Wednesday, November 30, 2016

We love our little boxes

There are days when I feel I shouldn't tweet, because my *intent* is just to make a note of something and someone else takes it as "Interesting, I want to understand this" - and a long discussion emerges. Twitter really isn't a good place for having discussions and personally I at least seem to be confusing people more than clarifying over that medium.

So this is a place for a blog post. Here's what I said:
Let's first talk about the principle. For years, I've been working as a tester and I view my job to include working through information and uncertainty. I'm somehow involved in an activity that makes a discovery of something missing or off, and then we'll do something about it when we know of it. Making lists of things we are missing is core to what I've been doing.

However, reading through lists is a huge time-waster. There's a lean principle of avoiding inventory, and lists of things we should/could do are definitely inventory. Creating and maintaining the lists is a lot of work. And a lot of times with focus on a shorter list in a group that does development is better. Let's deliver this value first and look at what we know the world looks like after that, right? So I've chosen to try to work on value we're delivering now.
 
My usual example of minor changes and tracking is my inability to unsee or dismiss typos in applications. I can go by them, but they leave me backtracking and drain my energy. But there are a lot of these things where, if I look from just *my* perspective as a developer, I could do the "minor" task also 5 minutes before the release. But the trouble is, there may be others who will backtrack all the way until the change is done.  

I see two patterns of how these discussions  with minor changes go (that are really honestly minor).

Case 1: Yes, this. 

There's tool with a local testing script for making sure our schema follows the rules. I change the schema, and I get told to run the local script. Except that the script won't run. Going through the code, I learn there's a parameter I need to use, no clue what it would be. And when I ask about it, I learn that in addition to the missing parameter, I also miss some libraries.

Instead of passing this information to me (and the 50 others who will run into this), the fellow I go to programs relevant error messages to the tooling, so that anyone coming after me gets the info from the trying to run the tool. And all of this happens while I sit with him, with changes being in the version control by the time I walk away.

A day later, I see someone else struggling with the tool. They appreciated the error message right there and then. No backlog. Small thing, do it now. Same amount of time would have gone into just making the backlog item.

Case 2: No, not this. 





There's the schema and it's shared with 10 teams. It's actually only becoming a contract between the teams, so it's work under progress. Reviewing it in a group with representatives, we agree on things that need doing. Like splitting according to our rules. Like removing values that are not in use ("it says DEFisEnabled" and there is no DEF at all yet, maybe in 6 months). Like making sure the names don't confuse us ("it says ABCisEnabled" and "true" means it's disabled). 

So we agree they need to be changed and they keep not changing. Because no one volunteers to change them. No one volunteers because anyone could volunteer (including me). And only one of us (me) will be directly suffering the consequences on a continuous basis with the mental load of remembering what works, what doesn't and what still needs doing.  While we're avoiding doing things that are part of that value we should be taking forward together, the side effects hit other people than the ones avoiding the work.

So...

We all have our ideas of what else we could be doing, and a lot of times that does not come from the perspective of value, but choices of the type of work I personally would like to do. If I'm a C++ developer and we need a Python tool, that is surely a task for someone else? If I'm a senior developer and the change can be done by a junior, that is surely a task for someone else? If I can find someone, anyone, to do it, it isn't my task to do. Because when it isn't mine, I can do more of things I personally would choose to do. Like complex algorithms. Or only testing. Or studying more of something I'm into because I don't have to do *that*. You name it. 

I could frame my original question to be: why so many people volunteer to only work on things they see as "their job", without caring about the overall flow in the system. And all this is a very human thing to do. We like our boxes. We like staying in our boxes. And we love the idea of someone else doing the stuff that doesn't belong into the boxes I like doing.



Saturday, November 26, 2016

In search of value and bottlenecks

Back in the days when agile was new to me, a lot of teams played all sorts of games to learn about the dynamics relevant to software development. Some of the best training courses included a simulation of some sort - maybe they still do.

I played the Marshmallow Challenge with Antti Kirjavainen at Tampere Goes Agile, and thinking of it, I realize it has been a long time since I've been playing any of these agile games.

One game that I remember particularly fondly is the Bottleneck game. I'm thinking of that game today, as I'm thinking about bottlenecks and people's attitudes.

A lot of times talking with programmers, I sense an idea of self-worth in writing code. It's true, there isn't a program we can run (and test) if there isn't the act of writing the code. However, looking at professional programmers in action by sitting next to them, you see that clearly it's not all about writing the code.

In fact, writing the code is hardly the bottleneck. Thinking smart to be able to write the right code is. And for a non-programming programmer like me, thinking together, in right kind of batches, tends to be the contribution I seek to improve.

Without writing the code, the thinking isn't complete. It's still a theory. The trust we experience in testing the system is in the part of the thinking that ended up in the code.

I also find it absolutely fascinating to look at programmers thinking about a line of code together. Having that chance (by inviting myself into that chance) I've learned that for each line we write, we have a lot of options. I remember looking at one of those cases unfold in particular, in a mob format.

We were replacing a component with another. We were not particularly good at talking in intent, all we knew is we need to take out calls to one component and replace then with calls to another. And very early on, someone suggests a way to do a thing. Someone else suggests another option. And another. And very soon there's suggestion of something none would have suggested without hearing the other suggestions. And that feeds into yet another suggestion.

While a lot of times we would go about doing all, we did not because we did not actually propose those as ways of doing. We listed them as possible ways of doing it. From doing the one selected, we still built more on top of the experience.

