Gifting someone a life and they f****** it up

Oh my! I was reminded of this story. It is a hard to digest story for me but I can't just hold myself from telling it.

About two years back, I did work for a client in India and they had to pay me about a couple of thousand dollars. Meanwhile, a fresh college graduate who was trained by some testing institute came to me seeking help in getting a job. He convinced me that I should help him. I was emotionally touched by the way his parents struggled to help him complete his engineering bachelor degree course.

His parents were daily wage farmers in some village in Andhra Pradesh. His parents were getting paid something like 3 to 4 dollars per day and they used to save as much as they could in that money to help this guy study.

He also seemed to express interest in doing some creative style testing and thinking. Convinced that this guy needs an uplift in life, I called up my client and said, "The money you were wanting to pay me is important to me. It would make a small difference to my current life style but God has helped me be happy with what I have right now so I need to ask a favor from you. I know this guy, XXXXX , who needs a job to help his family in basic shape. So if you could give him a job and pay him what you owe me, I'd be more than happy to engage with you again"

The client was very open to the idea but checked with me that I am not making up my mind to gift him life because it comes at a cost. I thought I knew how much it would cost.

With a couple of thousand dollars, you could buy lots of things or be happy having it in bank. My wife and parents were proud of what I did. This guy thanked me for gifting him a great opportunity. I told him that he is being given an opportunity with his parents in mind and he needs to work really hard and learn to do very good testing. He nodded like a doll.

I was constantly checking with my client of this fella's progress. The client said he was good and I was happy that he was doing good. A couple of months later when I tried to check again  I found that this guy had not been performing as good as he used to be. He seemed to be enjoying his life more than learning and improving skills. I wrote to him about it but the response didn't seem to suggest to me that he was serious. We then watched him for a couple more days and I called up my client to ask them to fire him because they didn't do it thinking I'd be offended.

He was fired. He lamented about his mistakes over a call with me but it was too late. I lost my money and possibly the reputation I had built with this client. Its sad that I lost money and faith about people asking my help. It reminded me of the stories I read in Panchathanthra. They are so true even after 5000 years.

Well, it helps me become wiser but makes me nervous to help somebody who brings up the emotional angle. Decisions in life are always based on emotions or the lack of it and they are heuristics.

I am not telling all I have helped have done this to me but even if one does, it creates an imbalance to the way I was dealing about helping people. Passion to foster good testing and good testers continue to guide me take decisions like the one above. I hope I have enough strength and money to pursue my goals despite such cases. You never know how much your decisions are going to cost you. I am not pained at having lost couple of thousand dollars but feel sorry for that guy's parents. The last I heard from that guy, he still wasn't able to find another job. 

Reminds me that sometimes opportunity knocks only once. Other times, we have to create it. If we aren't skilled, there is no way we can create opportunities.

Amen!

TASTRO - Tester's Astrology by Rrajesh Barde

One of Moolya's customer, a large IT company in India wanted me help a group of testers think beyond the boundaries they had accustomed to. They wanted me to help them bring out the potential and creativity of testers within their organization. Having thousands of testers,  they did know where to start from - the top 30 they had. Top 30 in terms of demonstrated passion for software testing.

The icing on the cake, they wanted their testers to progress towards becoming brainual testers.

A group of 30 testers were introduced to me and I spent time for a couple of weeks with them on various activities. We ended up doing so many good things together that we accomplished the mission together. There were plenty of great work that they did. Now, those 30 have been successful in inspiring 30 more and this chain reaction is appearing to happen. If it goes on, I am sure this organization is going to rock in the coming years.

Somebody impressed with how I mentored these 30 asked me, "Aren't you giving away all secrets of how testers in Moolya test?", to which I replied, "There is no secret. This is how we test and this is how we live". There is nothing to hide. We don't have any secret ingredient or a secret ingredient soup unlike many services companies. We have watched KungFu Panda and hope you too have watched it. We focus on our skills. Our website tells that story.

In this post, I want to highlight the creativity that came out of the exercises of Brainual Testing.
Rrajesh Barde surprised me that he had been reading my blogs ever since I started it and he told me he had also commented on it. I was glad to meet my oldest (well, he's pretty young) blog reader. The only question I asked him was, "Was it worth your time?"

