Influencing one at a time...

I had a professor who once told me her greatest reward in life would be to influence just one of her students to think differently. She sadly passed away a few years later, and University of Maryland now has a scholarship program in her honor. She accomplished many things during her life, and if influencing just one person was her goal, her life was more successful than she could ever have imagined. I never really understood why she set her bar for accomplishment so low (mostly because I knew she achieved so much more), but she was a humble woman and did not like to boast.

Influencing one person doesn't seem like a stretch goal, but unless you have ever been an educator or a trainer you may not really understand how hard it is to effectively influence someone to impact their way of thinking. I am not talking about teaching new facts, or showing someone how to use a tool. I am talking about getting people to change behavior based on new perspectives and awakening the curiosity of someone's mind to want to learn even more.

At Microsoft I train about 400 - 450 new testers around the world each year in our intensive, hands-on new tester course and test automation courses. The new tester course teaches testers (and some developers) the theory and application of several functional and structural testing techniques, test case design, and debugging skills including multiple interactive exercises designed to give the attendees practical experience. About 2 years ago I took some of the core lessons of our internal training and wrapped them up into a workshop that I present regularly at the Software Testing and Performance conference. At the internal training offerings and at the conferences I tell people my only goal is to get them to think about testing and how they approach testing from different perspectives, to think about different ways of problem solving, and how these techniques (at least the functional techniques) are tacitly employed (to varying degrees) even during exploratory testing approaches. (The effectiveness of the application of these techniques varies depending on the testers' abilities and knowledge; but that is a tangent.) 

While I hope I could reach everyone in each class or workshop I am a pragmatist. So, I set my personal objective to influence just one person to change or think about just one aspect of their testing. Well, at the STP conference in San Mateo I guess I was successful. Andrew Binstock, who writes for SD Times and InfoWorld, attended the workshop in San Mateo and posted his comments about one of the functional techniques discussed in the workshop. It seems Andrew realized how pairwise analysis could be used effectively in unit testing.

So, it seems I did reach at least one person at the conference, and hopefully his post will inspire others in his sphere of influence, and those that realize the value and change their behavior (with regards to pairwise testing) will influence others...and so it goes.