In a period of just a few minutes so many things happened. And all these things were about thinking, and bringing in various perspectives and experiences into that thinking. It made me realize that each line of code can have a lot of options on what it includes. From a perspective of a tester, those options have implications. Being a non-programming programmer further away from code, I would not see or understand those implications quite the same way.

The amount of tradeoffs in selections in building software is fascinating. The idea of getting it to work is so different from getting it to work just right for all the criteria we can be thinking of: the rightness for this particular technology, the rightness for future maintenance and extendability, the rightness for performance and security considerations.

So all of this leads me to think about the problems I'm experiencing in (some) developer thinking. The problems of "just tell me the requirements", "just specify what it needs to do". The problems of not volunteering to finish the details when the big lines have already been implemented. The problems of not caring about side effects when there's at least some way it already works. The problems of not considering future self and others in maintaining the code. The unwillingness to cross necessary technological borders and rather waiting for someone else to do their bit and solving problems in the interface together, real time. The inability to spend time on testing with an open mind to learn about things that didn't quite work as intended, that we did not even know to expect.

A lot of times the other thinkers, like product owners and testers are around to compensate for the programmer interests. But I still appreciate the programmers who can do all of these types of things the most.

And I find that they usually don't exist, except momentarily. And in programmer groups when they are in their best behavior. 

Not a consultant

I don't have excessive experience on how consultants do their jobs, I've been one only for a very short period of time in my career. The consultants that I see seem to be self-certain people, some very aware of their specialties and limitations, but all taking significant steps to go about helping organizations transform in some way. With the big visible cost number per day, there's an expectation of impact. Consultants being realistic, the impact isn't usually an overnight transformation, but a slow movement of changing perspectives and habits and including skills to stretch the status quo.

I've done short gigs with companies. Most recent one would be one where I first helped assess skills and potential of tester candidates delivering a video of pair testing and report on what to pay attention to in that video and then later training the hire into testing the product, again through strong-style pair testing with me never touching the keyboard. My "consulting" gigs are usually very contained, less open ended than what I see other consultants doing. And all this comes from the fact that I work as "just a tester" in some organization. Now F-Secure, and other product / customer organizations before that. I love the company ownership of the solution and the business development aspects, and I've always felt I get into that all the way immersing myself into the organization and its purpose.

Today I was listening to Sal Freudenberg Lascot talk about Neurodiversity / inclusive collaboration and I was thinking about how much nicer it was to think of aspects of being neurologically different in our needs of how we feel comfortable working than talking of being introvert/extrovert/ambivert. This thinking also helped me outline my favored style of working in organizations that I've been framing in contrast to styles of some people who try to achieve similar results.

I tend to avoid pushing people directly to do stuff. I'm very uncomfortable telling my team to do a retrospective (I mentioned that 20+ times, each time marking one in my bookkeeping to see how many mentions it took to get it done - 23 was the tally). I'd like to tell my automation tester colleagues to go pair with other automation testers because they just write the same code and it makes no sense to me to have personal repositories, but instead of telling, I again mention. Over time, I will show specific examples of problems, hoping people will take up solving those.

The same goes with me wanting to try out mob programming. I go and pair with people who work on exploratory testing in areas I'm learning deeply about right now. I organize practice mobs on areas I work on, but I don't push people to mob, I wait for them to volunteer. I keep the theme out in the open. I point out how the distributed way of working takes us weeks to complete some tasks that could be done in a day together. I share my excitement about doing learning like this with others. But I don't easily go and just book a time when we will do that. I give people time, assessing applicability of my perspectives and slowly moving in the themes of value. And I have an overall goal: I want us to feel happy and included. I want us to feel useful and valuable. I want us to make a difference together through the software we're creating. I want us to be able to say that we get better at what we're doing, every day.

I experiment with everything. The way I mention things and the ways they get caught. The ways I can personally complete a task. With every action, there's a response. And I spend a fair amount of my time finding patterns in those responses. I love the introspection of my own responses. And people around me occasionally hate that I overanalyze their reactions.

I realize I'm a consultant in a way, even if I am an internal consultant, and employee. I'm around to serve my chosen purpose, share my love of testing and great products, and it's ok that the changes I participate in take years and years to accomplish.

Looking back, I'm super proud of what we became at my previous place of work. From monthly releases and loads of bugs in production, we went into daily releases and rare occasions of bugs in production. From individuals avoiding talking to others we went into a well-working remote team that got together twice a week. From me feeling alone with my interests in testing, the change to the team caring for testing and me caring for technical solutions was immense. From people feeling they had no power, we went into a team of strong experts who cared for all activities from value to delivering it. The broke the ideas of working on an assembly line each with our tasks, and contributed according to both our strengths and stretches. We opened every corner of single code ownership and cleaned it up to be team's. We dropped all work estimates, and worked on a limited number of things at a time, delivering things in pairs (or mobs) as quickly as we could. We worked out ways to include work on technical debt, which we understood that came from the fact that we were learning: the things we coded a year ago needed an update, because every one of us was a better version of ourselves now.

When I look at consultants, I wonder if their different style of communicating and more direct driving of change is something I should practice. And I recognize my discomfort. Ir's not that I don't speak out. It's just that my preferred ways of communicating are slow. I like to take my time to see if my proposals will actually improve things. And I see that I regularly dismantle implementations of my great ideas at a time that others did not notice yet that they are not really working.

Not a consultant, yet a consultant. Aren't we all? 

