Tag: collaboration

Expressing Expectations

Long long ago, while preparing experiments for my diploma thesis in physics, my tutor taught me to express my expectation of the outcome of experiments before actually running them. I was to not only to express them in my head, but speak them out loudly, may be even make a note.

This helped a lot, when figuring out where my thinking didn’t match the experimental evidence. There was no denying when my expectation differed from the empirical result. Typically, there were two sources for the differences:

  1. My mental model wasn’t good enough to match the result of an experiment.
  2. The experimental setup wasn’t designed well enough to show the effect I was trying to measure.

I find that this is still working well in software development (both the coding part as well as testing). A related article about this is Peter Naurs seminal paper ‘Programming as Theory Building’.

When doing TDD (test driven development), explicitly expressing the outcome before running a test may not always lead to a surprise. In the very beginning, when a test tries to create an object, without having a class definition, it will cause an error message that is easy to predict.

However, when work has progressed a bit, I regularly run into situation where I expect the next new test to fail in a certain way, but when running the test, the actual error message is a surprise to me. These are situations where learning can happen, by figuring out why the actual behaviour does occur, instead of what I predicted.

Near the end, the surprise is caused differently: I’ll write a new test and expect it to fail. – It doesn’t. Again, this is a good reason to explore why exactly I thought the test would fail.

Particularly in a pair (or ensemble) programming setup, the inability to come up with a new failing test is a sign, that the implementation is good enough … for now.

Recently, I did a programming exercise as part of a technical interview, and expressing my thoughts and expectations while working on the code helped me to find a solution. Additionally, the interviewer didn’t only see what I was typing, but could follow my way of thinking. This relates to Naur’s paper mentioned above: The testing and tested code I wrote isn’t everything there is to my mental model of the given problem or its solution. The way of thinking is important too. This is why I find vocally expressing my expectations & thinking while actually doing the work.

What are your preferred way to actually do the work you’re doing? I’d love to hear about it.

A Community Written Book

An Update: It‘s available on LeanPub!

The book is now available at LeanPub ➙ https://leanpub.com/softwarepeopleworkfromhome.

@MaikNog and I (@S_2K on Twitter) are preparing a community e-book, similar to Viv Richards’ (who agreed to contribute to this one. Yay!) wonderful “Around the World with 80 Software Testers“.

It’s entitled “Software People … Work From Home — Insights & Experiences From Planet Earth” and it will contain reports about life and work in these times of lockdown, personal limitation and remoteness. They are personal experiences, unfiltered authentic … and safe for work. 🙂 I would love each contribution to be easily seen as the work of a person, the human behind the words. This is intended to be a very humane collection of individual works covering one topic.

Folks have already promised to contribute material – and here’s a map marking the countries: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1riRbKTZMGdwShPZJ0f884CIbXFD2Vhli&usp=sharing

World map displaying countries with contributors to the book

If you identify as a software person and would like to contribute, we (@MaikNog and @S_2K) would like to hear (or read) from you — especially (but not exclusively!) if you’re not from one of the countries marked in that map.

All the best to you and yours — stay healthy (or a speedy recovery, should that be needed)

Update on 27th April 2020: The name changed, the map is updated and the description more precise..

Update on 10^th^ May 2020: Updated the map, now including Greece and Italy. Thank y’all!

Agile Testing Days 2016 — Part 3: Tutorial Day 1

This year at the Agile Testing Days, I attended Samantha Laing and Karen Greaves 1/2-day workshop “The Collaborative Team”. It turned out that there was just one other participant in this tutorial, so actually it was much more like a private coaching session. A big thank you for offering the session anyway and making this possible.

The information and exercises were all about building and keeping trust in the team. I found it very interesting that, in order to increase the trust level, it is also important to know what the team can (and can not) influence.

Knowing this, makes it easier for teams to cope with undesirable situations. For example one of my recent teams was moved out of the building where most other teams are located, to a place some minutes walking down the road. For me, it was much easier to understand and accept this, after we learned about the reasons management gave us. — I still didn’t actually like the situation, but at least it was clear why this decision had been made.

This is a theme we touched in the tutorial time and time again: Talking and listening to each other helps immensely.

Another important takeaway for me were the exercises about the power of questions. The ability and patience to listen to people until they have spoken is so important. I have been given solutions (or suggestions for immediate steps) so often, when instead it would have been important to first understand the problem in more detail, rather than providing the tips that came to mind first. — I admit that I have done this, too.

With the experience from this workshop and the material we were given, I feel much better prepared to help teams improve, not limited to software testing but also in the topics we covered in this coaching session.

I liked the half-day format of the session a lot for two main reasons. First of all, this coaching session with two coaches and two attendees was very intensive and a little bit exhausting (but in a good way). Second of all, I had a free afternoon that I was able to spend in the beautiful city of Potsdam. 🙂

Thank you very much Karen & Sam and of course co-attendee Elena! If you have the chance to get this kind of session at a conference (or elsewhere), I can only and full-heartedly recommend it.

My ‘Day 1’ of this conference ended with a delicious speakers dinner in a very festive atmosphere.

agiletd-2016_conference-dinner_s

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