Weinberg on more than writing - the Fieldstone method

11th March, 2012 in Bangalore was a beautiful Sunday. Now that it is almost over, I can use the past tense "was". Just the weather making it beautiful is one part but what about the weather within me? I decided to make it beautiful within. Everybody has a pile of books that they bought but never paid its due attention. Weinberg on Writing ( WoW as I want to call now) - The Fieldstone Method was one of the books that hadn't got my time yet. So, I read the first chapter at home, closed the book, went to my wife and asked her if she had any plans for the afternoon. As I had taken her out yesterday, she excused herself out of any plans. Whenever a husband asks "What's your plan?" to his wife, it means, "I have a plan and want to be sure if your plan doesn't disturb mine" :). I took my backpack and scooted to a coffee shop nearby. Coffee, book reading and relaxing was my plan.

About 2 PM, I was all set. I wanted to start with Camomile Tea. I had told my wife that I'd be back only when I am finished with the book, so I was hoping there would be a couple of beverages. I realize now that there is nothing like "finishing the book" because The Fieldstone Method provides an experiential learning to those who want to work with it. Not just that.

I have had the great opportunity to meet with Jerry and spend a couple of days, attending his workshop, being a part of a peer conference that had Jerry, a conference and much more in 2008. I have been a reviewer of Jerry Weinberg's book "The Perfect Software and Other Illusions About Testing". I have read a couple of other Jerry's books that have changed me from time to time. With this book, I felt Jerry sitting next to me and coaching me on the Fieldstone Method. This is no hallucination. I am sure the emotions he had while turning the stones that he used to build this book has rubbed on me and has caused some very good emotions within me. Jerry intends that happens with the experiencers of the book. / OK there is no such word as experiencers in any dictionary /

I haven't published a book yet. If you are thinking I haven't written one yet, you are mistaken. I just haven't published it. I see the light now that will lead me to publishing. That's what I seem to be getting out of The Fieldstone Method because I am going to build my books not write it.

So, why am I telling you all this? To get you buy the book and experience it? To write a review of the book?    You will discover why I am writing about it, if you were to continue reading.

It is all about me. I recognized that I had almost stopped note taking. In other words, I had stopped collecting fieldstones. I guess I was just processing whatever my imperfect memory could store. Isn't it amazing that I stopped doing something that I advocate to other testers - note taking. When I realized this while experiencing the book, I picked my backpack and searched for my Indian version Moleskine and a pen. I must have missed observing a trillion stones but thankfully I have now saved myself from my ignorance that would have led to missing trillion power trillion stones in the future.

Here are some of the stones I collected today that I am pulling from my notebook (and typing it for you):

• Thought: When you are alone in a coffee shop, you hear people and their conversation you usually wouldn't bother to hear if you were not alone.
• Retrospective as I read the book: I was probably smart all this while but not happy because I always wanted to be more smart but never wanted to be happy.
• I shook the coffee table accidentally and a glass of water placed on it started to get its vibration and then I wondered: Pradeep, when was the last time you observed water settle down after being disturbed with a vibration. Your 9 month old kid now would watch it with curiosity. Relation to testing: The first time an information looks interesting and everybody pays attention to it. Once they learn how it happens, they lose interest to observe things that they were once curious about and if there was a different behavior? They would continue to assume they know something. Software is volatile, just like the water. 
• I was asking myself a question: Does it matter if something takes a long time to learn? What determines "long"?
• I saw cold coffee on some table and decided to order it. I wrote a note : How did my choice alter after seeing something that caused my brain to demand it.
• Project Gutenberg quoted in Jerry's book - Awesome

  A friend of mine, Nandan Pujar wanted to meet with me for a consultation and I felt, "What a great time for a good friend to come in. Some of the exercises I want to practice requires such an occasion and a trust worthy friend". I took notes as I was consulting for him:

• I was reminded of Warren Buffet interview of why he didn't come and invest in India prior to last year. His response was, "Nobody invited me to do so". 1.2 billion people didn't think of knocking that door that way. I felt sad for myself.
• My friend Nandan said, "Being with mediocre people helps you identify your delta with them and being with intellects helps you fix the delta". I thought it was a cool thing.
• Made note of words he used "Feudal" and "Artificial scarcity"

 I came back home and made other note of stones I saw, heard, observed, felt, experienced...