This guy turned out to be hyper creative. He had a sense of humor, lateral thinking, passion to test, leadership and creativity. We were brainstorming of how do we educate testers without letting them know they are educated. Of course, books are boring to most. What content do we feed them with? We discussed on Andy Glover's Cartoons for it. However, that didn't solve the problem of testers within their organization being able to see Andy working with them.

So, Rrajesh Barde in the meeting interrupted, "If I may, I have an idea..." and then came out with this brilliant idea of TASTRO - Testers ASTROlogy. In a country like India, a lot of people refer to Astrology. They at least want to read if there is something good in it for them. I thought that was a brilliant idea and we had to develop it further. We needed to mix fun and pun into it. We needed the learning touch. We needed people to look forward to their weekly TASTRO.

Here is what we got:

TASTRO – Tester’s Astro – What do your test signs foretell?

Aries		Your stars look good for coming week however you might face an environment downtime. Why not make a quick checklist on how to set it up?
Taurus		Avoid calls during Rahu Kaal. Those who have calls with your on-site coordinators during this time, Beware!!
Gemini		The planetary movements suggest that the build scheduled on week day will be delivered to the Testing team on Friday after sunset. You have plenty of time to read Rapid Software Testing Appendix and practice new testing ideas.
Cancer		Though you think you know it, you have no certainty until you try. You might see a surprise appreciation for your smart work. Smart work could mean, you use oracles to test.
Leo		You are worried with unplanned work load. Read the book – Lessons Learned in Software Testing at home and you may see the change in office.
Virgo		Worried why you your productivity appears to have come down? How long has it been since you took a break? Quick breaks between test sessions are important.
Libra		In the busy times, be prepared to work late, eat pizza for dinner at work, and work for some weekends. Don't wanna do that? Go beyond test cases, you will find more bugs.
Scorpio		There is a chance that your relationship with developers would go sour in the coming week. So treat them with chocolates. Developers are rich source of information for a tester.
Sagittarius		Your customers would be under the influence of aggressive Mars. You would be forced to test whatever is thrown at you. Check for the mission to be achieved to avoid falling into traps
Capricorn		You would be trying to achieve the stars by clicking here and there with your monkey paws. Stop doing that and your career could get better.
Aquarius		Your managers would somehow have a strong notion that you have just been marking those test cases as “pass” without executing them. Honesty is important for a good tester.
Pisces		When you have crashed the software and waiting for the system to boot, prepare your own test idea cheat sheet. For those who do, future has been bright.

Isn't this awesome? I feel testers like Rrajesh Barde are a huge boon to our industry. The beauty of my consulting was, I felt there wasn't just one Rrajesh Barde I met but many. I may cover about others in future posts.

A couple of years ago, I used to go to a consulting assignment as though I am superior and I consult people because they were inferior. These days, I go to consulting to get humbled by people like the ones I met.

Please, everybody, stretch out your creativity, you would find an Andy Glover or Rrajesh Barde in you. For those who want to follow Rrajesh's blog, here is the link. He came out with another concept called Bug Burji (Burji is a dish made out of Egg and we call it Egg Burji, Rrajesh made a Bug Burji out of it). Rrajesh, you inspire me. I hope after reading your work, a couple of others may join me in admiring your work and contribution.

I am telling myself that I was born to witness this beginning of the golden era of software testing. Don't know if you can even see what I am experiencing.

Testing Circus, Tea Time With Testers & The Testing Planet magazines

It is a proud moment that a magazine on testing started by a tester in India who did not have any funding or money to run it has completed 1 year and has matured well over the last couple of months.

It is testers like Ajoy and his team of volunteers listed here are the ones who are going to make a difference to this world in all good ways. It re-iterates a good point that passion can make things and sustain it. Many with huge budget but no passion can't achieve this. Even if they achieve, it may be with just business objective.

I want to congratulate Ajoy and his team for the efforts they have taken to bring this magazine out every month. Ajoy wanted to have enough money to run this and Moolya was the first company to sponsor ads in Testing Circus.

