It's been a great week on the intarwebs; several people I highly esteem wrote articles that align well with
Testing on the Edge of Chaos. So I figured I'd make Friday link-share and commentary day. Here we go:
Working Remotely
Jeff Attwood did a post on
working massively remote. I like the term "massively remote" or "massively distributed" because it's very different than the "we bought a company in poland and outsourced testing to India" model. In that latter model, you still have people who have to commute to an office, who have to work in cubicles, have to work eight to five (for their time zone), take lunch from 12 to 1, and so on.
In the massively distributed model, you work when, where, and how you want to work, within some boundaries. Build a cube in your house, rent one at a local co-working facility, or surf the wireless at
Panera Bread, it doesn't matter - what matters is
results.
Jeff's article was a fine introduction. A couple of the things I would add would be:
1) Set an "office time." Socialtext Office Time (SOT), for example, is Pacific. My computer, IRC, and skype are all set to SOT. That way we can set up meetings by simply saying "Let's meet at 10AM SOT" - without having to discuss what 10AM
means.
2) Get an
Asterisk phone system so that calls are free. Then use GNU Screen, a free ASCII-text screen-sharing utility, and, when programming, pair program
all the time, or at least for the non-trivial programming tasks.
3) Set up VNC for screen sharing to debug and demonstrate painful issues, and for pair testing.
4) Set up a release cadence for regression testing; for example, "if we find no blocker bugs, we expect to go to staging within 48 hours."
5) Try to get to prod every few weeks
If there's interest, I could do some writing on my experience with Massively Distributed Delivery teams. I am convinced it is just plain a better way to work.
On Writing
Personally, I'm really tired of the cult of "write everything down." These are the people that say things like "If you didn't write it down, it didn't happen."
Yet I've got a modestly popular testing blog and write a magazine column; writing has done well by me. also know it's limits. Identifying the key points of an issue, conveying them through a vague language like English, and not putting your audience to sleep - man, that's
hard. So I'm pleased to highly recommend this month's column in Inc. Magazine by Jason Friend on
better business writing. (Jason Fried is the 37Signals guy. You might also want to check out
74Signals.com; twice as many signals!)
On Technical Debt
Seth Godin did a blog post this week on
Consumer Debt. In the article, Seth said something very simplistic that made a lot of sense to me. In economic terms, borrowing money in order to get something right now that will decline in value, like a car or fancy coat, why, that's silly. However, it might make sense is to borrow some money to make an investment that will increase in value faster than your debt; we call this
leverage. Which begs a questions when teams take on tech debt: Are you borrowing for an investment, or are you just cutting corners for immediate gratification?
Seth also links to a
Dave Ramsey post along those same lines.
On the Meaning of "QA"
My colleague and friend Michael Bolton has been cranking out the blog posts - most recently
Testers: Get Out Of The Quality Assurance Business and
When Testers Are Asked for a Ship/NoShip Decision. Both of these articles stand on their own, but if there's enough interest, I might do a short article on the whole idea of QA. After all, the ideological backstory of QA is one I found fascinating and have done a fair amount of research on. For example - where did the term 'QA' come from? Why did we get the idea that some separate and distinct department could assure quality? And so on.
I'm also currently planning on interviewing Michael for the August Issue of STPCollaborative's magazine; you can leave questions as comments here or email me at matt.heusser@gmail.com. Please include your full name and location - city and state/province/country.
PodCastin'
The recent discussion of the 'oblivious school of software testing' on twitter reminded me of the time I talked to David Starr about Agile Testing in a
Podcast Interview. I thought you might enjoy it - direct
MP3 here.
I really enjoy podcast interviews, and may have more to come. Watch this space, and happy Friday!