• My 9 month old daughter had to poo. After cleaning the poo, I wrote in my note: As a kid I must have not known this is called "poo" and why people clean it off. Now that I know, I clean the mess I do. I am wondering if testers who recognize the "poo" of their work will ever clean the mess they do. Some of them are stuck with it and they seem to think as though it is a newly grown part of their system. Some who come new to the system see people stuck with the "poo" of their work and assume that, to be experienced, they also need to be stuck to "poo"

It is fantastic. I love it.  Thank you Jerry. You helped me recognize the "poo" I was carrying all this while and I am not going to be one of those who will not clean it. I will clean it. I will not just clean the "poo" I have been carrying for a while but identify with the help of trillions of stones I can see, to not carry any type of "poo" of my life. I also recognize the idea of heuristics and they are fallible.

Till yesterday, I was thinking, "Now that I have accomplished all this in life, how do I change myself?", Weinberg on Writing (or WOW) - The Fieldstone Method is a change catalyst. 11th March, 2012 was a beautiful Sunday in Bangalore. So can everyday be if I were to collect the stones.

How Pradeep teaches software testing - Part 4

If you didn't know how Part 4 came up? Here is how it came. I first wrote Part 1, then Part 2 and then Part 3 ;-) So, logically here is Part 4 of the series How Pradeep teaches software testing.

"I know how to do certain types of testing but if someone asks me to explain what I did, I struggle to explain" was a problem statement I heard from a tester today. I replied in a confident tone, "I know why that happens. It doesn't just appear to be your problem but I know a lot of testers who appear to have the same problem." 

I continued, "You should consciously practice explaining what you did, first to yourself and then to your colleagues although they probably know how and why you did it. Why? I am going to explain how your brain works (or how I think it does). It has two nodes. One that contains what you know and the other that controls your explanation of what you know. When you make a conscious effort, you are forcing a connection between these nodes in your brain. When you force your brain to connect those two nodes too often, at some point it will judge the need for a permanent connection and create it for you. After that you have a free flow of what you know and your explanation of what you know." 

After I said the above, I could see a smile in the face that reflects, "Yes, I now know how to solve this problem". I read a person's understanding not by their head nodding or when I hear, "I get it", but by the emotions and expressions on their face and the body. 

James Bach identified that I was a metacog. I didn't know I was one. After that, it has been very helpful for me to understand why I do things the way I do. I guess I turned myself into a metacog because I thought it suits the kind of testing I wanted to. It's not a special status, it is just a way of life.

I don't even know if the brain works the way I explained it to be but I guess you can understand why the above explanation makes sense. I make sure I tell people that I am not trying to misinform them about anything when I use such examples. I am just helping the tester imagine why there is a problem and how to solve it. A lot of my coaching is consulting.

Examples like the one you read above govern a major part of my coaching. I observe a lot. I practiced consciously making connections between what I have seen, heard, thought, experienced and know to being explain it when the context demands.

Analogies and Examples are powerful approaches to teaching. I need to know what connects to my audience very well. Although all my audience are testers, I can't use the same analogies and examples, it just doesn't work. Bangalore testers need a different example than those in Pune. In Pune, I would talk about Raj Thackery and in Bangalore I would talk about Vattal Nagraj, in Chennai about Goundamani and not about Vattal Nagraj. Now, for those of my readers from United States or Europe, you wouldn't know Goundamani or Vattal Nagraj and hence I would use examples of Chuck Norris, Sarah Palin, Julian Assange. If you are a F1 fan, I'd talk about testing through specific GP incidents. That's how the examples need to adopt based on audience. I also use a lot of examples from what I think the world connects to. For instance, I closely read and watch Air Crash Investigation in Nat Geo channel. OMG! There is so much to learn from the way NTSB (National Transportation Safety Board) deals with it. So, basically as a coach, I have to keep connecting to various thoughts and happenings to be able to connect with my audience. 

