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.

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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 :)