Managing grief(s) of lifetime is not an easy job. The road that you walk on is always alone. No one can empathize or walk the same steps as you. Everyone who is grieving along with you has their own journey's with their own pathways and their own set of roadblocks. Over a period of time you learn to survive with the loss. 'Living' with everything on the same old jest and fervor may not be with the same emotions of happiness. Life just continues to "go on"!

So that has been a story of last 10 yrs where I have tried my best to resettle with multiple hard waves unsettling my sails. and then I just started riding the tide. The survival tactic was to go on with the flow of the river. I think now that lot of precious time has been spent and its high time to set in new winds in the sail! 

As I have been flowing with the speed of the river, I have been closely and silently sharpening few rough edges of the axe on competency side. Been moving to newer unknown and untested waters. Challenged myself to be over occupied and all of it has been an interesting journey so far. 

Now that I take back to writing, these experiential learning leaves will surely occupy an important place on sharing.

I have been promising myself for last few years that I will restart and take to more serious writing all over again.

I plan a charter but then it just gets pushed off again.

But as a resolution for the new year, getting started was the only option I have set for myself and here I am back again!

The Restart :)

So finally I am there to write the first post of this year :)

In last few years, due to certain personal reasons I had to move away from my regular career track which involved project management, project delivery, sales, client management and other related stuff. This lead me explore something new and interesting at a much larger scale. The new key areas of involvement have been around  strategy, planning, operations and people management. The posts from here on will be around multiple new experiential learnings in these spaces.

Renewed synergies

Been few years that I really penned off something on a blog post.

Life has taken many twists and turns in these years. There have been forced changed priorities of life and so on.

Since one of coming new year's resolution is to restart on things that give me more eternal pleasure and blog writing is one of them, what better than penning something down before the new year actually starts :)

Lost Memories ....

2013 .....yet another year that gave me another huge void in life ....
God only knows till when he'll keep throwing me into such unknown crevices of life....as soon as I think life is back in control and settling in...he sets another storm on my sails :(

Meeting the old

Had an interesting time with IIT BHU Alumni meet yesterday (29June2013).
The function was a full packed day starting at 8 am and ending 11 pm. I was little apprehensive as I signed up a confirmation to attend thinking that this is going to be very long day and how will the organizers maintain it.
Kudos to Sumit Dey and team of his supporters who managed to do everything perfectly. The best was the upkeep on the timing control.

Meeting old friends, making new one's, listening to some interesting thoughts, reminiscing old days, reliving the days at BHU..... well memories galore!

2012 : A year gone by!

2012 was one of the worst year of my life.
It uprooted me in many ways. Shook my belief in lot of things around me.
Left me emotionally broken. It has been difficult to gather one self and face the ultimate truth of life. Face the fact of death of someone very near and dear to you.

Time is the only healer for such a situation. It gives you strength to re-coop. To gather yourself. Continue on the life with a mega void that has been created.

I also realized how lonely you get in your time of grief. None other than you can relate to the situation you are in. Everyone feels it is their right to advise and it your duty to adhere to that advise. It is so easier said than done when people tell you to be strong :(
So many perspectives of my viewpoint about life have changed in this last one year!

I hope that 2013 will bring in better days, a better me and a better vision from me for multiple things around me !!

Commitment to learning : Sad state

One thing that has been worrying me for sometime and which I closely observe as a growing trend is the run-away attitude towards learning. People seek success but there is no commitment shown towards learning.
I come across people from various kind of roles in the society who seem to believe that faster track is to learn less. But somehow I have never been comfortable with the thought.
For Example I am citing a few thoughts I have heard or experienced recently from people across various roles when I talk about learning to them -

• Students : The frequent questions are - Can I read the least and score the most? Why does it require me to learn if it will not add to my scoring at exams? Why do you wish me to read and re-read time and again? Are my paper degrees not sufficient enough?  
• Some of them who claim to undertake courses in various things do it just for the sake of formality rather than gaining any true knowledge about the same. 
• My worst experience on this was meeting some research scholars who are in process of doing PhD and have been registered as full time students for more than a year and who proudly say that they have not visited libraries and only read off net. They also claim innocence regarding knowledge regarding some of the great writers and authors or their works especially on their chosen topic of research. 

• New Joinee at work : Interest predominantly is on how quickly they can be deployed overseas or can have a direct customer / client facing role. They are just not ready to read / learn / practice more to gather more experiential facts and ability to manage any technical challenge or a difficult situation.
• Employees with experience : When I am fine doing what I am doing and if my manager is happy, why should I learn new things? Why should I put in such time and effort? Being in good books of my manager will help me rather than my skills.
• People in little more senior roles in organizations : Why should I bother? knowing just the terminology is sufficient enough. I have a team who should know such things with hands-on. They should be able to do work whenever needed. 