Similes, Metaphor or if you choose to call them Analogies are interesting and tough piece of cake, if you are the one providing it. People tend to take it in their own interpretation than what you intend to. It is good in a way, I get to learn when not to use what type of analogies to what kind of people :)

I use Fishing for explaining test coverage. I know a few other people have already used fishing as an example for teaching testing, so I didn't invent it but I know how to explain different concepts of testing with the fishing example. I think that most learning happens when you are interacting with the audience and not when you are explaining. That's where I do better with the fishing analogy.

I start drawing different types of fish, from guppies to clowns and from star fish to sharks. I then draw a size and shape of a specific type of net to catch fish. I give them a goal of catching as many different fish as possible in a limited amount of time. Some audience come back and tell me, "Ah with this net the guppies will escape"... what's your immediate thought? You would tell them to build a net that has smaller squares to catch guppies?  (Why say it? They know it) I would probably be Pradeep and say, "Fantastic. A lot of time spent celebrating the success of finding one good bug steals away the opportunity to find more good bugs. How do you want to celebrate? 3 minutes left."

So, after they come out with strategy and different nets, I tell people that just because they have nets (tools) to catch a specific type of fish it doesn't mean they can really catch a plenty of it. I then tell a story and examples from my life. One of them: I consulted for an organization who had bought an expensive automation tool hoping that they would now be able to find more bugs. They spent all their energy to set up tests on it and found fewer bugs over the year. I drive points like: Tools don't help you unless you know how to help the tools to do what you think they can.

For a while people think it is possible to catch a shark from a net. It is possible, maybe. I explain how a powerful shark can bring their boat down if they try to catch it through a net or a fishing rod and how a harpoon is better than a net. Sometimes people try to think of similar approaches to solve many different problems. The example of shark, net and harpoons are cool for people to relate to something they have done in the past that shouldn't have been done the way they did it. I then equate different types of fish to different quality criteria. I ask my audience what type of fish are they mostly catching and I hear a shout, "Functionality". 

After a lot of back and forth between me and my audience, we all discover what good test coverage could mean. I then start probing into their projects and figure out how much of fish they are missing that they shouldn't be and try to help them understand why they shouldn't be catching too much of the same fish. Sometimes it upsets the food chain :) 

While there is fishing in my class, there is also plenty of room for Sine and Cosine for Test Techniques, Brian Marick's Minefield Analogy for Regression Test Strategy, Tom and Jerry examples for How Scripted Testing is dangerous, what lessons can we learn from Saurav Ganguly's come back, how to read Sachin and Kambli's career graphs, farming... It must be fun to sit in my class. I don't know, I have never been able to.

Happy New Year!

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.

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

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)

Overcoming "obsessive checking if being mentioned disorder"

Happy New Year to all my dear readers, followers, fans, bulbs & CFL Lamps. I wish you become a better tester and respect other (good) testers much better than what you did in 2010. I also wish to be what I wished you to be :-)

The support for the company I launched Moolya Software Testing Private Limited - Brainual Software Testing Services Company, from you all has been fantastic. We hope to keep the momentum and continue adding great value to our customers. I have had a real busy time answering lots of questions about the company from testers all over. Without being able to mention the names, we have had two outsourcing request for quote, two special testing requirement requests, one recovery-before-it-goes-down testing requests from top organizations ever since we launched this company. Added to that is the support from the testers all over. Great start for us and we wish to make Moolya a dream company for good testers and hence be the most preferred testing vendor of the world.


Now, what's the Obsessive Checking If Being Mentioned Disorder?

On this new year, I want to tell you some true stories that you have never heard before. I could have simply kept it with me but I want to be honest to you because you spend your time here. Its you who have made this a successful blog and not just me. I don't know if someone else is facing the same problem but I just hope they are not.

• 5 years ago when I entered into blogging, I also picked up the habit of reading blogs. The first time I was mentioned on someone's blog, I felt as though the world was under my feet. I guess its natural for a human being to feel so, for that moment. After a day, I returned to realizing the place I stand is the actual world under my feet. I am no special. Recognized I was a "normal" human being.

• When my name was mentioned again on another blog, I felt great. Some kind of juice flowed all over my body and I loved the way it tickled when it flowed. I was hoping that a lot more people would mention my name and my blog on their blogs so that I could keep experiencing the flow of that magical juice.