It wasn't just to promote Moolya but to help Ajoy and his team dream bigger with Testing Circus. To all those involved, I bow to you, salute you for what you have done. I know, probably more than anyone else, how difficult it is to have achieved it.

So, this post is dedicated to you folks.

There is another set of testers from India, Lalitkumar Bhamare and Pratikkumar Patel who are also doing a good job. They are the Tea Time With Testers. I want to mention and thank them for their efforts. I sincerely appreciate your work, passion and style.

Now, to both these magazines, your goal over the next couple of years is to be better than The Testing Planet. That appears to me as a golden standard for testing magazines to achieve. Rosie Sherry and her team of volunteers have not just set but raised the standard too high for others to try beating. I still remember the day when Rosie Sherry started the software testing club and pinged me on Skype to tell about it. I think Rosie should write a book on how she built all this so well.

All in all, this is becoming a good age to live in as a software tester. Those who are blind to all great work happening in testing deserve it because their children or grand children are probably not going to respect them :)

Subscribe to these magazines and you will thank me for asking you to do it. 

How Pradeep teaches software testing - Part 3

I hope you have read Part 1 and Part 2 of the series of "How Pradeep teaches software testing" and I welcome you to the Part 3. I don't yet know how many parts it is going to take for me to complete this series. I am hoping that I would write down the most important parts and keep adding whenever I need to update. In this part, I am going to focus on my journey of doing exercises and hands on stuff I do at my workshops.

Having been a guinea pig of James Bach and Michael Bolton's online coaching, I myself went through quite a few exercises that were under experimentation. I still remember James showing me a set of pens and then hiding all of them away from me but one to ask me which one was being shown to me. All of them looked identical so it was difficult to tell which pen was he showing me. I had to figure out a way to question him to help me identify the difference between those pens. This is one such exercise that didn't make it to the Rapid Software Testing class. However, I benefited from all of them.

When I started to teach my own version of Rapid Software Testing in India, I sought permission to use a few exercises from the original version. I got permitted to use the Mysterious Spherical Ball and Dice Game. Oh, the Triangle, too. I needed more and I had to create my own.

Even before that, I had to modify the exercises to suit me and the point I wanted to drive. I did that. I have a few variations of the game and exercises and at times I drive a different point from the original one. If I were to have been a parrot repeating what they taught me, I wouldn't have been able to survive or inspire people.

I tried my own exercises. I tried them out with James & Michael. It was hard to teach them back something with my exercises. That made my exercises or my ability to deal with them stronger. I then tried it out on a couple of testers here in India and it worked wonders. So, I consciously didn't take all of my exercises to James & Michael. Not that I wanted to avoid them but as their good student, I wanted to appreciate their time. I first wanted to get good at something before asking them to work on it.

I published some exercises on my blog. For instance the telephone puzzle and other brainstorming exercises helped me to experiment some of my own.

Every time I did the same exercise with new batch of testers, a new idea or an approach used to emerge that used to teach me a lot. I started to focus on what testers in India need to learn. If their fundamental is flawed then it is not good to teach them some things that appear to be Greek and Latin.

I made a list of things that I think is fundamental and started to work towards exercises for the same.

I am listing a few of them below

Skills

• Observation
• Questioning
• Lateral Thinking
• Reverse Engineering
• Scripting
• Investigation

Technical

• Test coverage
• Testability
• Mission focus
• Heuristics & Oracles
• Bug Reporting

I built exercises for each category I wanted testers to get good at. As an example, I built an exercise for reverse engineering practice for testers: Finding Nemo  . Sorry to Mac folks unless they have a Windows emulator in it.

I wondered if I could really help in creating good testers with my crazy set of exercises and ideas. I was consulting for Edista Testing Institute and sought an opportunity to experiment my crazy ideas with two batches of fresh college graduates. The results were beyond imagination. I could bet on these testers against all of the ISTQB passed fresh college graduates put together. Here are excerpts of the work that they produced after a month of training from me. 