Tuesday, November 22, 2016

New World Problems in Automation

I did a talk yesterday, which I think of being around the idea that in a world where we've found useful and valuable ways of including automation in testing in a relevant scope, what more is there to do on that theme. Surely we're not ready and future (and today) hold many challenges around spreading skills and knowledge and innovating around today's problems.

I keep thinking back to an after conference discussion with someone who I think first my idea of where we can be if we stop fighting against test automation's existence. They had loads and loads of automated unit, component and integration tests. They found their tests valuable and useful while not perfect. But I'm most intrigued with the reminder of how the problems we talk about change when we have automation that isn't just wasting our time and effort.

The problem we talked about was that it takes too long to run the tests. What to do?

I want to first take a moment to appreciate how different a problem this is from the idea of not knowing how to create useful test automation in the first place. Surely, it sounded like this organization had many things playing for them: a product that is an API for other developers to use; smart and caring developers and testers working together; lots of data to dig into with your questions about which tests have been useful.

So we talked about the problem. 30 minutes is a long time to wait. They had already parallelized their test execution. But there was just much of tests.

We talked about experiments to drop some of the tests. The thoughtful reading to remove overlaps taking a lot of effort. Tagging tests into different groups to be able to run subsets. Creating random subsets and dropping them from schedules to see the impact of dropping, like having different tests to run for each weekday so that all tests end up run only once a week.

We talked about how we don't really know what will fail in the future. How end-user core scenarios might be a good thing to keep in  mind, but how those might stay in the mind of the developers changing code without being in the automation. And how there just does not seem to be one right answer.

I have some work to do to get to these new world problems. And I'm so happy to see that some amazing, smart people who also understand the value of exploration in the overall palette are there already. Maybe the next real step for these people is machine learning on the changes. I look forward to seeing to people taking attempts in that direction. 

Sunday, November 20, 2016

Remind me again, why do I speak at conferences?

It was 1997 and all I wanted was to be one of the cool kids in the student union board of executives. I announced my interest, and was standing in the queue for introducing myself. At time of my introduction in front of the large classroom with probably 50 people at most, I was shaking, about to faint. They could see me shake. My voice would escape me. The introduction did not go well, but it changed my life. It changed me through starting to work on my handicap of fear of crowds and public speaking.

With public 59 talks in 2015-2017 timeframe, I can say that the change is quite relevant.

Public speaking is not an inherent talent, but it is a skill we can practice. It's a skill I have practiced, and an area where one is never ready. All it takes is a decision: I will do it. Opportunities to practice are everywhere. Start safe with something you know and care for, with a short talk, with an audience that shares your interests. They want to see you succeed and they are interested in your framing of the same topics. You don't have to travel across the world for your first talk. Talk at your own company. Talk in your local community. Don't worry about failing, we all do bad sometimes.

I've learned not to do theoretical talks as they don't sit well with me - I speak from experiences and cases, even if those cases are full of imperfection. I've learned to take down the amount of text on my slides as my comfort levels of speaking went up. And I've moved from talks to live demos. There is no one recipe for a talk. I find the recipe to seek is bringing yourself to the talk and for me, it's been a long journey of experiments with all sorts of topics, approaches and emphasis.

I recently listened to Agile Uprising Podcast's Women in Agile -episode, and listening to it made me upset. One of the panelists introduced the idea that it's bad for all of us women if a women who shouldn't be speaking (not good enough) gets a chance. It made me think back to the chances I was given to practice. I wasn't always good. I got better by practice. Speaking isn't a one off thing, but it is a journey. Amongst all the average men, why is one average woman framed as bad?

Getting ready to yet another talk, I ask what I've recently asked so many times: why do I bother? Why do I speak at conferences? What's in it for me? As my friend reminds me, there's three things conference speaking gives me.

  1. Network and connections. My network isn't of immediate financial value to me as I'm not a consultant, but I've found (and keep looking for) special people to connect with. People who can inspire me, teach me and keep me honest when I'm learning. 
  2. Strive for learning. Speaking in conferences gives me chances of participating in conferences I couldn't be in otherwise. Many of my colleagues talk about years without being in one, and I go to tens of conferences every year. My unique position as someone who goes out a lot in combination to my personality makes me the person who drives my organizations for better directions. I know what is possible outside my company, and I don't believe in "impossible". I'm never completely happy with where we are not but always seeking for options to do things better at work. 
  3. Setting an example. I speak so that people like me would dare to speak. People who are not consultants  but practitioners. People with severe stage fright. People who don't see people like them on stage, just like I still don't see people like me. We have still unrepresentative amount of women in the field of testing on the stages. 
I try to remember this when I'm in a different country while my son is sick at home and I can only offer my voice as comfort. And I reflect on this as I work to pass the ball forward, to take time to stay away from conferences to work on other projects. 

If you are someone working your way into the speaking circuit, either right at the beginning or anywhere on the journey, and believe my experiences could be of help, please reach out. If I can be a speaker, anyone can. 


Friday, November 18, 2016

Thinking you're the best

I've been to organizations where we talk about "being the best". It kind of strikes a chord with me, in particular for the fact that I believe I'm really, really good testing specialist - and a decent software generalist too. But today, I'm thinking of the risks of thinking of being the best.

If you think you're the best, you think there is nothing to learn from others, and in the fast-paced industry of software development, that attitude would be irresponsible and dangerous. If you are the best, you often view yourself as an individual contributor who may also fear being revealed not to be as perfect as she'd like to be when in collaboration settings.