• When I was mentioned on James Bach's blog and followed by Michael Bolton's blog, I felt an extra dose of high concentration juice was flowing in me. It didn't just tickle me but had soothing effects on some painful areas of my life. I still feel, it is normal.

• I used to write blog posts and anxiously wait for a couple of days to see if someone mentioned or appreciated my recent post somewhere along with my name. At this point I was on the boundary of "normal". Fortunate for you, my dear readers, I haven't written a single post because it may likely be mentioned by someone but wrote my heart out and hoped it gets popular by other bloggers mentioning it.

• After sometime, I realized that some people had mentioned about me and my blog posts but I didn't come to know when they did it. I added a sitemeter to my blog to track where the hits are coming from. I became way too obsessive with sitemeter. I used to hit the Sitemeter refresh about 200 times a day. At least twice more than the hits I used to get. I was desperate. I worked way too hard to do good work and anxiously wait for an opportunity to blog about it. At this point, I was definitely thrown out from the "normal" category of human beings. I was addicted to the flow of the magical juice. Lucky for my readers, I enjoyed the "being ethical" juice which prevented me from using stupid tactics to attract readership and hence driving the opportunity of being mentioned. 

• Then people started just mentioning my name without the link, so I got a little nervous about it. Not that they didn't link to my blog but because I discovered them too late. So, I set up a Google Alert with my name. Later I found, many people don't get my second name right. Its "Pradeep Soundararajan" and not "Pradeep Soundarajan" as most people appear to write. So, I ended up setting up a Google Alert for all possible permutations of my name. I was obsessed to check reports of Google Alerts. I went crazy about it. Sitemeter and Google Alert made me go crazy. At this point, I assume, I threw myself very far from belonging to the "normal" category. The worst is yet to come.

• After a few months from being thrown far away from "normalcy", I was very excited when other bloggers post new entries. It gave me a hope that they would have mentioned my name. I used to pretend being surprised of being mentioned although I would have hoped for it. I guess its fair to call this phase as "starting to get worse".

• Here comes the beauty. Months later, I started replacing every word by my name till I saw my name on others post. So, I may have read a few posts without actually learning anything from it because all I saw is "Pradeep" & "Tester Tested" on those posts. I think you'd agree one hundred percent, if I call this phase as "Obsessive Checking If Being Mentioned Disorder", which of course is too fucking bad thing to happen. It is important for me to say that all these were subconscious driven stuff. I didn't plan for it, couldn't control it.

• The magical juice that tickled me and made me feel great was also making me uncontrollable to my own mind.

• Added to that is the Twitter era. When I got addicted to twitter, all I had to say was, "Oh no! Not again". I saw a few people showing traces of the symptoms of the disorder or maybe I started feeling so.

Then a small light showed up

At some point, the obsessive checking if being mentioned disorder showed itself up in front of my face when it interfered my learning. That's when I decided to knock it off completely. 

I could start ignoring the urge to do things that may bring back the magical flow of the invisible juice only because I feared if my learning will slip. You may think that I deleted the Sitemeter Account, Unsubscribed from Google Alerts and blah blah but I didn't do any of them. Having it there and not yielding to it is a way I tried coming out of it.

I tried reducing the frequency of me visiting sitemeter stats. Some days I get busy learning, testing or working that I forget to login or forget that I logged in and the tab is lying somewhere. I still do visit Sitemeter and Google Alerts because I don't want to go to the other extreme. Call it post traumatic stuff :)

I reduced the number of blogs and posts I read. I don't go to Google Reader anymore. I just go to the URL of the blog I want to read and avoid clicking blog post links on twitter. 

I have reduced the frequency of writing in forums, groups, LinkedIn,  Test Republic, STC...

Most important of all I said to myself, "Now that you know you are not good, why care if people mention you?" and ignored to going to places where I was mentioned in the past.

Then comes practice over time. I wanted to give myself at least an year of practice. Today, I have reached a stage where I don't care who mentions me or my blog posts, for my own good. That doesn't mean I don't respect them. Moreover, others mentioning me or my post is not in my control. 