I was all the more convinced about creating my own exercises to help creating good testers in India. As an evidence of how skilled a tester could get beyond those 30 days is here - Santhosh Tuppad, my student of the fresh college graduate training is now a co-founder of Moolya Software Testing Private Limited. Not just he, other testers from those batches are top testers in the organization they are working for. There are a few in them who haven't yet made it large but if you talk to them you'd know it may happen, if not today, tomorrow.

He is the youngest testing entrepreneur to the best of my knowledge at the age of 23 and this story being created in India and me playing a small role in it makes me happy of the path I am heading towards in coaching software testers. I am specifically going to write about my students and their journey after attending my training in a part dedicated to them.

The exercises created curiosity in them to learn more. So, I didn't do the learning for them, they did it for themselves. What every training for a software tester needs to do - is to create curiosity with pointers of how they could do it. What ISTQB is doing is a super reverse of that. They damage the gene when it is being built and create business opportunities to themselves in the context of helping such genes upgrade and repair.

Some of the ISTQB trainers in India who perceive that my work has an influence on them, use some of my exercises in their workshop. I allow them to do so because that's the best hope for me that someone would then question the value of what is being taught as ISTQB and get curious to learn about testing.

My exercises teach people to test their own ideas of testing. I'd like to build thousands of them and give it away. Over the last few years, I have seen lot of action from Context Driven Testing folks on the exercises. People come up with their own exercises and share it with others. It is the safest community to be in irrespective of whether you agree to the principles or not. People like Sebi, Markus Gaertner, Matt Heusser are the ones on top of my head who contribute testing exercises to the world.

You will have fun cracking my Finding Nemo exercise. You would trick yourself to believing you have cracked it and then if you do a few more tests, you'd discover you haven't. Santhosh and I worked on something called Guess the Password - Version 1 & Version 2 . Don't go to Version 2.0 before completing Version 1.0.

This is what I am doing in India. This is how I coach testers. The future is all about such testing exercises, if it were to be a bright one. So, all of India isn't all that bad in testing as you may be imagining it to be. Note that!

In future parts of the series, I am going to be covering on aspects of my interaction with testers in the class, humor that works for me in my class, feedback and what I did with it, interacting with trainers in software testing and lots more. Stay tuned, it looks to be completely safe.

How Pradeep teaches software testing - Part 2

I just hope you all read Part 1 of this series. Now, I bring to you Part 2 where I talk about my journey of my first set of workshops.

In 2007, I was not sure if people would be willing to listen to my ideas in testing. I had some good readership for my blog and I announced 2 hour free talk on exploratory testing titled Mirchi Test Masala. Mirchi in Hindi means "spicy" and I wanted to offer the Indian Spicy Testing flavor during my talk. By God's grace, I was flooded with interest from my blog readers to host me for this talk at their organizations.

I happened to be invited in companies like Dell, Huawei, Celstream, Ionidea, Hasten Technologies and even at an organization in Chennai. There were few more organizations who happened to invite me a couple of months later looking at the blog post. I forgot some of their names. It could have been big or small ones.

This was an opportunity for me to test my public speaking skills, my ability to coach testers and also a test of how influential I could be to testers. I used a bug in Microsoft Powerpoint 2003 as an exercise to drive certain points to the audience and help them see testing as an exploration than merely test case execution.

This also gave me an opportunity to face some tough questions from audience and there was a stiff resistance to my ideas. Being an outspoken context driven tester in India wasn't one bit easy. There was a huge wave against the ideas I was trying to spread. Whatever resistance I faced didn't matter much because people saw an extreme passion for testing in me and they were acknowledging it well. That was a huge boost to my confidence that I can actually do a full day workshop.

I guess in early 2007, Michael Bolton did a Rapid Software Testing training for a client in Bangalore. That client had chosen a venue for coaching which was "rent a training room" types. I decided that I should do my first workshop in the same place because the vibrations that Michael left there would help me boost my confidence. I payed a lot of money to book the same room. That is where I did my first workshop on Exploratory Testing.

I was surprised (yeah, I was) that there were about 17 people who were willing to pay as much as 3500 INR for a day to get trained by me. I guess I paid more than half of that money on rental of the training room but I was happy. I don't distribute feedback forms because I believe the actual feedback is when people go back to their workstations and test out the new ideas.

