At 9 AM on Aug 13th, 2008, Testerlock, Principal Consultant of Testers & Blocks Consulting, walks into the lobby of Seven Inc in Whitefield, Bangalore and asks for Peter, the Head of Testing. Testerlock, was supposed to attend a meeting with Peter and his team of Test Managers. There had been some testing problems in Seven Inc that had been causing concerns to top management. So, it was Peter's boss Nick Fry, who hired Testerlock to figure out what's going wrong.
After all security clearances, Testerlock was welcomed to a conference room by Peter where his team of managers, Sasha, Rubin, Maria, Vibeesh, Ratan and Ankit were waiting for the meeting. The conference room was quite big and could even fit 20 people with an oval table in the center and Featherlite chromium hand rest chairs . Testerlock's name was already written in one of the paper clips marking his seating position near the door. Everyone in the room had heard about Testerlock through his articles and published podcasts and interviews. As Testerlock sat in his seat introducing himself and shaking hand with the team, he smelled the coffee aroma and while putting his laptop bag down on the table, he asked, "Ah! Can I have a Nescafe too?" and that put Peter's team in surprise about Testerlock's ability to identify Nescafe aroma from other available ones.
The meeting started with Peter displaying the agenda planned and discussing each point with a little bit more detail than an e-mail communication that happened a week back. When Peter stopped, Sasha took over.
While these things were happening Peter was getting confused if Testerlock was listening to all that because Testerlock was constantly writing something on his Moleskine. Testerlock had to several times nod to acknowledge what Peter had said. Nodding has been a practiced way in India to acknowledge having heard something from the other.
Sasha, a Test Manager with Seven for about seven years. That's right, 7 years. Sasha had been a star performer at Seven's Texas office and she looked like one and spoke like one, too. Sasha then started explaining her team's challenges of unable to achieve 100% testing and test case being complex, bugs not being fixed and so on....
Testerlock had just one word to say, "Interesting".
From Sasha to Ankit, and from Ankit to Ratan the problems the team faced were...."productivity of testers, tester developer relationship, lack of good process, best practices not working, budget is too low for good testing to be done, test automation not yielding ROI..." and yet again Testerlock had to say one word, "Interesting" and kept writing a lot of notes on Moleskine.
When it moved from Ratan to Vibeesh and Vibeesh was explaining the challenges his team faced, Testerlock interrupted the meeting asking for directions to a rest room. Before he left for the rest room, Testerlock asked the team to continue sharing the problems faced by them.
When he walked into the room again, he had a kind of style in his walk that meant that he knew what the problem was.
By then it had shifted from Vibeesh to Maria, and then new set of problems being listed. By then Testerlock had stopped making notes and was sitting and listening to what Maria was saying.
It was about 11:45 AM when Maria completed flushing her list of problems. Peter was excited to ask Testerlock a question and without hesitating much, he asked, "So, Mr Testerlock, what do you think the actual problem is?"
This time, Testerlock stood up and gave a one word answer. It wasn't the word, "Interesting" but the answer to the question Peter asked.
If you were Testerlock, what would your answer be? ( Your answer need not be one word but it could be. If your answer was already listed by other people who commented think about a different answer or expand on the latter. Maybe you might hit a better one )