For years, I prepared in the previous night for every relevant meeting. I went in with a ready-made plan, usually three to prep my responses for whatever might emerge in the meetings. Back in school, my Swedish teacher made me translate things out loud every class, because of my "word-perfect translations". Truth is I had them pre-translated with great effort because I was mortified with the idea of having to do  that work on the fly.

Through my own experiences, I've grown to learn that the pre-prep was always my safety blanket. I did not want to look bad. I did not want to be revealed. I was the person who would rather use 3 days on a half-an-hour task. And I would say it was for my "learning". It was for my "personality". But truth is, it was for my fear of not being perfect.

This might explain why I'm nowadays such a strong proponent of collaboration: mobbing (safer) and pairing (personal stretch). When two non-perfect people work together, the result is magic.


Pull systems

If you've been around agile a while, pull systems are probably a thing you've heard of. This is not directly related to pull requests that are requests to review code, but with pull systems the idea is that in a process with many steps, the step after you determines when you should be producing. This is to avoid inventory (stuff lying around without moving forward) that is a form of waste.

If I think of my testing as a pull system, the consumer of my results is the developer making changes or the business person making decisions on accepting risks knowingly. It makes little sense for me to produce information that no one wants. There needs to be a consumer for that information.

However, the stuff we work on does not include clear cut rules of what people are interested in. No one can tell me exactly what these different stakeholders already know, and what information they find useful, or even more, if their finding something useful is correct as per their stage of learning about what is relevant. So, I shoot some info at them and stop to look at reactions. I try same or similar thing several times and stop to look at reactions, including if they even notice I'm trying establish a pattern. I have a heuristic that at a point they still reject the info and they see the pattern without me pinpointing it, we may be approaching a point where my time is best used delivering a different message. Except that time changes things, so it makes sense to try again later because it was clearly relevant enough in my perspective to conspire on getting the message across in the first place.

There's again a trigger I'm thinking through this. And the trigger is me realizing that pull systems thinking had become very ingrained in me and, as it turns out, some of my closest colleagues. Taken far enough, it means that no information is offered without you pulling it. Broadcasting things in hopes of serendipity can be considered waste.

One of the biggest puzzles for me with the new job in the two first months has been that it took forever before anyone offered me info I did not have to go hunt for. As a new employee, I felt lucky I was not here for the first time, so I knew things from the past and had the means to go for the information. But at end of every day, I've felt exhausted. Every day of work has required all my senses to be fully aware, and nothing has come easy.

I never sensed that this was ill-intentioned as whenever I would have a question, the response was overwhelmingly positive. No one refuses to help me, not by words, not by expressions. They are there whenever I know what I need from them.

And finally yesterday someone voiced out the words "pull system" when discussing my experience in our first ever (during my time here now) retrospective. We've been trained to think of pull rather than push, when we're trained agile thinking.When no one voices the idea of pulling information to a new hire, the new hire can end up feeling overwhelmed and exhausted without a good reason. In my thinking of plausible explanations of the behaviors, values/culture were high up on the list, but my guesses were targeted more towards individualistic culture ("I'd rather work by myself") than the idea of encouraging pull systems.

And there is such a thing as taking pull systems too far. When you're in a discovery process, you don't know what to pull unless you first discover more. Without broadcasting some information, you will minimize serendipity: the lucky accident of something relevant finding you that you did not know you could know.

The world is a balance. I'm still a big believer in pull, but some of the stuff we just need to push. Finding the right balance is fascinating, and I will think about this a lot more with regards to the ways I test. I still believe in teaching my stakeholders to pull information from me, remembering that I'm not the one fixing bugs here in the middle of the night if they escape into production. My expertise is valuable, and through pull system thinking, deemed more valuable by the consumers of the information I provide. But there might be stuff I need to just push through broadcast more. 

Thursday, November 17, 2016

Don't set me up for a failure, it will happen organically too

I appreciate pull requests. The idea that one of us changes something and it goes through other people's eyes is wonderful. I like the idea of not being left alone. I like the idea of getting feedback and suggesting improvements. And I see this works well on some of the cases, usually ones where the size of the pull request is small, the scope of it is clear and where there are knowledgeable people to comment on stuff.

However, recently I've also had the pleasure of following pull requests that end up in long discussions. I've had my own 1st pull request in a new company rejected without a good reason. And I've seen that a process that serves some well is really painful for others.

So on some of the activities that end up as pull requests, I keep repeating: we would be better off mob programming. Pull requests can turn into:
  • wasted time on implementing a change that isn't welcome
  • wasted time on arguing over authority: who gets to decide what is good enough or right?
  • back-and-forth discussion over long period of time trashing all focus of other work
There was a twitter comment behind my need of writing this post with regards to my note on "I'd rather be mob programming":
I find that people learn in different ways, and I don't see anything inherently off with learning while in a mob as long as I feel safe. With smaller number of voices, I may learn bad practices that I need to unlearn later. I may be left alone with the conflicting information from two "seniors". And even worse, I may get completely blocked on my attempts to contribute. You wouldn't believe the reasons people find when they go looking for why nothing I do is ever good enough. Except that it is.

In a mob, I'm not a victim of one person's perspective. If I use the wrong words to express things, I find that other people help out and get to the core of the idea. As long as there is kindness, consideration and respect. We need psychological safety, and establishing that over PRs if it does not yet exist or gets forgotten is almost a mission impossible.

When I'm new, you don't need to give me tasks to try me out alone. I don't have to sink first to learn to swim. And even worse, as someone new, having me work on something only to correct me through pull request discussion (or rejection) isn't really setting me up for feeling like I belong.

