notes and rants

For better or worse, part of my current role requires me to get really busy people to answer my questions or give me information so I can ultimately help them do their jobs better. For example, I’m currently gathering some information on business challenges from the members of the test leadership team at Microsoft in order to help them prioritize the cross-company work they want to focus on in the next fiscal year.

After our last meeting, I sent meeting notes to the leadership team alias, along with a request to provide the information by the end of the month.

Two weeks later, I had two responses. This was not, of course unexpected, but I had a secret trick that has never failed me. I’ve discovered in my career that the more senior people get, the less likely they are to respond to email sent to an alias – regardless of the seniority of the people on the alias. I could have sent a follow up email to the alias, but it would have met the same fate as the first attempt.

Instead, as mundane as it sounds, I typed up an email in Word, and then used the mail merge feature to send each TLT member a “personal” email requesting the information (boy, I hope nobody on the alias reads this blog and discovers my secret). The result was immediate success. I sent the email to 24 people on Saturday evening, and by Sunday afternoon I had 3 responses. I currently have 10 responses, along with promises for at least a few more by Wednesday. It’s a dirty trick, but it works – people just love personal attention, and if you find a way to give it to them (even if you cheat just a little), they will likely give you what you’re asking for.

Testing posts will reconvene shortly – thanks for allowing the diversion.

I was recently talking with a colleague about someone he knows who is currently in a “senior” position at a software company. He mentioned that the person – let’s call him “Tim” was having some problems with his employees. The problem Tim had was that his employees weren’t  - in his eyes – giving him enough respect. I asked some questions about Tim, and it turns out that he hadn’t really done anything to earn his team’s respect – according to Tim, you see, his position of authority entitled him to respect. If Tim were the president of the company – or chief something or other, I’d be more apt to give him a handful of “position related respect”, but just because Tim runs a small organization doesn’t, in my mind, give him reason to demand respect.

To me, this is silly. You don’t get a free pass on respect just because you’re in charge. Assuming he’s competent, Tim wouldn’t have to to a lot to earn his team’s respect. He just hast to do something to earn it. I’m not asking for a special q&a session or anything specific at all. Just show the team that you know what you’re doing. They know you got to your position because you have proven yourself capable, but so far, they haven’t seen it. Show them that you both know something, and that you know your limitations. Have a combination of vision and humility and have some attention to detail. You can do more, but you certainly don’t have to re-demonstrate everything that got you to your position. You do, however, have to give people a reason to respect and follow you. The better the reason, the closer they will follow.

I gave this advice to my friend – I hope Tim can be successful.

Been incredibly busy lately, but wanted to share a few other HWTSAM reviews.

There’s a review on stickyminds that’s pretty good (and yes, I agree that Ken may have been a little to “rah-rah” about testing at Microsoft, but to each his own).

There’s also a nice write up and discussion over on software testing club.

Finally, Ken has put together a nice list of all of the reviewers over on his blog.

Thanks again everyone for the support.

I was thinking about my last post – as well as the “stuff on my plate”, and thought it may be interesting to share some examples (and simultaneously share a bit about what I’m working on).

To quickly recap, I discussed how I try to get rid of as many possible distractions when 'I’m working on tasks where I need a lot of focus (“in the zone”), and don’t want to be interrupted. I also mentioned that I have plenty of work that doesn’t suffer (too much at least) from interruption, and that I try to do that work if I expect to be interrupted.

For example, I have to get the following things done in the next week or so where I’ll need some non-interrupted time – work where extended focus will have a big impact on my ability to accomplish the work. These items all have deadlines in the next 10 days.

• I’m giving a presentation to a MS testing group next Friday that I need to prepare, edit, refine, practice, etc.
• I need to write my paper for PNSQC (this one scares me a bit because I haven’t started it yet)
• I need to write up some stats for myself on my team’s performance (annual reviews coming up)

Given the proper context, the above is only 6-10 hours of focused work. The challenge for me sometimes is carving out that much time in a week. I have a plan to get it done, and I don’t anticipate any problems.

On the other side of the fence is “stuff I have to do, but I can do it while the kids are screaming if I need to” stuff. Some examples include:

• Writing blog posts :)
• Updating the web site for sasqag
• Various work requests (e.g. doc reviews or feedback)
• Sending agendas for some of the recurring meetings I own
• Updates for internal aliases I own
• Monitoring MSDN test forum

I usually have 12-15 hours of meeting a month (3 hrs for 1:1s with my team, another hour with my boss, meeting(s) with mentees, an hour or two of team meetings and a handful of one off and recurring meetings). I do a lot of the interruptable work when, for example, I have 30-45 minutes between meetings. To me, that’s not quite enough time for focused work, but I can use those chunks to knock off a lot of the littler stuff. I usually have a couple of 3-4 hour uncommitted blocks a week where I can crank out the other stuff.