Bothering about things that are not in my control is foolishness. Not bothering about things that are in my control is much more foolish.

Sometimes the community elevates me to the "guru" & "expert" status (OK, American, UK & European folks, not you, I am talking about Indians here) and I have learnt to treat myself as a student despite what others call me as. I have declined being interviewed for a testing magazine with the interview title, "Know your testing guru".

Its not been easy but its getting easier. I am in the "normal" ring now, making me eligible to post this. I don't care if people tweet this, don't tweet it or not. It is for my reference. When I look back after a couple of years, I will have some things to smile upon saying, "Look at how I was". Just in case, you can see some symptoms of the same disorder in you, trust me, we will have lots to talk about when we meet.

I am just out of a danger en route to success as a good student of this craft. I hope I can wade away other dangers that might be on the way, much faster.

Once again, a new year is not happy because you call it that way, you make it that way. I am having a happy new year and hope you have it too. I met Chandru today. The smile and confidence he had in his face is inspiring enough for me to push hard for good things.

Who is making software testers, dumb and bad?

Not so long ago, I thought there existed a set of testers called, "bad testers". I hated them. I wanted to punch them on their face and get their face to bleed. I wanted to become a powerful politician and kill them all and escape without being charged for genocide. I wanted to become a superhero and get people to fire them from their jobs. I wanted them to beg for jobs, money and survival. I thought that is the way to get them to open their minds for learning. All this should have shot my blood pressure up while those bad testers remained cool. They were untouched by my criticism and continued to think that I was an asshole.


Whenever I found them, I insulted them as much as I could till I realized that they needed more care from me than those whom I was already caring about. I started caring for them. My world changed and so did theirs.


I was always wondering how these bad testers are happy. Needless to say I thought I am a great tester and still continue to think that way. By "great", I mean, "just what is required". Today, you can be a great tester by being just what is required. Tomorrow, the case might change.


I tried shifting the question from "Why are bad testers happy about themselves?" to "Who is making these bad testers happy?" and "Who is preventing the bad testers to learn that they are doing bad testing?"

That's when I said to myself, "There are no bad testers. There are some who are forced to practice bad testing. The force is either internal or external or a combination of them".

That was an important shift in the strategy that helped me in my exploration of identifying what factors cause a tester to appear bad or practice bad testing.


Internal forces 
I mean, ones that the testers themselves are responsible for or have control over.

• Money more important than anything else: For some testers who are sole breadwinners of the family, they might internalize the idea that what works for others is a safer route to traverse than exploring new paths and risking their cash flow. They spend their life traveling those peoples route who themselves have followed someone else's route. All finding it to be safe and hence not wanting to change.

• Fear of losing the job: For some testers, losing a job means unbearable social pressure. These testers don't ever try to speak against anything to protect their jobs. Their whole life is spent on running just one test case - Is this the right time to shut my mouth? - to which the result always remains - Pass.

• Shallow ambitions in life: For some testers, their ambition is to never do something fascinating but just run the rat race, build a house, buy a car, get married & have kids. They also try to ensure that their kids continue to run the rat race. I am not speaking against taking care of the family but taking care of the family should be balanced with building high ambitions in life and working towards it.

• Victim of Rutherford-Bohr's experiment: Some testers, no matter what exciting stuff they are presented with, try to return to their most stable state of ignoring all the exciting stuff because their life is already happy (grounded). 

• Living someone else's dream: Some testers, don't have dreams of their own. They just pretend to have their own while they are living other's dream. Some live the dream of their parents and rest their manager's. Living others dream makes their life boring and they give up on almost everything, forget testing.

• Taste of early success causing a drift from continuing to learn - Mostly a very dangerous one. These kind of testers think they are on the right path and there is no reason for them to change. 

• Having learned that good testing is hard - Some testers acknowledge what good testing is but they also learn it is very hard to test well. Out of that, some of them make up their mind saying they are not in for such hard work because they think life is bigger than doing good testing. Nothing wrong but they don't seem to be doing to the big part well, either.

External forces
I mean, the ones who are responsible or has a power or influence to get good testing done.