Somehow, people were convinced that I was giving them a different perspective. My workshop was mostly hands on. Minutes before I started my workshop I pinged Michael and said, "I need your blessings on this important day in my life. I am nervous" and he replied, "Are you an expert presenter?" and I answered, "No". He then said this great thing, "Well then pretend to be an expert presenter". That helped me so much that I pretended to be an awesome presenter. Over the years, I have developed a stage presence that audience have loved it in most occasions.

What I seemed to gain is many different ways to run the same exercise. However, my audience were my asset. They asked so many questions to me that helped me do a lot better thinking to help them learn what they wanted to. Sometimes I appear to people as the king of analogy and examples. I connect with my audience well because there were my audience of past who taught me so much about how to do it and how many different ways I could fail trying to give an analogy.

There is at least one good thing I tell in all my workshops: If you want to disagree with what I am saying and stay silent just because you don't care about me, you are killing the testing community indirectly. I am going to be doing these workshops to many other testers and I don't want to keep telling stupid stuff to them, so please help me.

That statement has helped some people tell me where I am bad and where I need to do better. After I engage them in a conversation and if I was convinced about it, I made necessary changes.

A big thank you to all those who attended my first set of workshops. You made this guy grow in confidence and helped him learn how bad he is and how good he needs to get. The most useful feedback has mostly not been on feedback forms.  

How Pradeep teaches software testing - Part 1

I'd like to spill the beans here. I want to tell you how I teach people to test software and my journey of it. I have also written about it in the past here , here and here. In this post, I'd like to tell you about finer details of my teaching style and how I got them. If you would read all the parts I am about to publish, you'd know more about my teaching than you ever did or you ever wanted to :)

How my speaking style evolved

The influence of James Bach & Michael Bolton

The first time I ever witnessed someone teaching software testing was when I got coached by James Bach and Michael Bolton. I had also witnessed people who, in the context of teaching software testing, were reading slides. I don't consider what they are doing as "teaching software testing" but I consider them as "slide runners".

The way James and Michael coach are two diverse powerful approaches to teaching testing. There are things in common but there is James specific and Michael specific signatures in their respective styles.While I was working on the exercises they gave me, I was also observing how they teach me. That was the most important step for me to think about teaching other testers.

I was curious to find out how James or Michael feels when they coach testers. What goes on in their mind? What is the thought process? How could I experience what they are experiencing?

A way I could do it, was to start coaching a few testers aping the styles of James and Michael. I remember my first class, I cracked the same jokes that I had heard from Michael Bolton and copied the body language of James Bach. Did it go well? Fortunate for me, that audience hadn't seen J & M in action. It appeared to be good. I had watched James Bach's Becoming a Software Testing Expert video at least a 100 times to try copying his style. I practiced and practiced. The bathroom and toilet was the best place for me to do so. Most people are bathroom singers and I had turned myself to be a bathroom presenter. Over the last few years, those who have seen James or Michael in action come to me after my talk and have said, "There is so much of James or Michael in you". Not surprising.

Moving away from being an ape to developing my own style


The best part about trying to ape James & Michael was, I failed to do so, in many occasions. There was someone else in me by the name of Pradeep who was constantly bringing himself out. He used to sometimes take over James Bach and Michael Bolton. I was very afraid of that. I didn't know if people are going to like Pradeep as compared to James or Michael.

At times the Pradeep in me took over for a longer duration as I couldn't hide him too long and people weren't disappointed about that. Slowly, the Pradeep in me started gaining confidence that he could do it all alone without the help of James & Michael styles he was trying to ape.

It happened that my English accent got into a spin and I was neither speaking the Indian English accent nor Americans would consider that I belong there. So, many Indian testers have thought I was trying to fake my accent to sound more like an American. I had a tough time explaining to them that I was not and then gave up. I guess I was paying the price for admiring and communicating a lot with James and Michael :)

I began focusing more on my skills to teach than to be worried if people are thinking that I fake my accent. Today I connect my audience with good content and humor that they almost seem to have forgotten making note of my accent. At least, I would like to think so :)

Today my talks and classes have lots of humor, not because Michael does it too but the Pradeep in me is a natural humorist. Today my talks are aggressive and I pump a lot of energy out, not because James does that but the Pradeep in me is highly energetic to talk about testing.