And that’s what I do (most of it) and how I do it (sort of). Thanks for indulging me.

In the world of twitter, facebook, email, cell phones and IM, I sometimes wonder how anybody gets anything done. Too many studies to count mention the effects of multi-tasking and interruptions on getting work done. Think about it for a moment – you’re deep in thought writing code, testing a complex feature, or writing an important paper. Your IM window pops up with a friend asking if you’re free next Thursday for lunch, or you’re distracted by a phone call from your mother. You stop to deal with the questions and get back to work…sort of. The problem is that a few minutes ago you were “in the zone”. Now, you need to take 10-15 minutes to get you back in the zone. Get interrupted enough, and a whole day is gone and you don’t have much (if anything) to show for it.

My feeling is that if you want to be productive, you need to allow yourself to stay in the zone. this means that you have to turn off reminders, turn off popup messages – and focus on your work. I just wiped my laptop this week and installed the Windows 7 RC (which is fantastic). I also installed office, and immediately brought up the taskbar context menu for outlook and turned off all of the ways it wants to keep me informed. I swear turning off these four checkboxes gives me an extra 5-8 hours of productivity per-week.

look – no checks

Then (after I mute my phone, and turn make sure Office Communicator is on “do not disturb”, when I want to focus and crank out work, nothing is left to distract me. I can get in the zone and stay in the zone. If I didn’t do this, I’d never complete anything other than the most trivial projects.

Of course, I don’t work like this 40 hours a week. I have plenty of work that lends itself well to interruptions (catching up on blog reading, cleaning out my inbox, reading and posting to twitter, reading research papers, etc.). So, if I know I’m in a situation where I have the potential to be interrupted, I choose to work on interruptible tasks. I can’t imagine what my day would be like if I didn’t do this, but I see people all the time who allow themselves to be interrupted far to often when they’re doing work that suffers from interruptions.

I’m not saying I’m a pro, but it’s something I work on. It’s funny (and sort of weird) that I get a lot of personal satisfaction from working through my todo list and keeping my inbox empty. If I didn’t have a plan, I’d never get it done.

But that’s just me.

I went to the dentist this morning for a routine teeth cleaning and to get my yearly x-rays. My teeth were fine, but the x-rays showed something interesting – the crown my dentist put on last year didn’t appear to sit correctly on the tooth. My dentist stared for a minute and determined that the crown “installation” wasn’t up to his standards, and that he would like to schedule an appointment to redo it. He capped it off by stressing that “there would be no cost to me”. While it’s nice that my dentist has a warranty on his work, there is a cost. I’ll need to miss 3 or so hours of work, and there will be needles and grinders and temporary crowns to deal with. There’s no cash leaving my pocket, but the new crown certainly isn’t free.

Unfortunately, the model isn’t unique to dentistry. If a customer has a problem with their software program, we (software developers in general) can choose to provide them a fix “free of charge”. But it’s not free – the customer had to take the time to report the issue, and will need to take time to install the patch or updates. You also have to remember that the customer never would have reported the issue if it wasn’t causing him some pain or blocking his work. The fix is free, but the path to get there is not.

I guess in the end this is yet another case of my wish to get things right the first time. Good enough obviously isn’t, and it can hurt.

<note – the title of this post is a play on Crosby’s Quality is Free. Other than the similarities of title, this post and the book have nothing in common>

Work on the Korean version of HWTSAM is wrapping up, and we’re looking for a few more of what the editors like to call “praise quotes”. These are the nice things people say about the book that either go on the back cover or on the inside pages.

If you’ve read the book and want to add your words to the Korean version of hwtsam, just send me email (alan dot page at microsoft dot com).

So far, the blogosphere in general has had a better experience with the book than the amazon reviewers :)

Here is a link to the latest review I found. Thanks Michael for taking the time to write this up.

It looks like (pending paper composition and acceptance) that I’ll be heading three hours south this October to present at the Pacific Northwest Software Quality Conference in Portland, OR. I’ll be presenting on “The role of experienced testers on software quality” (or something like that).

I’m also excited that (at least) two of the bloggers I follow will also be presenting.

Marlena Compton, who has some great ideas on metrics and visualization in testing, and the Testy Redhead (who I believe won best paper last year) will also be presenting. On top of that, Elisabeth Hendrickson will be giving a keynote. I’m excited to be a part of it and think it will be a fantastic conference.

