With few decades in the software industry, I have something I would call a career. I would not have seen how my career unfolds in advance, and I could never have described what I do as a path I want to take.
A few heuristics have served me well:
Today:
Even if I have my "Maaret to wikipedia" project, it serves more as a way of thinking through what there is that I could even do. In the end of the day, I go back to my heuristics: do what you enjoy, and always be learning. Goals move, but appreciation of learning with great people remains.
A few heuristics have served me well:
- Do something you enjoy (and some of it should bring money in)
- Always be learning.
- Have a goal, just to recognize whether what you enjoy takes you there. If not, change the goal.
For some years, I had a goal of becoming an international keynote speaker and I did a lot of my choices around that goal. I chose jobs that built me a platform of experiences to speak on, doing things hands on with product development rather than consulting. And I became a keynote speaker that wants to quit speaking and replace her contribution of 20-30 talks a year with 20-30 new speakers who start from a platform of mentoring.
My current goal goes under the working name "Maaret to Wikipedia" and if you have ideas on how to do that, I am open to suggestions. Currently it feel funny, self-indulgent and next to impossible to see the route, and it is already making an impact on how I prioritize - within things I enjoy - the things I end up doing. The best thing about this goal is how supported I feel for it at work with my close colleagues and how it helps me see some people who always lift me up when I need it (Marit van Dijk, I'm thinking of you).
A lot of the work I do is invisible.
I help people who are speakers to get their messages out better. Sometimes giving people the transformative insight into what they are speaking on takes me literally a few minutes, and the people seeing their own experience in a different light completely miss the shine I added. They would not be better off without running into me - usually very intentionally on my part.
At work I facilitate a developer-centric way of working in a way that mixes holding space for good things, injecting good things and leading by doing some of the things. The work I do leaves behind very few pull requests, but many things others do shine a little better because of the stuff I do.
I change jobs fairly often, leaving behind people who, I would hope, know something more because our paths have crossed. The companies interest is not lifting their people up, rather to abstract us under a brand.
I write blogs, articles and all kinds of texts. It changes what some people do. Yet when they do it, doing it is their own success.
I build talks of my experiences, I show up to share, and I discuss with people. Meeting people gives me a lot of energy, new ideas and drive.
I'm not exactly a one trick pony within software - but software all in all is my trick. My interests are manyfold. I speak and write about exploratory testing, test automation, teaching programming, mob & pair programming, agile, management, self-development, conference organizing, speaking, diversity, and any observations around software that I feel like. I'm usually known for things I do on the side, rather than the things I focus on.
What I'm particularly proud of is my ability to re-invent myself and see my belief systems shattered - with my own initiative. Listing things that I believed to be true that aren't so is one of my favorite pastimes.
A Vague Timeline
In recent reflections, I have come to appreciate how large chunks of my work during my career has been left to oblivion as per how things are and personal choices of not sticking with them. They've all given me a platform to observe things from. They also bring out feelings of wishing someone would have taught my younger self some of the things I now know. But I also recognize that my younger self did what she could with the conditions she was under, and every experience I have had has made me the person I am today. Hindsight bias makes us feel like we could have known things, and if there is one thing exploratory testing really enforces in learning, it is that the reality of missing things is the reality and we outcomes are unpredictable.
My current goal goes under the working name "Maaret to Wikipedia" and if you have ideas on how to do that, I am open to suggestions. Currently it feel funny, self-indulgent and next to impossible to see the route, and it is already making an impact on how I prioritize - within things I enjoy - the things I end up doing. The best thing about this goal is how supported I feel for it at work with my close colleagues and how it helps me see some people who always lift me up when I need it (Marit van Dijk, I'm thinking of you).
A lot of the work I do is invisible.
I help people who are speakers to get their messages out better. Sometimes giving people the transformative insight into what they are speaking on takes me literally a few minutes, and the people seeing their own experience in a different light completely miss the shine I added. They would not be better off without running into me - usually very intentionally on my part.
At work I facilitate a developer-centric way of working in a way that mixes holding space for good things, injecting good things and leading by doing some of the things. The work I do leaves behind very few pull requests, but many things others do shine a little better because of the stuff I do.
I change jobs fairly often, leaving behind people who, I would hope, know something more because our paths have crossed. The companies interest is not lifting their people up, rather to abstract us under a brand.
I write blogs, articles and all kinds of texts. It changes what some people do. Yet when they do it, doing it is their own success.
I build talks of my experiences, I show up to share, and I discuss with people. Meeting people gives me a lot of energy, new ideas and drive.
I'm not exactly a one trick pony within software - but software all in all is my trick. My interests are manyfold. I speak and write about exploratory testing, test automation, teaching programming, mob & pair programming, agile, management, self-development, conference organizing, speaking, diversity, and any observations around software that I feel like. I'm usually known for things I do on the side, rather than the things I focus on.
What I'm particularly proud of is my ability to re-invent myself and see my belief systems shattered - with my own initiative. Listing things that I believed to be true that aren't so is one of my favorite pastimes.