The legacy passed on

Just about few days back, Santhosh Tuppad's girl friend pinged me on Gmail Chat (that occasionally works after the launch of G+. I just hope Engineers in Google stop boasting about their innovative ideas of write hell lot of code to test code that intimidate the industry and focus on fixing issues that irritates the users they claim to care for) to tell me that she is seeing so much of me in him when he speaks. I helped her understand it shall go away after a while because the Santhosh in him won't allow Pradeep to dominate for long.

Two days after that Parimala told me that she surprised her husband by using some words which I use as frequently as I can and then realized "OMG, this is so much of Pradeep in me. How do I get rid of this guy?"

It looks like legacy passed on and soon they will recover and pass it on to someone.

Watch out for part 2

Bangalore Workshop on Software Testing - 3 on 6th August, 2011

This year, BWST 3 (#bwst3) is delayed by a couple of months and for all good reasons. We were busy with personal and professional stuff. So, here comes the details.

Personal excellence & skill development

We have been noticing over the last few years that those who can change things for the world are those who have been changing things for themselves. As people say revolution starts from within, our experience has been similar to agree with that.

In this year BWST 3,  we are focusing on interacting more on personal excellence and skill development. We want to hear stories (from all participants, not just the speakers) on how they have been working on their personal excellence. Are they being pushed to that? What is their motivation to do it? What is causing them to fail? What support they need and from whom? What kind of skills are they working on? What are the black swan skills that the world should know about? What kind of books they read and how has it helped them? What kind of changes are they making to themselves? What do they plan to change about testing in future?

Does this topic connect with you well? Would you like to present or participate in this? We have very limited seating of 25 this year and this is an invite only conference. You don't need to send us a Salsa dance video to get an invite but you could write down your story of how you built or have been building your skills to us at parimala hut moolya.com titled "BWST 3 speaker" / "BWST 3 participant".

For those who don't know what I am talking about: Please read this, this, this and this. Last year, we had Selim Mia from Bangladesh, Yeshwantrao from Madurai and Vasu from Chennai come all over to Bangalore to attend BWST 2. So, indirectly, I am telling, its open to the world.

Venue:

The venue is at a hotel located in Bannerghatta Road, Bangalore. We shall send the details of reaching the venue to all selected participants and speakers via email.

Time: 

• 8 30 AM to 6 PM - BWST 3 (Late comers will not get Red K card. That's unfair. They will get it but be on time)
• 6 PM till cops ask you to go home - Social gathering with testers

How do discussions happen in BWST?

We will be using K-cards and everybody gets to talk. As an organizer and a talkative person, I hate K-cards, so you can imagine that it gives all an equal chance. As it isn't rocket science to figure out how to use them, we will explain to you over there before we start.

For those who have attended BWST 1 or 1 and 2 or just 2 :) - This year, we have modified the 3 color K-card to just 2. We will have a Red card (High Priority Request - Limited use) and Green card ( Put me on the deck, I have something to say or ask - (Unlimited use)

Cost

As you all know this is a "pay for yourself" style conference and you'd need to pay 550 INR to cover your own expenses of food and refreshments during the day. At the hotel, we will have a complimentary wi-fi facility and power adaptors. So, bring on your tweeting machines and use #bwst3

It is a practice [ :) ] that we hang out in a pub after the conference and hence if you'd like to just join the evening pub meeting with all the testers of BWST 3, write to us separately with your mobile number. We shall SMS and tweet the location of the pub you need to come to. Of course, "pay for yourself".

This year, we have decided to provide T-shirts to all participants and speakers and we are looking forward to wearing one of our own sponsored by oh who else - Moolya

Hurry up! If you are too late, you get to wait list and you will have to pray someone drops out. Spread the word, use the #bwst3

Testers & their passion for test automation

Once a group of software testers were traveling on a plane to attend a test automation conference. Their plane was hijacked by terrorists and all people on board, including the testers were held hostages.