In specific, this tweet makes me want to express my feelings more clearly:
Trust me, you don't need to set me up for failure to expose weaknesses or opening educational opportunities. Those emerge organically when working on things. And while getting to those educational opportunities, the idea that I really dislike is that there is no better way: just read the code alone. Because there is a better way. It could be pair or a mob. If you are a woman working with the guys who keep telling that women only write comments in code (old stuff, sure) you will always feel safer with a group. In group, people are on a better behavior. Even if it gets called a Mob.

Wednesday, November 16, 2016

A Pull Request Ping Pong

There's a schema that needs doing. Nothing special. Just names of things. Allowed values. Defaults. And from my past experiences, doing this badly early on is a source of many bad things when multiple systems are supposed to communicate (and won't) or when someone realizes that it should be called something different. I tend to come with this feedback from the testing angle, so better get on it early on to avoid ripple effects.

We meet and agree this works needs doing and we will do it as everything, with pull requests. Just change it for the better, each of us individually. Nothing happens, so I bring us together again to agree on principles of naming, organizing and formatting and we walk out with some rules I can act on, and agreement that I wouldn't but that everyone else ("programmers") would. We agree also on a timeframe.

Timeframe passes and half of the people have done changes. No one has really done changes we agreed to be applicable throughout the schema. So with deadline, I both remind people (and stuff happens) and volunteer to do some of the consistency and documentation related work on it.

I get sucked into the fascinating process of pull requests. A lot of them, on a short timeframe. And a lot of them having a lot of discussion. I experience the wait time. The rework. The ping-pong. The silently undone work that no one volunteers to do as it might be rejected as there isn't a principle on those yet.

Like for naming of fields that have a time numeric value to include the information if it is this time milliseconds, seconds, minutes or  hours. Like for knowing exactly what each value does to ensure the names communicate the right things through several systems. Like checking default values for consistency when they are spread around in a few files that none finds immediately their own.  There's a lot of hope of "someone else's work".

With the time we used on the ping-pong, we could have met together and done a lot of this work. So I wonder where the idea of the excellence of pull requests for this comes from. And all I can think of is the idea of being able to work alone. Pull requests are appearance of collaboration when there is also real collaboration: pairing or mobbing.

I think of this the next time someone tells me mobbing is ineffective. There's still so much of harmonization work that none volunteered for today, with the hope that someone else will deal with it. Or, time will take care of it. When there's more than this one place of dependency, it's clear it will no longer change. It's now or hard. And I prefer getting things done.

A great reminder from a friend:



Saturday, November 12, 2016

Triggers to search for a new mindmapping tool

I've used mind mapping tools for years, and recently my go-to choice has been Mindmup. I've used it in most of my public exploratory testing presentations and usually having at least a few people come check the name of the tool again after the talk. I've been surprised they did not know about usefulness of electronic mind mapping in exploratory testing.

As always, this Thursday I clicked on to mindmup.com to get to the tool and opened a map for my mob to use as note taking tool while demoing mob testing.

The tool had been updated to a visually new version, which mildly annoyed me, but I take that as just not liking tools I like change. There were no problems during the session, the group created a map and all was fine.

After the session, I proceeded to do what I always do: save the map in my gdrive collection of maps different sessions have created. And I couldn't do it - all I was getting was an upsetting info of buying Mindmup Gold.


That sparked both a tweet of frustration that Mindmup twitter account quickly picked up without hashtags or mentions.

Later, I was forced to pair with a friend to "solve my problem with saving the mind map". I wasn't particularly happy. I just wanted to change tools. In the world of options, I felt it was time to move on. If nothing else, the pairing revealed two things:

  • Where I went wrong with ending up with a map I couldn't save as I wanted to
  • How to work around not being able to save as I wanted to
Where I went wrong?

Nowadays, I have several clicks more to go through to get to a new map than in the old version. There's a landing page first. Then there's a page with buttons to start a map. And finally I'm in a map. 

Unsurprisingly, I wasn't particularly keen on looking at the new screens or paying attention. So when I thought the second screen had two buttons, it actually had five. 

I never realized that I should have chosen a storage option before creating a map, as that was conceptually different from previous versions of this product, but also most of other products I use. I create and I save - in that order. I don't plan on saving before creating.

The workaround

Instead of being able to save to gdrive, I could now export a map. And probably I could save the exported map on my gdrive, yet I ended up importing it to a map using gdrive as storage option. 

So? What now?

I'm still upset after two days, even if I'm more calm than before. I very much dislike the extra clicks, and I'm ready to pay for my mapping tool. I'm looking into options. I was recommended Coggle or MIndmeister, and I'm now playing with those to see if I like them. I'm probably going to check Xmind if I would go back to it.

Or, maybe I'll feel differently soon. 

The experience, however, is showing me how I deal with software frustration. One annoys me and I'm paying for the others. That's kind of funny.  
 

Your choice, explorer!

I had five amazing, insightful volunteers for my demo exploratory testing mob at Testbash Philadelphia. Their open reactions made the experience for me even more worthwhile. In particular I remember when one exclaimed: "Interesting! Oo, I don't like that.", when another said that "I wouldn't write anything down before I know more about the application" and a third confessed that the experience was both fun and exhausting but the chosen style of exploring wouldn't be their chosen style of exploring. Fourth mentioned being unsure of rules and how strictly should those be followed, and the fifth was missing a specification to begin with. The volunteers individual approaches got many participants to approach me later, wondering about the options. What would be the right way to go about exploring the application?