A Vague Timeline
In recent reflections, I have come to appreciate how large chunks of my work during my career has been left to oblivion as per how things are and personal choices of not sticking with them. They've all given me a platform to observe things from. They also bring out feelings of wishing someone would have taught my younger self some of the things I now know. But I also recognize that my younger self did what she could with the conditions she was under, and every experience I have had has made me the person I am today. Hindsight bias makes us feel like we could have known things, and if there is one thing exploratory testing really enforces in learning, it is that the reality of missing things is the reality and we outcomes are unpredictable.
“Looking back, journeys are never clear. so why do we still expect them to be when we start a new one?” — @a_bangser— Maaret Pyhäjärvi (@maaretp) November 9, 2019
Today:
- Describing test automation at work as a baseline for returning to research - on applying AI in testing, and applying testing in AI-based systems
- Building a self-organized developer-centric team with modern agile practices that have enough structure for the powerless
- Writing further my books on Mob Programming, Strong-Style Pair Programming and Exploratory Testing
- Organizing a conference as experimentation platform to change the world of conferences
- Helping aspiring speakers by finding them mentors with SpeakEasy (or mentoring them myself)
Before, each step going sort of backwards in time in a way that makes sense to me:
- Becoming an expert in exploratory testing. I've done this all my career, and it is the one thing that has been my continued focus.
- Becoming an expert in engineering management. I did not realize I had been learning this in my test manager role before. A few decades of reading every book on the topic to manage up effectively as a tester did help.
- Becoming an expert in test automation. Moving it from none to some, and from some to better. Knowing well what better looks like.
- Speaking in conferences, meetups and delivering training sessions that total 399 sessions.
- Discussing (and improving) conference proposals in 15 minute time-slots over three years with about 500 people and discovering a process I call "Call for Collaboration".
- Popularizing "Testers don't break your code, they break your illusions about the code" by speaking about it, elaborating it with samples from my professional life, beyond testing conferences. The guy who said it did not do the work I did around it. Google for evidence and stop assuming my work belongs to him.
- Introducing frequent product releases where it was "impossible" as release updates computers in the millions.
- Introducing daily product releases where it was "impossible" as there was no test automation.
- Organizing 5 years of European Testing Conference to learn how (if) conferences should pay the speakers, to create a true networking conference and to bring together developers and testers on a shared testing agenda.
- Becoming an expert in pair and mob testing (and programming).
- Teaching programming (in Java) to women over 30 and kids with the Intentional method using pair and mob programming as core instruments in teaching.
- Teaching Software Testing at Aalto University of Applied Sciences / Helsinki University of Technology both as main lecturer but also as visiting industry speaker
- Doing my first keynote to only be known as the woman the other keynoter spent their keynote bashing "out of respect and surprise how alike we think".
- Building and teaching a 22-day on-site Testing training program to enable unemployed career changers into the industry. Delivering a second iteration as independent trainer.
- Running Finnish Association for Software Testing for decade and letting it wither away as a man was rewarded and thanked for starting the thing. Starting Software Testing Finland (Ohjelmistotestaus ry) to start over, only to realize that there was no correcting as any communities around the topic in Finland are intertwined in people's minds.
- Becoming an expert in complex test environments. If you ever feel like talking about the kinds of environments that cost a million and take minimum of 6 months to deliver, then we have similar experiences.
- Becoming an expert in defect management and bug advocacy. Analyzing a large set of defect management tools in order to select one against requirements gathered in a fairly large organization.
- Becoming an expert in acceptance testing. I know how to get domain experts clueless on testing just enough structure to excel and not waste effort and impact the quality at start of acceptance testing through contracts and collaboration. I spent some years intensively learning it.
- Becoming an expert in test management. Running multi-million projects as test manager, but also running smaller ones. I did this for different companies to get the crux of it.
- Becoming an expert in software contract quality and testing -related aspects. If you ever want to spend a few hours on discussing how badly contractors can behave and how you recognize loopholes in contracts around this, I'm your person.
- Becoming an expert in software processes leading up to agile. When Alistair Cockburn asks who has read his work on Crystal, there were not many others in the room that had. Research gives you chances to read and think deeply about what others are saying.
- Becoming an expert in benchmarking with the TPI-model. Analyzing 25 Finnish companies with TPI-model and doing a benchmark on state of testing in Finland. I can still speak on the details because I did the work even if the company kept me in the background.
- Doing my first talk on the topic of Extreme Programming in 2001.
- Researching (and publishing) on software product development, and (exploratory) testing
- Becoming an expert in localization testing. I spent years running localization testing projects and doing it myself and learning everything I could read on then and since on how localization testing works.
Even if I have my "Maaret to wikipedia" project, it serves more as a way of thinking through what there is that I could even do. In the end of the day, I go back to my heuristics: do what you enjoy, and always be learning. Goals move, but appreciation of learning with great people remains.