The situation was grim as terrorists appeared to be dangerous with AK-56 strapped across their chests. The terrorists demanded a lot of things that the government couldn’t meet. After seven hours of flying, the plane was running out of fuel. The only demand government could meet was to refuel the plane.

Terrorists chose an airport to land and the plane was refueled enough to fly for 12 more hours. The terrorists threatened to kill a hostage every one hour if their demands were not met.They demanded the release of a terrorist who was captured by the government last month during an operation. The government had only three options: a) to release the terrorist b) to ignore the threat and get all people on board killed c) to perform a surgical strike during the next refueling session.

The government opted for option c. The surgical strike team consisted of highly skilled commandos who were trained in such rescue missions. The commandos pretending to be refueling the plane stormed into the plane and had concealed the latest FMG (Folding Machine Gun) which they unleashed to kill all eleven terrorists on board with minor bullet injuries to hostages.

After the strike was over, all passengers including the software testers on board stood up and clapped for quite sometime while commandos were preparing to off board the passengers. The news had become viral across the world and there were a lot of people waiting to receive the passengers. The conference organizers felt proud to receive the software testers who were on board this flight that had been rescued.

On the request of the conference organizers, those software testers decided to talk on what lessons can be learnt from the experience to software testing. With a huge round of applause, one of them came on stage, held the microphones and in a bold voice said, “Those commandos used a fully automatic machine gun to kill all the terrorists. That indicates that we should make our testing fully automatic to find all bugs”. Every tester in the hall clapped for the great lesson they learnt. 

Moral of the story: Testers and Test management have forgotten to appreciate their own colleagues and consider processes and tools help them achieve their goals.  Update: Also quoting Julian Harty : "Automation should be a servant, not master of our Software delivery"

If you have a colleague whom you want to appreciate and don't mind doing that in the comments section here, just go for it. Let me start.

A letter from the worst Agile Tester in India

Dear Blog Reader,

Greetings!

Hope you all are doing something in life and I don't care about it. I would like to introduce myself to you. I guess you don't know about my split personality disorder. My name is Pradeep Soundararajan too. No, not the guy you know but this is his split personality. The split personality is - I am the worst Agile tester from India. Yet, I am smart enough to be able to survive in this industry because the industry is structured to pose challenges to good testers and not for people like me.

What makes me qualify to be the worst tester is I don't squeeze my brain to test, don't care about the project success or what happens to my employer because I can always find another one who can hire me. Thanks to the most advanced interviewing techniques for a tester that ensures people like me get jobs.

As a matter of fact, I wasn't as confident as I am today about my survival in IT industry a couple of years ago. Ever since my management went to attend a conference where lots of people spoke about Agile, we were given a goal to ensure that even we become Agile. Thankfully, it didn't matter what Agile means or what Agile Manifesto says. What my management got about Agile is - to be calling ourselves as Agile, we need a stand up, a scrum, a sprint, some tests called as acceptance tests, developers and testers working together and oh business analysts writing bed time stories for us.

If our context demands to change the stand up to sit down, we won't because you see, we are AGILE and Agile to people like us means - don't change anything that will prevent people from recognizing that we are not Agile. Simple.

Our Agile coach and certified scrum master, in order to retain their jobs, appear to read a lot of blogs where people post their Agile experiences. Without probing if it suits our context or not they bring in best practices which are ideally ideas shared on blogs. Bloggers do a fantastic job of posting things that appears to work for them or in simpler words - pretending to work for them.

Once there was a white board added to our work place and a few sticky notes on our desks. We just thought we had to use these new tools to continue being called as Agile and we started writing down tweets (as twitter was blocked) on sticky post it notes and pasted it on the white board. It delighted our scrum master and agile coach. They even blogged about it.

Early days, the industry was wrong about making the tester sole responsibility for quality. These days they are saying quality is everybody's responsibility and that's a huge relief for people like me who are pathetic testers. All hiring that happens and the interviewing mechanisms ensure irresponsible people like me are favored for the job.

The industry will never learn that quality can never become responsibility of all irresponsible people of the project. However, by having said quality is everybody's responsibility, my burden has come down. I now share the blame well with all other people on the project even when I know my job was mediocre.