These are states that really worry me at times about our future which is consistently becoming more and more technologically dependent and complicated.

Confused with Google's approach - Need solution to the issue

Have been maintaining this blog from 2006-2007 on-wards. Recently received a mail saying I need to claim my blogs so that they are not frozen. When I tried to do it as per the process explained, kept on getting error message.

Posted a query in the forum and received following response.

Little funny that Google does not have a solution to reported issue, but want to implement new maintenance rules.

Sorry Google, hope you are hearing and understand that this is an extremely bad idea.

Attached below is communication chain.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I recieved a reminder mail saying I need to claim my blogs. Tried doing so but keep getting an error "user account not found".
Though when I directly log on, I can access account and make posts too.
Pls check and help.

Thanks
Meeta

-- To view this post online, visit https://groups.google.com/a/googleproductforums.com/d/msg/blogger/-/wXILvT6t464J.

Blogger blogger@googleproductforums.com	8:28 AM (1 hour ago)
to blogger

I just went through this very thing, several iterations in fact. Blogger maintains that my username is one of my GMail accounts, but trying to log in to the Legacy Migration page with this username returns the same error as above: "user account not found."

I assume this is because I started with Blogger long before Google bought them, and there is something in a data table somewhere that's not linked correctly.

-- To view this post online, visit https://groups.google.com/a/googleproductforums.com/d/msg/blogger/-/ymv9TEaA7Q0J.

Meeta Prakash	9:33 AM (2 minutes ago)
to Blogger

But then how do you suggest to handle our blogs with your new rules ?

You definitely cant make mine unaccessible and I cant take my data anywhere. It is not so easily downloadable :(

Pls suggest a solution.

Thanks

Testability of Thoughts, Thought Process and Actions : Musings

Testability of Thoughts, Thought Process and Actions : Musings

Was going through my old blog posts and realized that there are so many times I come back to say I am re-starting or starting something new. I do few things for a while on my blog and then I again vanish. I observe that this shows in kind of a pattern in my writing.

There are a few things that I further realized when I started analysing this self pattern in activity.

Did I ever loose focus ?

No. But there were things in life that took a greater priority than blogging at that instance of time. But yes, I have never deviated from personal goal sheet of learning.

Did I stop my learning ?
No. Actually I spent my time more in learning something that was needed to enhance my skill sets. I was open to take up most difficult and challenging situations and that left me little time for many things which further forced prioritization and re-prioritization of many tasks that I do on personal note.

Did I stop being consistent ?
No. Consistency was persistent in my thought process as well as personal actions. But the focus was self development rather than blogging. Time availability added to the challenge.

Did I stop my innovative mind to think about new things ?
No. The new things thought and learnt were used somewhere else and the results were successful.

Did I procrastinate publishing my writings ?
Yes. There are umpteen writings that exist in my draft folder and just need the final polish to be published.

Did I procrastinate writing itself ?
To an extent, Yes. Writing moved out of my priority goal sheet and was replaced with heavy weightage to learning more in every possible aspect and dimension.
 
Am I sharing enough of my learning's ?
Not at all. Most of my learning's are learning's with myself. They are being shared verbally only with people who comeback and insistently seek individually.

So here I am with more determined 2012 and pulling active writing back into my goal sheet :)
And this time it is with focus to bring up the learning's of last 15 years well spent with Testing as my eat, drink and sleep agenda.

Just thinking ..... on a different note

Was reading something on greats like Plato, Aristotle etc. today. It described about their lives, works and other aspects of their existence. There was so much of mention about how each aspect of their life is understood and interpretation of what proof led to this understanding.

Suddenly a thought came, how will people of this generation be understood few centuries later?
We, in this generation  have moved away so much from paper. We love our small machines and prefer to do most things electronically. We also chat in our local languages using English to represent it.

I actually just do not remember when was it last in recent times since I have started working that I used a proper paper and pen to write something that I really want to represent as my individual thought. Whenever I feel like writing my first choice is type off and so I am sure do many more of us. So are we leaving any footprints for our future generations or just leaving a space for them to re-discover everything all over again.

Huh! something to worry for future?

As I type this post, I also get reminded to think about India's glorious past.
for example -

• If you read Ramayana, there are instances like the 'vimana' in which Ravan took Sita away and later Ram and Sita returned to Ayodhya in. Was is anything different that modern technology planes or helicopters?
• Both Ramayana and Mahabharata have so many 'astra's' and 'yantra's' used in war. How different are these from our modern day missiles?
• 'Muni-Rishi's' just taking some water in their hands from 'kamandals' and creating blessings or curses.
• 'Narada Muni' travelling across worlds in seconds. Was this not teleporting?
• 'Trishanku' hanging between stars of 'saptarishi mandal'. Was this not related to managing gravity?

And are we not re-discovering these all over again now coz the world did not have the technology transcripts?

