Does it help being / (posing) as ignorant ?

Surprised to see the title ??

 

......the truth is "YES" it helps ...at least my experience says "YES" for me.....

 

Learning :

 

As I started growing up the career ladder, my responsibilities started to take new dimensions professionally..... and a very important lesson I learnt with this progression was to retain my urge to learn and learn more.

 

The day ego takes a higher place and you think that now you know most of all ....... you start your down fall on learning..... this also impacts on you holistically as a person as you are closed towards imbibing anything new coming your way.

 

One of the key approaches I take today towards new projects coming on my plate is to reuse my existing knowledge and experiential learning. The second is to improve on my existing knowledge.

Traps :

 

But much before I took to these approaches as practice, there were some attitudinal traps that I fell into. Some of them were 

1. I know it all :
2. What new can I learn beyond this ?
3. Everything is similar in this field, what will be the new challenge ?
4. If I can do it one way, I can do the other too

 Relating it practically as -

• As soon as I see a work item-I think this is easy job and 'X' # of artifacts and learning's from my last project can be reused here. No considerable thought at start point was given to the rework involved in customization of these reusable artifacts
• Oh! this is so easy and similar to what has been handled earlier by me
• This is the same old technology what can be the challenge here ?

Believe me ...... once the project started and we started to get deep into work ...was when I realized that though things are similar; use same old technology but the implementation and the legacy system handling always makes it different. To add to the complexity is the system architecture which will define the complexity in its own way.
Many a times I also realized that reuse was futile and total waste of effort trying to re-engineer. Ultimately it was only my learning that helped me craft and structure things better in the new environment.

An approach of playing "ignorant" also helped me ask most of the wrong questions at the right places and hence helped me identify my roadblocks much in advance than I actually would have.

Now ....big or small ...new or old ......each time I get something on my plate.....
My approach is the same ......
Oh!! new work..........Let's EXPLORE !!


..............and I am still improving and working on sharpening my skill sets.

The Pear Tree & Testing !!

An interesting story I read recently and it relates so much to the testing .........
If you are passionate about testing ....you can relate every word to some activity you do as a tester ....including the lessons learnt !!

The Pear tree!!


There was a man who had four sons. He wanted his sons to learn not to judge things too quickly. So he sent them each on a quest, in turn, to go and look at a pear tree that was a great distance away.

The first son went in the winter, the second in the spring, the third in summer, and the youngest son in the fall.

When they had all gone and come back, he called them together to describe what they had seen.
The first son said that the tree was ugly, bent, and twisted.
The second son said no it was covered with green buds and full of promise.
The third son disagreed; he said it was laden with blossoms that smelled so sweet and looked so beautiful, it was the most graceful thing he had ever seen.
The last son disagreed with all of them; he said it was ripe and drooping with fruit, full of life and fulfillment.

The man then explained to his sons that they were all right, because they had each seen but only one season in the tree's life.

He told them that you cannot judge a tree, or a person, by only one season, and that the essence of who they are and the pleasure, joy, and love that come from that life can only be Measured at the end,when all the seasons are up.

Lessons learnt :
If you give up when it's winter, you will miss the promise of your spring, the beauty of your summer, fulfillment of your fall!!

Don't let the pain of one season destroy the joy of all the rest!!

Don't judge life by one difficult season… don’t judge a person by one single incident!!

Managing Traceability - yes / no ?

In my opinion, managing traceability is difficult especially if the product is very complex in architecture.


Though it is tough, I do not perceive it as impossible.

The only place this falls through the cracks is when the product starts to grow and people do not have time to maintain or reuse it efficiently and effectively.

One of the easiest ways to maintain it for the benefit of all groups in SDLC is to maintain it centrally. Have a few people team working very closely with architects who track each and every impact.

The methods to track can be either through something as simple as an xls or through various tools available in the market. BPM and BPT(Business Process Modeling and testing) can be one option.

A small tracker will need to be maintained further as a subset of traceability tracker to know proper coverage of: Positive tests, Negative Tests, Performance/Load/Stress, usability... etc ..etc based on your needs.

Learning's from Interview Board

Read an interesting post from Pari http://curioustester.blogspot.com/2010_07_01_archive.html
it reminded me of many interview panels that I have been part of ........
It is always so easy to be on the other side of the table ....you can ask anything and pass off with it.......and that is the imagination with which many an interviewee walk in ....... (BTW - I usually interview people with 8+ yrs of experience only)

Just like Pari resorted to asking a potential employee (I prefer referring them so till I do not reject them officially post an interview :)) if he could test a marker ....... I have used many similar simple examples like a coffee vending machine; swipe in/out machines; login on a home page;  etc

People are usually caught by surprise coz they come prepared for heavy questions with equally weighty answers :)

Where does it helps me ?