I find that one of the powers of testing in a mob is how it reveals our personal differences and preferences. My volunteers were all from different organizations and locations, with different built-in personal styles. Being different is a strength, helping bring in different perspectives. But to work, on a longer term in particular, in a mob, they would need to build common mechanisms.

They could experiment with different approaches. Let's agree not to write *anything* down for an hour. Let's agree to write only bugs down. Let's agree to only focus on listing functionalities. Let's not touch the application but go look for online documentation of what to expect. All valid approaches.

Working together would create a mix of recipes the group uses to bring in things each feels is relevant, giving chances for the ways of others. They could agree to spend an hour in being mainly navigated within the intent of one, perhaps starting from the one least strongly formed. Instead of choosing one, try all styles. Let the unlikely show its power first.

Within the half an hour of demo, we did not go too deep into letting intent emerge from the group, but I gave the box to play in. We saw it was hard to stay in the box, that problems all around the application made it even harder.

So what would be the right way to start? My one rule is variance. Do it different every time if that is possible to maximize your chances of serendipity. What goes first determines what can come second, and the varied order of things helps you think in different dimensions. It's not just one way, but whatever you do first already changes the state of your knowledge.

Your choice, explorer. Just realize the choice exists. 

Friday, November 11, 2016

Ruining the life of the introvert

I listened to an insightful talk by Elizabeth Zagroba on Succeeding as an Introvert yesterday, and throughout the talk I kept reflecting my own thoughts. I thought about how awful the idea of Mob Testing I introduced first thing in the morning must be for someone who identifies strongly as an introvert. I thought about how I've been regularly labeled as extrovert, yet how I recognized most of the introverted aspects she was describing in her talks as things I do - like thinking critically once more after the meeting is done. I thought about how with those definitions, almost everyone in Finland would be an introvert. And I laughed at my cultural discomfort earlier that morning when the Americans decided to talk to me in the elevator.

I remembered back to my old job, citing one of the developers who wasn't particularly happy with me bringing agile ways of working into the place: "You are here to ruin the life of introvert developers". I hoped I wasn't then, and I still hope so.

Mobbing may seem like a nightmare for the introverted. Sitting in a room with people the whole day, and forcing the task to happen on one computer through speaking up about what should happen on that computer. It sounds like it's hard to disengage, as there's a continuous rotation of each mob member being on the keyboard. I had no time to address this in my talk, so I thought about writing on it.

When reading an article about how Google builds great teams, I had written down a quote:
Good teams are not teams where introverts are left by themselves but ones where they feel safe and can open up. 
We all, introverts and extroverts alike, want our contributions to matter. A great team is one where everyone pitches in, in ways they find comfortable. Leaving introverts entirely alone would't work, and having the special traits of introverts available is an asset.

A lot of times, introverts struggle to be heard even more than extroverts. In a functioning mob where "kindness, consideration and respect" is in action, introverts might have a better chance of getting their insights incorporated. In a delivery process that welcomes ideas and feedback at any time, the time to reflect to come to an idea is a non-issue. In a mob, anyone can use a second computer while working on the shared task for research activities. A lot of times, this enables an individual to contribute just the right thing at the right time, to keep the overall task flowing. In a mob, anyone can step out at any time, going for a walk to take quiet time, and just rejoin when ready. The work continues meanwhile, and after.  "Ask what you need" was Elizabeth's message yesterday, and that resonated with me.

Mobs are not just for extroverts. I have utmost respect for Aaron Griffith, with a test automation background and an integral part of the original Hunter mob and a self-proclaimed introvert. His article on Mob Programming for the Introverted is a great reference to someone's experience who isn't just thinking about introversion, but living a life of one - in a 40 hours a week mob.





Sunday, November 6, 2016

Mob Testing after New Work

I'm absolutely delighted to have tester colleagues again. Well, we call us quality engineers, but the name does not change it - there's some pretty amazing testers out there to share with. The group of testers makes me remember times I was not dependent on Twitter to find people to learn with as I was while being the only tester amongst all the developers. And makes me feel torn in my priorities, at least a little.

Since I joined, we've restarted our regular meetings we call QE Forum. And created us a chat to discuss and share. A lot of positive energy around. Just last week we did a lean coffee at work, and I learned a lot from my tester colleagues both is in the topics they're into and the stuff we discussed deeper than titles.

The collaboration with my new-found colleagues has made it clear we're divided in our interests in general, while I seem to be interested in both camps. Usually it's either test automation or deep exploratory testing. And the divide also shows in my efforts to introduce learning together through mob testing.

We've done two mob testing sessions so far.

  • Mob Exploratory Testing on a functionality I was working on at the company
  • TDD in Python to improve our programming skills in the language we use to automate
The TDD session gave two surprising (to me) reactions. First was a non-programmer colleague who chooses to join programming sessions when I organize them in mob format. This experience brings back memories of how mobbing changed me: from reluctance to curiosity, and through learning to liking. Another was a programming tester colleague, who is now interested into moving from system level automation to helping developers with their unit tests. 

The Mob Exploratory Testing session was just fun and laughter amongst us finding problems I had not yet paid attention to in the feature I brought for us to test together. It introduced tools that no one else had told me about before that the others thought would be evident, but how could they be for someone who just joined the company. I introduced approaches to testing the feature that went way beyond the user interface, and we made interesting observations about limitations of the implementation too. 

So getting my tester colleagues to practice mobs seems doable and fun. The learning from group sessions makes us stronger in our individual work. But the big step is still work in progress: getting to do mob programming with my new developers. That may take some time, as I'm not ready to push people too much even if I believe in it being helpful. 