It’s been busier than normal for me at Microville recently. My friend (and frequent soccer match viewing partner) James Whittaker ended his 3-year run at Microsoft last week. James still lives locally, and I expect that we’ll continue to collaborate in the future. The pettier downside of James’ departure is that some of our shared projects now fall to me – it’s a bit more work, but all stuff I love to do (although it may not be the stuff that my boss wants me to do). I’m sure I’ll figure out a way to fit it all in.

It looks like you can preorder Beautiful Testing on Amazon. I wrote a chapter for the book on Large Scale Test Automation. I’ll leak some details in this blog between now and when the book comes out.

The Chinese and Korean translations of hwtsam are well under way. I hope I can get my hands on a copy of each of the translations when they are available.

Next week is the yearly “engineering forum” at Microsoft. We take one week every year and hold something that’s quite similar to a conference like SD West or PDC. We have a hundred or so talks spread over 5 days, including keynotes from the bigwigs. Our group (the larger group – not just my little team) are responsible for putting it on, so there’s a bit of “ship stress” in the air at building 21.

Things should be back to normal shortly. Now, it’s time to get back to those 30 “red” todo items and 50 or so unread emails in my inbox.

Words are funny things. We use them to convey meaning - but there's more to words than that. We also use words to try to change the way people view things. In real estate advertisements, for example, you see words like "rustic" used instead of "old", or describe a home as "having character" when it really means the house is practically falling apart.

I find it interesting (or amusing, I can't decide which) that testers play this game too. I know testers who avoid and replace words entrenched in the testing vocabulary with words that they think sound better - or in their "words", words that convey a better meaning than the original. Other than diluting the testing vocabulary, I don't really have a problem with this. If you want to call a boundary a fence-post or an edge, that's fine. If you want to call it a termination endpoint, that's fine too.

What really bugs me (believe me, I've had to edit the "bad" words out of this rant more than once already) is when people change the meanings as an attempt to raise the value of test, or show that test "has a seat at the table", or is a "first-class citizen". I have to tell you, I'm sick and tired of testers whining about not getting respect. If you want respect, you have to give respect and you have to earn respect. Using fancy words isn't going to do it for you, but if you do your job and show value and stop trying to convince people you're more valuable than you truly are, you'll be fine. I know plenty of testers who do these things, and guess what - they have respect (and even admiration) from their peers in development. This is a huge peeve of mine, and unfortunately, one I deal with too frequently for my own mental well-being. Here's a message for all testers - you aren't going to earn respect by whining about the fact that you don't have respect. Nothing, in fact, could be less effective. Knock it off and try something else. I'm this close to impersonating SteveB and throwing a chair through the window of our lovely test excellence offices.

I named this blog many years ago when I was "just" a test architect on the windows CE team at Microsoft. Finally, as I get to this point in the post I realize that I've finally written a post that reflects the blog title - or at least close if you consider a rant a word.

I still owe you some posts covering my recent metrics presentation, but wanted to pass this along in the meantime. I don’t post links to other blogs often, but I thought this was appropriate – especially to the crowd who thinks that because metrics can be gamed, they are useless.

Raymond is consistently solid on common sense – this post is no exception.

People become more trustworthy the more you trust them

I can’t mention enough how important trust is (it doesn’t get mentioned in this blog enough, but it’s one of my favorite topics to discuss internally). Perhaps the first step to a successful metrics program is to build (or nurture) a culture where such a program can actually succeed.

Been a busy week, but wanted to send a link to my materials from STAR. My presentation style is generally more discussion based, so you may not get a lot from these, but I’m happy to answer questions if you have them.

I will take some time in future blog posts to rehash some of the points for those who were not able to attend star.

The presentation is here.

Another review of HWTSAM is here. My favorite quote:

All in all, this is an impressive work with a great deal of wisdom and principles – underpinned by sound theory – that would be of interest to any company that produces software of reasonable complexity.

Keep those reviews coming (and keep sending pictures of you and HWTSAM in “special” places)

I’m on a plane returning from Orlando  / STAR east. As expected, it was a fun week, but by Friday I’d had enough of the 95 degree weather – it’s nice to be heading back to 65 degree Seattle.

I thought my presentation on metrics went well  - if you were there and have additional comments, feel free to post them here. In the description for the talk, I said that it would be a “highly interactive” presentation. I knew I succeeded when over dinner James Whittaker told me that he “uncovered my scam” – he said I got the audience to give half of the talk for me (which sounds about right). When you give a presentation at 3:00 in the afternoon on the second day of the conference, you have to do something to keep people awake. I suppose it also cuts down on my prep time.

I’ll post a link to my latest slides later this week – although without the audience giving half the talk, I’m not sure how valuable they will be.