Make a difference : Bring an edge to your project delivery ! [My Learning : #1]

[My Learning : #1]

How can you do more efficient project delivery ??
There are many instances when projects go in crisis. Mostly the crisis situations fall into 2 categories

• Either the client expectation is not met on time or
• There are delivery quality issues -  in other words client expectation is not met

A general observations that I have had around where slippages are mostly hapenning and can be easily corrected with more focus and attention are

1. Requirement Freeze - Ensure that the requirements for test are clearly defined and signed off from all stakeholders.
2. Code Freeze - Insist on a code freeze from Dev team and deployment to QA environment that is completely stable.
3. Dedicated QA Environment - Ensure that a dedicated QA environment is available with latest and stable build deployed for testing. During the period of a testing cycle, this code should not be updated. Have all the release notes available handy against each new code update deployed.
4. Risk Based Testing : The approach is one of the better ones to start testing on. It can be either used as a direct approach or can be used as a parallel approach to exhaustive testing that needs to be undertaken. It also helps to prioritize and build a strong traceability avoiding defect slippages.
5. People Dependencies : People are the biggest keys for successful project deliveries. Understand the key people in your project. Understand what they are involved with and what are they doing. Help them improve with your experience and do better.
6. People Competency - Invest in your people and their competencies. Give them space to develop their skills and create scenarios where they can upgrade and learn.
7. Reaction – only after crisis - Do not react only after crisis has hit you and you get into either multiple blame games or cover-up activities. Pay close attention to track deliverable against expectation matching for cleaner output in sync with desired client expectation.
8. Role of a Team Member as a 'TESTER' - As a tester, don't be a checker be a tester ! Try unconventional testing. Look for avenues to do the exploratory. Keep a keen eye open for critical defects. Bring in a thought process as end user. This will help you crack the hidden issues and potential defects.
9. Role of a Team Lead / Test Manager - Be innovative in building your test strategy. Gather your application / product details technically as well as functionally. Show your team members how to be innovative in test approach. Build your test oracles strong. Do not hesitate to ask questions. Neither hesitate to insist on logging an issue and not sweep it under carpet on behest of development team.
10. Role of a Manager - As a manager don't just sit there and watch. Only metrics numbers will not give you a better and cleaner tested product or app. Don't also just fall into the trap where you feel that few web apps and trackers that you maintain or the jazzy reports that you can stir up with MS office packages will take you and your teams to places with clients. Make your hands dirty along with your teams and lead from front to deliver a better tested deliverable.

Lessons of Learning : from leaves of experience

I intend to start writing a series of posts that will be in the tag line "Lessons of Learning - My learning #".
These will mainly be focused around my experience in life as I have evolved through my journey of testing experiences.
These will primarily be short notes to start with and will slowly grow into bigger writing pieces.
Will look forward to comments from you to add on your experience leaves to the same :)

Experiential Learning

I picked up a new mobile handset some weeks back but did not have time to configure it up due to free time unavailability ........ started to do it in bits and pieces....managed to set up a few basic accesses.... finally realized that there is an issue when I try to access mails. It just refused to open up any of my mbox ..... tried many approaches, mobile store and googling too but was just NOT getting the appropriate info to set it right..... I was so irritated at the user unfriendliness and was wondering if it was worth spending the bomb of currency notes on it ....

Then I remembered that AJ had a older version of a similar handset, and this weekend (14 May 2011) when I pinged him, I asked him if he could help me on....... and there started our virtual paired testing :)

We set onto identifying what he had on his handset over skype chat and I tried to see if I could replicate or find some near about alternative to what he was suggesting ........ he built up scenarios for me based on his user experience and I tried to see if I could replicate it over my new handset with new functionalities and modules..... visa-versa I told him of my user needs and he tried to initiate it on his cell and tell me the scenario which I again tried to replicate.
The first trap I unearthed was that I cannot access coz the software's pre-installed on my handset are old ones and the new apps don't support them any more. AJ suggested that I needed to set up an application that will help me access all that I needed from a single screen. AJ further suggested I use snaptu for it as he found that very comfortable. He sent me a link and I downloaded and installed it up.......it was an older version and after installation, I had to again upgrade it up...... but then started my series of unearthing multiple user unfriendly scenarios and setting each one of them up as per my need......

The worst of all traps was that my logical thinking and the way the mobile functionalities are mapped had no sync. For example : I assume gmail to be a social networking, but the system accepts it as 'utilities'.... with this experience, I expected  hotmail also to be 'utilities'..... but found it is under 'entertainment' .....yahoo mail and You Tube was also found there .....
Also found that Yahoo and Hotmail were listed under 'news' too :(

Long and short of it ... had to really spend time looking for navigations that were not so logical in approach ....

And finally after 3 weeks of buying the handset I am operational in mobile over my required net access on the move :)

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 !!


….