Chronicles Of Testing

During a recent interview, I was asked, “Why does your resume state that you lead with empathy?” My straightforward response was that I do not know any other way to lead. The leaders I admire include Marie Curie, who carried radioactive materials in her pocket for the greater good, and Shankar Nag, who proactively undertook the responsibility of traveling abroad to study modern transportation systems without waiting for formal assignments. To elaborate, I choose to lead with empathy deliberately. This perspective, which some may find uncommon, arises from my own experiences with managers who lacked empathy. As one interviewer insightfully remarked, I learned a great deal about leadership by observing “how not to lead.” Many of us share this experience, having worked under managers who, at the slightest disagreement, became a significant impediment—transforming what should have been a positive and enriching learning environment into a challenging one. If, as an interviewer, you inquire ...

Establishing the context is essential when conversing, writing and especially when testing. Reasons why establishing the context prior to testing can be missed out: Ignorant or Unaware –Testers/Leaders are not yet aware of the science behind establishing a context. Code and test enthusiasts hastening to verify and validate the product against set requirements. By not encouraging the idea of questioning at every stage of software development, one could dampen the outcome of testing. Relevant and well-timed questioning leads to challenging the status quo and learn new dimensions and the changing contexts that are akin to testing.  Change in requirements requires a change in context, which is seldom accommodated in ardent and uncompromising work cultures. The above scenarios can occur in instances when: The team has not set clear team and individual objectives prior to testing. The code delivered to be tested is delayed and has passed the test execution start ...

Risk versus experiment - A change in mindset for self-learners attempting to learn by the method of experimenting. The tweet above about risk and experimenting didn't convey all that I meant to and in less than 140 characters it is hard to put into a single tweet the content and the context at times. Hence an attempt to share this short post on how re-thinking risk as an experiment can help us in self-learning and not abruptly end our learning via experimenting because it is categorized as hard or as risky.  Every experiment may or may not be composed of risks.  I'd like to address via this tweet that some think few tasks as risky and wouldn't even attempt to figure out the solution by themselves. They would rather wait for someone else to conduct this experiment or take this risk on behalf of them to learn from it, which is fair too. But at the same time, if we are relaxed with whatever may be the outcome of the experiment conducted in the...