• To identify a genuine testers and ensure not a checker is hired
• Identify the concepts of the person
• Identify the gaps that he brings to table as a heavy weight in his thought process

Few easy areas (read traps) where people get confused and easily get caught are -

• Metrics and Measures - What are they collecting and reason to have them ?
• Software Testability and Usability
• Test Scenario and Test cases
• Test Oracle and Test Heuristic
• Why Automation ? - When and where to use it ? What is the thumb rule to decide on automation ?
• What are they doing now in their current job profile and why are they doing so ? Why did they not use an 'XYZ' approach ?
• Reliability of their test cases 
•  ..........

[You thought I'll leak my complete questioning skill here ;) ...who knows when I'll interview you next !!]

Long and short of it .......we seriously lack thinking testers amongst the community .......... there are also people who have achieved a lot but will still struggle when subjected to such questions ....

The testing community needs a lot of change in thought process and we need to be the change .....

Negative and Positive Test Cases

It was interesting conversation between James Bach and Michael Bolton last week over twitter where the topic was focused around - Negative and Positive Test Cases.

One of Michael's comment "When you read a newspaper, do you *count* the stories? Count good news stories vs. bad news stories?" ....made me think why we as testers get swayed to the thought of classifying our test cases in such a  manner .......

Yes, when I read a news paper ...I do not classify my stories nor count them but then what becomes so different when I write test cases ???

Putting my test manager's cap, the few immediate things / reasons that came up -

1. How do you ensure that you have your test scenarios totally covered ?
2. Can you maintain an exhaustive checklist ?
3. Or is it easier to classify them as negative and positive for the team to build easier understandability around what is expected from them ?
4. Does it take me away from micro management ?

In my opinion the completeness of test cases covering a scenario is bound by both the negative and positive aspects required to test. So based on my experience and assumptions I feel that it is the ease of tracking that has got these terms of negative and positive in the scene and somewhere the thought process got lost and it started to become more of a process meant for tracking and keeping a count rather than measuring the value add in totality.

Gracious Jon Bach

How many people will have the courage to own up against their perception and post a blog titled " To India, an apology"............. This blog note from Jon Bach is a gracious post that explores his perception handling on Indian Testers and how he overcame it ...

Cudos Jon !! I appreciate !!

Proves only 1 thing ....If you want a solution to any problem, you'll always find one ..........If you want a change, be the change yourself.

Read the blog post at Jon's page at http://jonbox.wordpress.com/2009/12/17/to-india-an-apology/#comment-347

To India, an apology



By jbtestpilot


I’m back.



At the behest of a colleague named Lanette Creamer (a fantastic blogger worth following), I just went ahead and decided to just get busy, just get over myself, and just post an entry.


A few things went through my mind as to what to say after such a lapse, but the ideas seemed shallow — pet peeves, annoyances, ramblings, diary stuff. Nothing worthy.


Then I thought of Lanette’s reliable, refreshing honesty and openness in her blog, and the idea came out of nowhere.




An apology.




To testers in India.


And here’s why…



For years, I put you in a box and closed the lid. I labeled it “Indian Testers” and shelved it, thinking I knew everything I needed to know about you. It was easy to do this. For years when I worked for a local (Seattle) test lab, you were a competitor. I believed what others said about you because it made it easier to believe that the lab could compete with your testing companies despite being lower cost. Even though I left the lab last year for a bigger company with more challenges for me, I found out a few months later that you were replacing me and most of my staff, taking jobs away from my country when we most needed them.

Nevermind that it was not your fault, nor that the few Indian testers I had worked with in my 15 years of testing were pretty good. I dismissed that as an anomaly. Besides, those testers lived and worked in the United States. I considered them “American”, and let that other folklore rule my perceptions about testers who still lived in India.


Folklore said you had no passion or skill or curiosity or personality. Everywhere I went, people agreed. They said you were too compliant. You appeared to do only what you were told, and you always seemed to agree and understand, nodding your head and saying “yes, certainly sir.” You only wanted the software to work (not to fail) and your shallow tests only confirmed that.



So like the others, I tended to see you as commodities and machines. You were only good for running easy conformance tests that required no skill — good for tests that no one else wanted to do. I would see short, strange emails from you that said “Kindly send me a sample test plan for the testing, please.”



This was more evidence for me that Indian testers didn’t think outside the box or have much imagination. They were not critical thinkers. They stuck to the test procedure, even if it was badly written. They wrote bad procedures themselves. They didn’t ask questions. They didn’t take initiative. They said yes to everything and rarely lived up to promises. While very polite, they had the “no problem” syndrome. They did not push back when something was difficult, or impossible.


In May when I last wrote a blog in this space, the company I worked for announced layoffs and told us that we had to train our replacements for the next few months. In that time, the new Indian staff would have to be as good as we were even though most of my staff had many years of experience with the product.



