of testing: Testers designed test cases, executed and perhaps wrote both a test plan document and test report document. Test process improvement was a thing, but even so testing was often a pointy cog…  

Many Bits under the Bridge Later

It is not about the test cases any more, it’s about being part of a team – that delivers an IT solution to the business. First of all, if it’s just about the test cases then it is a race to the lowest paid off-shore location, a run to the bottom in repetitiveness and mechanic activity. Checking! with more focus on crossing the t’s and dotting the i’s. We have tools for that now – the plates are shifting.

When testing professionals puts “writing test cases” on their LinkedIn description. It seems to me that they are stuck in the testing world of 10 years ago. Standing still and not seeing that Testers are Knowledge Workers – not workers of producing artifacts. It is much more important to see beyond the visible, Uncovering better ways and seeing testing as an activity to provide information to the stakeholders, based on experiments and observations.

Skill up and be smarter! And don’t listen to old tapes – it’s not worth it :).

See also this from QA Symphony & Ministry of Testing:

The Software Tester: Modern vs. Traditional [Infographic]

The Shift-Coach Testing Trend

Shift-Coach is when testers and test managers trends towards being coaches and facilitators of the testing activities. Shift-Coach is more about leading the testing than leading the testers to paraphrase from @DevToTest Joe DeMeyers blog post.

The ground breaker for this trend, is to me, the talk “How I Lost My Job As a Test Manager” presented at Test Bash 2015 by Stephen Janaway. Stephen explains how reorganization of the test manager role forced them to be more a facilitator than embedded in the teams. Similarly many other great test managers talk more and more about people skills and coaching, especially in agile projects. I want to define shift-coach around the facilitation testing activities, and place testers that doubles as scrum masters in the Shift-Deliver trend.

In traditional (v-model) projects testing has often included people that were not professional testers; – in user acceptance tests this has often been business subject matter experts. The testing was done by someone with the best knowledge of the topic, and that may not have been the professional tester. That more and more projects do this – more and more, is a big challenge for many testing folks. But it is a significant trend in testing world of 2016.

Shift-Coach trend is visible when Alan Page  talks at Test Bash Philly 2016:

You’ve heard the rumors, and you’ve seen it happen. An organization or development team decides they don’t need testers, and you have big questions and massive concerns. Is quality not important anymore? Are they irresponsible or idiotic? Are their hats on too tight? Do testers still have jobs?

Alan Page is a career tester who has not only gone through the “no-tester” transition, he’s taking it head on and embracing it. Alan will share experiences, stories, strategies, and tactics (and failures) on how he’s taken everything he’s learned in over twenty years of software testing, and used those skills to have an impact on software engineering teams at Microsoft. Whether you’re going through this transition yourself, think it may be coming, or just want to tell someone what an absurd idea this is, this is the talk for you.

This trend goes along with Shift-Right, Shift-Left and Shift-Deliver discussed separately. I discussed these trend labels at Nordic Testing Days 2016 during the talk “How to Test in IT operations“ and coined the labels on the EuroStar Test Huddle forum.

Drive the Testing – Coach!