Not the same task

I share experiences and thoughts I've had on mob programming and mob testing from my starting points and perspectives. I don't get to (yet) work with teams fluent in promiscuous pairing, I still struggle with getting people to pair with me across specialties (tester - developer -pairing) and a lot of the problems I'm facing are related to inability to make releases, or efficiently collaborate so that a lot of time would not be wasted on either waiting or doing the wrong things.

I wanted to address a specific issue in the idea of doing a measured experiment on mob programming vs. pair programming vs. solo programming: the experience that it's not the same task and end result we're doing and getting into. 

The Ladder Effect

I was mob programming with my team, and we all perceived we were working on something relatively simple: we needed to take out old Telerik UI components and replace them with new family of Telerik UI components. It was a task that most of my team's developers had individually done on other areas and we were mobbing just because we wanted to practice working together - learning together.

One of the developers was navigating and telling what to do, when another stepped in to suggest a better way. As the two had different ideas, we got a third idea and a fourth idea, and had a quick discussion on their benefits. The fourth idea would have never come about without hearing the first three proposals. This is what I think of as the ladder effect: you need the input of others to come up with the idea one of you has that the one having it thinks it is obvious and it turns out it isn't. 

If each of the developers individually or in pair would complete the exact same task (which of course we don't, we're not researching but working to create value to production), the task is not the same. The resulting code is not the same. 

Not the same may mean it's irrelevant. We always have bugs in production, and some of them are just not so relevant. It also may mean it is relevant. That there's work not done, to be done later either as fixes or as slower progress on the next features due to what was missing from the code. 

To get the four ideas in, we would have needed an implementation, people caring to review in enough detail, at least once change of the whole approach to the change with a complete rewrite. So we shouldn't compare solo vs. mob with the idea that the end result in production is the same. 

A Stupid Little Thing

In a solo work setting recently, I was looking at code to realize that the encouraged practice is to include a copyright header in each of the code files. A lot of the files we had recently been modifying had a reference to year 2012. In many ways, this problem is below cosmetic, as it is never visible in any way to the end users, as we don't publish the code. But housekeeping-wise, there's still a working agreement we'd update this to reflect current year on edit. 

In individual work, whoever is bothered with these can go and fix them. But hardly anyone is bothered enough to do anything. 

In a mob, when this comes up, the group realizes quickly how stupid and repetitive task updating these is. Where each individually would either just fix ones in their scope or dismiss the problem completely, the mob hearing a second mention tends to recognize a theme they don't want to hear about. And recognizing a repetitive thing that wastes effort of the whole group, it gets automated. 

A Big Difference

One of the projects I recently completed with my team was a 6-month long refactoring/rewrite of something build over four years. Little did any of us know back when the problem started developing... But looking in hindsight, I can describe the problem. There was a solo developer would always get features done and into production, not the fastest of them all. He believed that code should be a tree in which you introduce a new branch when you get a relevant new requirement. By the time we realized what the beliefs were, he had seven full copies of the code conditioned to different versions of the code from start of the program. 

Someone did review it, but the reviews were in vain. In face of a seemingly impossible task, people step down and focus on what they were supposed to do. While others in the team are conflict-averse, I have a tendency of taking up things others don't. Thus the rewrite, as a pair. 

If we were mobbing, that result would have never happened. The developer creating the code with a significantly different belief system in what makes code maintainable could have learned sooner. Instead, he was doing code as he had done for the last 25 years. 

Whenever I paired with the developer even for half an hour, I was exhausted for a week. I'm sure others had the same feeling. Working with him in a mob, we could share the load of dealing with the differences. 

If it was up to me, that developer wouldn't be a developer. But it is not up to me. So I do what is the second best choice, help him learn. Mobbing was powerful in both building up the team to face the challenge, support in dealing with the challenge and eventually find the courage to fix the issue we had let build all too long. 

Starting to pay back is more relevant than cost

All of the last stories I share are really about the task or the cost of the task to get it actually completed to the same level. But a lot of times, I find, the cost does not matter - time matters. If we have something in production in a week even if it took five people mobbing, over one person working for it for three weeks,  we'd rather get to a point where the investment starts to pay back faster. 

We win customer gigs for speed - things that would never be our business' points of success otherwise. We have time to earn more money with the sooner availability. The little extra cost on development can become irrelevant quickly with scale in ability to sell the software. 

There was a feature we said would take 6 weeks for us based on our previous experience on similar features. We mobbed on it for an afternoon with 7 people, 4 hours each. A pair of us continued and the feature was done two working days later. So 6*40 = 240 hours and 7*4 + 2*2*7,5 = 58 hours. 

I'm sure the first estimate included significant wait times and interruptions that would happen a lot more over longer period of time. But the realized effort left a lot of time for reading books and studying that tends to be padded into our estimates, even if mobbing and pairing took the embedded time into that away. Fun is powerful mechanism. Yet, the cost isn't relevant. We won a customer case for that feature. That's what is relevant. 

Conclusions

If I would want to compare individual work to mobbing, I would need ways of making the task the same. Both the individual and the mob would need to produce a result with the same features:
  • Same value for production, including same lack of bugs
  • Same value for maintenance, only to be revealed long-term
  • Same positive impact on the future tasks done individually 
  • Same positive impact for the business overall
My evidence may be anecdotal, but it is enough for me to try more of this out. I welcome someone with resources to do proper research to do a good comparison. Then again, there's a gaping hole still on good research on individual and paired performance too. Setting up repeatable experiments is a lot of work, and meanwhile I'm happy to help my organizations improve using mob programming as one of the tools. 