As a trainer, manager, and coach, I had fun teaching technical skill and product domain knowledge. But what I CAN’T train is curiosity. I cannot train someone to have a hunger to learn and discover and explore. Either they have it or they don’t. After all, remember that the folklore told me that companies who went to India to outsource their testing were coming back because of the poor quality. The trend even had a name — “backshoring.”


When I was told about the layoff and told I had a few months to train my 3 teams before our exit from the company, I knew the transition was not going to go well. The Indian replacements would surely fail, and my career would go down with them, I was sure. It was not a good time to be a test manager. There had to be a way, but I couldn’t think of anything. Maybe by being a son-of-a-bitch boss, I could take these Indian folks and scare them into being good testers. It was against my nature to do that, but I had no choice. I didn’t know how else I could turn people who didn’t want to learn into those that did.



A month after the layoff announcement, I was right. The transition classes for one of my teams’ projects had started, and the Indian testers were mechanical and uninspired. They asked few if any questions despite the product being complicated. When asked if they had questions, they said no. It was going badly, right on schedule, just as I had predicted, just as the folklore said it would.



Just before the transition classes were about to start for another of my project teams (the biggest and most complicated), I learned about a class available for whoever on the team wanted to go. It was called “Doing Business in India”, taught by an outside firm. I was too depressed and burned out from training the previous day to do any real work, anyway, so I figured I go to the class and have an onsite “vacation day.” The class would surely be full of boring, useless platitudes – a great place to escape for awhile. It was a free day away from the rigors of transition of our work to India, at a time when my great staff would soon be out of a job.


I felt like a problem child in that class. I sat in the back row and defied the guy to teach me anything. This wasn’t like me at all, but on this subject, I thought I knew what I needed to know about Indian testers.



But he did a strange thing. He did not talk about platitudes. He explained that he had been a cultural anthropologist, having lived and worked in India for 25 years. He talked about why the generalities and perceptions of Indians were so pervasive. He validated my perceptions, talked about their history and why they seemed to be so complicit.


I went up to him at a break and told him more about my perceptions (listed above). I eventually said “Listen, I just want one thing from this class: tell me the key to unlock their souls.” I smiled when I said it, but he seemed to know that I wanted his help to break through the veneer of their politeness and complicity to expose if they had real personalities and talent like the few “American-Indian” testers I had worked with.



I was being glib, but he answered me plainly.




“Such a key does exist, Jon,” he said with a serious look. Then he looked away. “I’ll mention that when we reconvene.”




And true to his promise, when class reconvened, he said: “If American-cultured testers are 80% business and 20% personal, flip it when working with Indian testers. Focus a LOT more on the personal than you ever thought you could stand. You’ll get the productivity you want.”




He was talking right to me. He almost dared me to try it.




So in defiance, I did.


When transition started for that bigger, more complex product – ushering in a new group of Indian testers — I took them team to lunch. It was July 3, the day before Independence Day. I asked them about Indian independence. The talk quickly turned to ideas of freedom and culture and … well, marriage. After all, weren’t all marriages arranged over there? How could that be freedom?




Even though one of them was from an arranged marriage, another was from what they called a “love” marriage. That surprised me. I asked each of them to tell me more about that. The one in the arranged marriage said “You grow to love them.” Being married for 10 years, I had to admit that I understood that. There are things about my wife that I have grown to love over the years, even though it did not start out that way.



He later said that his wife was joining him the next day, and what he said next surprised me.



“From what you said about your Independence Day in the United States, when my wife arrives tomorrow, it will not be Independence Day for me.”



I didn’t understand at first, but then he smiled. Ah, a joke!




As a married man, I got it. And right there, I had my first success. I saw a personality under the veneer, and I liked him right away.




The next day I went to my other team, the one I was not having much success with. I decided I would start over. I gave one of them a task. I agreed to learn something I thought he might be interested in – cricket – in return for him learning our product – a database for attorneys and other legal professionals to store and review legal documents. I made him a deal: build me a database (using our product) of documents about cricket. He learns the product, I learn about cricket – same database. He said yes and that it was a fine idea and smiled.




I asked the other tester to do the same. He reacted flatly. Then I caught myself.


Ummm, maybe not ALL Indian testers like cricket…!



So I asked him. “That is, if you’re interested in cricket.”



He said he was not, but that he would do it anyway. As I walked away with the first guy (the one who complied), I said “I guess I blew it there. I should not assume everyone likes cricket.”




“Oh no,” he replied. “Anir loves cricket. He was messing with you.”



I couldn’t believe it. That little event was yet another key turned in a lock, showing me promise of a personality and productivity, and it happened in an instant.




That little idea started a chain of other small ideas.