• Head or Tails of testing - I have talked to at least slightly less than a hundred Heads of Testing of big, medium and small scale organizations. They have so much power to change things and yet they don't seem to be doing anything about it. I must also admit that some people are doing very well while most don't appear to be. Why don't these people take a break from their work, sit along testers on one of the project and test for just a couple of days to realize how hard it is and what can they do to help these testers do a great job. 

• The interviewers - At least people in India, when they are out of college, want to just learn enough to crack an interview. When interviewers emphasize on demonstration of memorization than skills, its easy for a billion plus population to crack them. Fakers get in, Genuine people might not.

• Testing institutes - Business demands scale, I agree. Scaling at the cost of quality of education is in my opinion, spoiling your own country's chances. Please read the book Outliers by Malcom Gladwell and more specifically Chapter Five - The Three Lessons from Joe Flom. You'd know what your business needs for future if it has to remain scalable.

• The experts - If you have great ideas, please price them a little lower for the first few years or based on the geography. You won't be considered cheap, trust me. Don't make money an entry barrier to someone who wants to get excellent at testing. 

• Commercial conferences - If you have have had good deals of sponsorship and paid delegates for a specific year, consider giving 80% discount to 10 people who cant afford it but want to attend it.

Combination of internal & external forces

When the external forces & internal forces combine, its a killer combo for bad testing

• Lack of speed in firing poor performers - If the people responsible to get good testing done are delaying in firing poor performers then the hope in the poor performer rises that he or she is doing well and should continue doing that. In at least half the organizations I consult, I get the opportunity to consult because they haven't fired the poor performers for a long time and something went kaput.

• Not paying good testers well - I have been to a few conferences in India where Head of IT or Head of Dev or Head of Testing are keynote speakers. Their speech is usually, "We have come to realize that testing is of great importance" but then they don't match the pay of the good testers they have to their claims. People call that "keynote". Can you walk the talk?

• Waiting till the year end to spend on training budget - Wondering why many organizations keep their training budget till the year end and not organize a training when the team needs it sometime mid year? As a side note, I wish, in India, the Learning & Development department, which is a separate entity in the organization is eliminated and every department becomes Learning & Development apart from what they do. 

• The book writers - When you write books that are not different from any other books that are available, you are re-iterating the point that the industry isn't changing. Many testers who accidentally pick up a book and skim through it read stuff that they have read a couple of years ago feel they are on track (and also end up not buying your book). Is that a message your book wanted to communicate?

I am 30 now. I am more curious about my age of 50 and waiting to get there, because I hope, I would have seen many changes - lots of positive ones. Mostly because the generation to which I belong or the generations junior to that of mine would have solved the problems I have listed and might have gone beyond that. I am not discarding the fact that the older generations have not solved it. There are dozens of them out of a population of millions.

When I tried punching just one bad tester I met, blood oozed out. Not on the face but in my hands for it was a mirror that I saw. 

What is our competition on?

There is a trend that is picking up in the software testing industry. To be more precise, I am talking about a trend of competitions, prizes and rewards. This is good. I love the idea of being able to compete globally and with testers whom I may not have known otherwise.

When someone wins a testing challenge and the report is published to those who participated, it influences others to ape some of the good practices and end up creating their own styles out of it. The flip side, what the winner does becomes best practice for wannabe winners of the next competition. For instance, having been practicing video recording as a part of my bug reporting style, I posted videos of bugs in Utest bug battle last year. When I coach testers, I also help them understand what kind of bugs need video recording and help them practice it. Santhosh Tuppad who is a regular bug battle winner in Utest told me that many testers have started to upload videos instead of screenshots and he published an experience report where he mentioned that point.

At this point of my post, I'd like to appreciate all companies putting up competitions that is helping to bring out new, fresh and different kind of talent to the public view. I like to support you in as many ways I can. I have been a participant, creator, winner and loser of such competitions. Its all fine.


However, I am starting to have some concerns about the competitions that are coming up which demands voting by public to decide who wins. Now, I need to clarify something. I am not talking against those companies who are doing it. As a matter of fact, I am not talking against "anything". The company wants a way to get more people to know about them and such voting based competitions help in doing that. If I start an organization, I'd like to do things that helps in getting a lot more people to know about the services my organization offers. 

