How do you do, Head of Testing? vol. 1

Thanks for asking. To be honest, the answer depends on the type of day I’m having. Downward spiraling direction can be found in my days more often than not recently. Ah, I should finally take the lesson from Benjamin Zander about those spirals and ditch them. And also remember rule #6.

A bit more than a year ago I started out with the goal to help testers in the company do a great job. It looks broad and sounds idealistic but it was as good as any mission to take as a starting point. I believed I could find a way to rally people behind initiatives, ignite their belief in change, and help them engage and drive testing and its development. At the same time, I had to figure out what the role of a competence head means…

I couldn’t be everywhere and put my hands into and onto everything, I knew as much. Some groundwork needed to be done or so I thought. Understanding the people and the system, its influences and boundaries was my first goal. So I set out to have long discussions with almost all testers in the company. I didn’t believe in picking and choosing just a few because, naive as I am, I believe all people matter and play some sort of role. So I did that, spent quite a lot of energy and didn’t get much of it back.

I gathered a lot of information in notes, impressions, memories, stories by doing so but then trying to analyze and systematize it ended up being a painful and somewhat confusing process. So I learned that sometimes there can be too many different answers to a limited set of questions. Some patterns may emerge but it may only be your own biases that make you see what is not there. But interpretations you make are very real in your mind. Piecing the information together to describe a big picture of the status of testing in the company through the eyes of testers took me a lot of energy and didn’t give much back.

It also made me think of how I chose the questions. I tried to cover a vast spectrum: understand the person’s history in testing, their knowledge and habits in testing, evolution of testing in this company through their eyes, problems and issues they see, changes they hope for, etc. Looking back, I’d still talk to every single person but be more careful and selective in the questions. I could easily come up with a convincing rationalization why I needed each and every one of those questions, what kind of information they would yield and why I deed this information… My mind is really great at such things. However, excess of stories will make the load heavier than it needs to be. This takes energy and it’s difficult to get it back.

As a systems thinker, I’d been noticing signs of barriers between people. Detecting barriers in an invisible system of people in an organization and off the org chart goes like this: you run face first into something, scream in pain, curse and cuss, and try to determine the culprit. It’s just that you can’t see it but can trace your fingers across air and lightly touch… something. Imagine navigating a glass labyrinth where there are people almost within your reach, only to brush your fingertips against the glass. Some cold drafts sweep past you. Eventually you determine that the actual office layout has an uncanny similarity to the labyrinth. Why, both have glass walls through which you can see people but not interact with them very well. So you turn your back to others and mind your own business with the people next to you. Observing this is emotionally taxing and takes energy that I can’t get back.

So I sketched the organization on paper to visualize issues, and discussed it with some people. In addition to all the other things on my plate, I started trying different things to see what could increases osmosis…

More on that in the future. I’m starting to ramble and wax lyrical about glass walls. That ain’t gonna give me the energy back.