I had a room full of Indian testers who had just flew in the day before. It was 8:00 am in a new time zone. It was hard for *me* to get up early, much less think about flying across the world the day before.


So I put a 3 ft x 3 ft map of India on the wall so they could each tell me where they were from. As the pushpins were going in, a magical thing happened. I realized India was a BIG country. Next to it, I put a map of Washington. Then it dawned on me – most of Washington they would never see. Yakima, Wenatchee, Bellingham, Long Beach, Spokane, Moses Lake, Orcas Island, Mt. St. Helens. Politically, Washington is mostly a “red” state, mostly Republican. The Seattle population, however, skews it so that Washington is almost always considered a “blue” state (Democrat) in national elections. They wouldn’t know that.



Then I thought of Seattle. There are parts of Seattle that are wealthier than others, that have different value systems. Capitol Hill tends to be liberal. Beacon Hill is conservative, and they are a mere 3 miles from each other.




It stands to reason then, I thought as I looked at the map, that India must be the same way. Maybe a tester from the south is not the same as a tester from the north. Tamil Nadu in the southeast is conservative. Coimbatore is less so. Maybe this collection of people and their personalities would come out in different ways, but maybe the key toward getting them to show that to me was the same – make it personal.




The next day in a training class I was hosting for them, I brought up Google Maps and projected it on the wall. I zoomed in on Coimbatore where they were from and asked each to show me on what street they lived. That way, maybe they’d be less homesick, and I’d learn about their city. No testing got done in that two-hour session. No training got done. Nothing business, nothing productive, nothing measurable. But all personal.


What really got done in that session was me getting over myself. I was building a team, accidentally, on purpose, and I was seeing smiles and jokes, and shyness fading. The next session when we got into learning the product, the jokes carried forth – not always by me. I set the tone that it was ok, and they slowly followed suit. It began to be fun.




At the next session, the walls melted a bit more and we played one of the testing-thinking games me and my brother are famous for.



A week of this, and none of them were machines. They were people just like me, just like my existing teams that were being replaced.


I saw them thinking more and more above and beyond my expectations. They were hungry and wanted to learn more. While still polite, the veneer dropped despite the jet lag and the homesickness. They learned on their own, as a team, after business hours. They took pictures of me with them, shared their family pictures with me, shared the pictures they took when they explored Seattle that past weekend. They went places (in MY city) that even I hadn’t gone yet.


We got down to business, but it was personal. That was the key. They dove into their feature assignments just like my team did. They loved exploring, were not shy, talked over each other, even gaggled like kindergarteners eager to show each other as if it was show-and-tell time. It was amazing, and it was as easy as a key being turned in a lock, just like the instructor said would happen.



And, you know, I suddenly realized that I was the same manager I was with my existing staff. This was me, my style. This is what I had done with my staff well before the Indians came in to be trained. The only difference was my perception that Indian testers were not as capable as my staff. For that, I was just plain wrong.




So, India, consider me schooled. I have some keys now that I didn’t have before and my perception is different. Like a good tester, I ran a different set of tests on you that revealed new data well beyond the folklore.

Still, let this be my apology.


My response to Jon ...........
Jon







A very nice post …I just chanced upon a link today while browsing and it led me here …..though this is an older post by you, I could not help writing a note






I have been working across borders for all my professional life and find every country and their people mesmerizing in multiple perspective.






Just like you had perceptions about Indians and their behavioral attitude ….. People in India have some too  …….from the ones that I have found amongst people when I interact with them, I’d like to share some key ones with you…….






I could take these learning’s and was able to see it visibly effective in non-US-UK…(non English speaking) countries to be similar in many respects …….






When initially people start interacting….. they face a few challenges like :


1. They are little unsure on how to maintain the cultural balance during discussion


2. The language and pronunciation at times are difficult to immediately pick up (Remember – English is still a foreign language)


3. They feel that if they ask questions, they might be considered ignorant and unskilled






The above 3 I significantly relate to as a barrier in European countries too where English is a foreign language.






For India there is a 4th one too


4. Cultural upbringing that says do not question your teacher upfront. You can initiate dialogues later. Indians strongly believe the saying ” Guru Govind dou khade, kake lagu paav…Balihari guru aapno Govind diyo milaye” that means…. “if both God and Teacher stand in front of me, whom should I bow first? …. It has to be the teacher coz it was he who taught how to understand and unite with God”.






Family – anyways rules as the first law in india !!






It is really nice to see that all of us are now trying to break these cross cultural barriers and trying to understand perspectives of others and in return learn something from them as well !!


….

Amazing Discussion

I had the opportunity to have an amazing discussion with James Bach today which also involved mentoring on positioning oneself.

My take away's post discussion  -

• Believe in yourself
• Understand your strengths
• Position your flairs
• Do not hesitate to ask for what is legitimate