Friday, November 4, 2016

Mobbing with someone who hates it

A lot of times when I talk about how much I've come to enjoy mob programming as a tester (feeling increasingly more comfortable in the uniqueness of my testing specialty among hard-core programmers), a question in the end is: "Did everyone like it, surely you've had bad experiences too?"

My worst experience was mobbing with someone who hated the idea of mobbing (or pairing).

In one of the early mobbing sessions, probably our first without an external facilitator, one session was particularly painful. After all the work I put in to convince the programmers to practice together in the name of learning for two hours, one of them felt forced into it.

Well, he felt forced into pretty much anything. Over the course of 4,5 years with the team, he labeled me as "organizational cancer" - whatever I was doing was destroying whatever he felt was important. He told me I existed to "ruin the life of introverted developers" and other even meaner things I endured on a weekly basis. But one amongst 10 really wonderful people can be dismissed, even if it definitely can wear one out.


But he was one of us, and we wanted him included. So he was, in particular from the invite from the manager insisting we'd do learning together as a whole team.

The mobbing experience that followed was 1,5 hours of agony. There was a consistent flow of negativity. We got to hear how this group work thing is like being in kindergarten. How adults should stop playing at work. We heard in various ways how much he hated every moment of it. When driving, he refused to play by the agreed rules of letting thinking happen outside the keyboard, and just went into coding with an audience, not even explaining. Everyone was in pain, yet none of us said anything at first, just trying to get the work done. At the end of the session, I was exhausted, and so were everyone else.

My frustration finally came out as a remark telling the guy that this thing in life isn't compulsory. If he hates this so much, he is welcome to drop out from the next sessions we had scheduled. His face lit up, with "really?" and he looked absolutely delighted. The others said nothing again, until only two of my team remained, including the manager. They pointed out that leaving him out was bad because he would need the learning mobbing could give the most. But we went with letting him opt-out.

The rest of the team mobbing without him had a great time. We learned a lot, we got things done, we developed empathy towards each other. And every time we showed up from our mobbing cave, it was like we had just been in a great party. He was invited, but opted-out.

Until one day he said he could join in. The fun others are having is inviting. We told him he is welcome, but the behavior we endured once wasn't going to be ok anymore. So he joined on occasion, observing and navigating, still opting out from the driver seat.

My lesson learned: you're better off without someone who hates it. And that the fun, party-like feeling of mobbing you're excluded from might just be a thing to draw you in. So allow opt-out, either completely or partially. Even make that explicit. We did not force him in the first place, but he felt it was compulsory as a whole team activity.

Tuesday, November 1, 2016

Learning and planning for learning

I'm one of the people who loves doing lists. I have lists of things I should do, and when I feel overwhelmed with what I need to be doing, I find myself doing lists again.

Recently I've come to realize that lists are procrastination. Making a list isn't going to take the work forward. Doing the work takes the work forward. So I'm trying get off my list-making habit.

In my blogging, I've moved from making a list of topics and planning for writing to writing - in case anyone wonders how I manage to write so much, now you know! In organizing events, I moved to doing over planning even earlier. I just follow an inspiration someone provides by needing a stage or sharing something I want to learn and rather than think about how it's done, just do it. It will get done by doing.

An area where I really struggle with my inherent instinct to plan is learning. When there's so much to learn and I dislike shallow learning, how do I choose my next focus? What do I feel strongly about that I want to learn it, and in particular, how do I prioritize so that I have time to learn.

Through coaching new speakers, I've been fortunate to hear the very inspiring story of Bhagya Perera. With her determination of learning and turning her learning into action, she scheduled an hour a day for a side project and awed everyone with results. There's something relevant for me to learn there that I want to try: cadence. Regularly using an hour a day is better than using five hours one day, when you have a theme of learning that you want to apply into action.

Today I heard from a tester colleague she now wants to learn unit testing having been exposed to Test-Driven Development in Python in a session hosted for us. The curiosity of how, with smaller scale tests she could be more helpful to her developer colleagues was wonderful to see.

Seeing her chosen focus made me again think of mine. To avoid making a full list, I decided I will just share my themes in a post.

Vision: I work in a new company, and want to find ways of specifically learn things that will increase my impact as a tester.

Theme 1. C++. I've been tossing around the idea of C++ vs. Python and three things lead me to close my 6-month plan to C++. First, I'm too absent-minded to work on two languages at once - it takes a stronger routine. Second, I was just selected to receive diversity ticket to Meeting C++ -conference. Third, that language is the language of my developers and the ground in which my impact can be most significant.

Theme 2. Structured exploration in multi-team setting. I have a new product to learn deeply. As a result of my learning, taking the learning journey for a next tester should be different. I need to figure out ways of scaling my personal approach of structured exploration, taking the project I work with to continuous delivery that I  left behind changing jobs.

Theme 3. Software security. I could say this is related to working with security products, but it's really coming out of an opportunity. There's a MOOC course (free) online called Cyber Security Base that University of Helsinki organizes together with my employer, and that is just too good opportunity to pass. To keep this engaging, I will remote mob on the exercises, so in case you're in the course and not a university student, my study group welcomes more participants. I figure that since I'm not really into the credits, the worst they can do for mobbing is to say they don't encourage group work. And that would make little sense to me, as long as we are all learning what the course teaches.

There's a million themes I would really also like to learn, but these are, for a period of time, my themes. We'll see where I'm with those in six months.