I have figured out a formula to make my life smoother than how it was earlier. I am presented with stories about the changes to the product or new additions and I need to write tests that meet the acceptance criteria. Business Analysts test for the acceptance criteria at the end of the sprint before signing off to push a build into production. So, my job is to sit with the BA's at the start of the sprint and figure out what their acceptance tests are and that's it. I mean it. That's the formula.

Do my developers care about TDD, Unit Testing their code or anything of that sort? No!  I don't bother to ask them those questions because if I ask, they would also ask questions on my work and I don't want that to happen. My organization posted millions of dollars of profit, it could have actually been billions of dollars but hey only if people like me were out of job. As an organization posts profits, the management is fooled to believe that they have the right people with them. They hardly know anything about their customers. Today's customers are so ignorant to software quality that they would figure out a work around than yelling at the company. They love the "Don't send" button.

The IT industry in India thrives on "head count" and not brain count and I am a billable "head" to my organization. As long as I am a billable head, my job is never going to be threatened. Do you think the US companies will pull out of India? No, they want cheap stuff and that's why they come to India. How does India deliver cheap stuff then? Its by hiring people like me who don't mind not doing great stuff as long as I am paid just enough to keep running my home loan, car loan and my wife's shopping expenses. If converted to dollars, that's still way short of what a US fella would get. There are some expensive folks in India but they talk a language that people in US think as not scalable.

Most Americans themselves don't appear to get Agile and asking Indians to do something good that they haven't got is super fun. They won't know how to track and we won't know how to produce and it works out as a perfect job saving combo for all of us. Unfortunately for those who have put in their money, the cost of pulling out is so much that they are stuck to indirectly beg us to do something to make things work. I once went to an Agile conference in the west and found that the leading agilists are complaining about their own countrymen for being bad Agile folks. I returned with confidence that we are just aping the major population of Agilists of the west and to an Indian, it is perfect to ape the Americans way of producing software.

When things go haywire, we bring in some consultants who are so passionate about agile (notice the small "a"?) that they wouldn't know they are shifting their role from a consultant to a contractor. They would do the "just enough" needed to make our biggest release, clean some of our mess and then go away. While they are here, we will treat them well and make them feel so good that they think they have got a great client and when they go away, we don't bother about what they did till our next major release.

The sprints are so beautifully positioned and the activities are so amazingly structured that I can easily blame the sprint for not being able to learn anything new or add any skills to what I might currently possess.

Every now and then, I pick up new terms that western folks talk about just to ensure I don't get intimidated in interviews. Be it Scrumban, Lean-Kanban or Lean Scrumban. If some interview questions are too intimidating then I simply remind myself of having read Brian Marick's Artisanal Retro-Futurism crossed with Team-Scale Anarcho-Syndicalism. I don't get a head or tail of it and I don't care either as long as I can tell my interviewers that's what I do. If asked to explain, I know how to obfuscate it further.

Good testers don't get the point of life and that is - some people have money and others need to extract it from them without needing to work hard. Good testers are specialists, they only specialize in how to test well. There is a need for generalists in this world, who can learn how to make money while not testing well mixed with not knowing how to code.

My life moves on but the good testers appear to be stuck trying to explain guys like me what should be done. Note, you can't move an inch out of us and we outnumber you so much that your life is as painful as having cancer all over your brain.

I am starting a new certification program - CTBCIA.  "Certified to be certified in Agile". This is skill based. I will test how long you can stand up, how you hurry up when a sprint is about to finish,... If you are from any other country, please email me, we shall expand our certification business aping the success of ISTQB all over the world. Once we have a local chapter in your country, we can make more money through conferences and selling our training programs which are feeders to our certification program. Don't worry about marketing, leading agile consultants of the world will talk so much bad about our certification that they will attract our target customers to approach us.

If you want to be a successful Agile tester, trust me, you don't need to know anything about it. Mostly because the people running the project themselves have no clue. Learning about being agile can damage your brain cells and your career.

I really don't care whatever you choose to do because you don't care for me. Humanity and software are two opposite terms.

Regardless,

-- Pradeep Soundararajan ( The split personality guy, not the one you know)