The problem with the voting to decide a winner, could be hurting, to those who have put in lot of efforts but couldn't gather enough votes. For instance, Eurostar conferences organized a Videostar competition. By looking at the marketing flyer of the competition which said something like, "Put on your Holywood director hat" and about creativity, I assumed the video with the Holywood movie type creativity will probably get me to be the Videostar and did the Joker act. Anne Marie did a video that I personally liked. Nothing less of all that was from Rob Lambert who had a different way of putting things that he wanted to talk. Maybe all that was driven by seeing how creative were Eurostar folks who put up this video. Finally, the video that won, by that I mean, the one that got the most number of votes, was not so exciting as others in the list. We are independent consultants who don't have a mailer list to whom we can send and help generate a lot of votes for ourselves. Being an employee of a large company and gathering votes is much easier, especially if the Head of Testing is the one asking for votes. I guess that's what happened. Now, I am not questioning about anyone's ability but I am talking about the system.

I could have still won. I could have got a 99% lead over all others if I wished to. The Videostar page recorded a vote from a browser-computer and registers it or probably sets a cookie as well so that I cant vote twice. However, I could clear the cookies, refresh the page and vote for me again. How long would it take to automate this and leave it running overnight to wake up in the morning to declare myself as a winner?

I didn't win the Videostar. That is a testimonial that I didn't try winning with the "hacked way" I discovered. Oh, if you think there would have been an assessment of votes coming in from the same IP, I could have gone a step ahead and used the cloud to make it up or use tools that helps me mask my IP and hence not reveal where the votes came in from.

In that case, should winning be decided by a panel of judges who may not understand my skills? For instance if I take up the ISTQB Foundation Level exam, I will fail. I did fail in a mock test that I took online. Does that mean, I don't know how to test or I don't know the foundation of software testing? 

A competition has a set of rules. I am just asking if the rules can be made in such a way that the skill factor plays a vital role in winning and not the votes or my ability to memorize answers and vomit it out on an exam.

Let me repeat this: I am fine with companies organizing competitions to increase their visibility but I want to know if there can be a better way to do it than the voting system. I am dreaming of testing competitions where the winner is judged based on the skill demonstrated. A report is published by the panel as to why the winning entry amongst others were eligible for the top prize. Every step we put must help us move forward. Movement is important but there is a vector in it. What direction are we moving in and by what magnitude?

Bug battles are one kind of a competition that I like. There are more kinds of skills that companies can try to focus on. When I organized a testing challenge for Test Republic, I did a Bug Advocacy Challenge. I think there needs to Bug Investigation Challenges, Rapid Test Planning Challenges, Test of agility challenges, Test Management Challenges, Interviewing Tester Challenges, Collaborating with Developers Challenge, Understanding Requirements Challenge that can help in bringing out winners with skills of different kinds. 

So, there was a competition announced from Eurostar on blogging. I was about to pounce on it because I wanted to go to Eurostar and I have been one of the earliest Eurostar blogger. I skimmed through to see if there was anything related to voting and there it was. I decided to not enter the competition. 

I would be highly stupid if I was trying to write this post to create a negative impression of Eurostar or any other organization. That is not my intention. I'd like to say that Eurostar is a great conference I want to go but not because I got a lot of votes than someone else. I want to go if my skills get me there. I understand why Eurostar or companies that are running a voting based competition might be doing these competitions but I'd like them to think if there can be a better way to do things. I have respect for organizations like Utest and Eurostar because they are trying to do some work that is helping people change things the way they do. That is the reason I want them to be able to cause a much higher and better influence on the community, to take it forward. 

A tip to the winner

If you, a tester, happen to win any testing competition, here is something that I hope you think about from what I say to myself from my experience of winning several testing competitions; I won because the mightiest chose not to compete. This thought helps you a lot when you work with people. They shall embrace you not see you as a person they should stand away or just merely stare at.

Competitions could remain but what is our competition on? 

• Choice A.  Number of votes
• Choice B. the breadth and depth of skills? 

To add a little humor to this serious post; what is your vote for? A or B?