Flow for Managers

There's no such a thing as a universal way to do your job and not let it kill you.

To achieve the best results some professions need to work in a flow, and some -- in a quick succession of tense-release phases. And, among other things, 'the result' is assessed by how much better your life has become (or maybe it took a turn for the worse).

It looks like Pomodoro-like techniques are best for managers who are forced to operate in a quickly changing environment, while flow is necessary for engineers and researchers.

The major three - On the importance of smiling

You lot, you spend all your time thinking about dying, like you're going to get killed by eggs or beef or global warming or asteroids. But you never take time to imagine the impossible, that maybe you survive. This is the year five point five slash apple slash twenty six. Doctor Who, IX (quoted by Internet transcript)


In my experience, probably the most popular reason of a conflict is when someone (apparently unaware of what's important and what's not, or, worse, having his or her own opinion about the matter) tries to push their agenda, thus putting your interests in danger. That's what missionary's complex feels and looks like.

I don't know why (and probably the origin is not that important here, unless we regard a problem from neuropsychophysiological point of view) people (we) sometimes tend to feel their (our) job as a kind of a mission. It may be good when we want a good motivation. It is not that good when we need a team to function harmoniously. Meaning, if not altogether without a conflict, but at least without coming to a halt due to unresolvable contradictions between its members.

Are you sure it's your job that you hate

It is important and popular fact that things are not always what they seem
Hitchhicker's Guide to the Galaxy, the movie

Years of employment kind of proved that one's attitude to their job is not necessarily connected with an objective quality of that job. After working for many years as an employee myself, and after talking to the other employees, I was surprised to discover that the job is almost never an evil in itself, but is often treated as an underdog that can't say anything in it's defense. 

Probably it is so because its advocates are managers, and who trusts managers? Right. Even managers don't trust managers. (Seriousely though, managers are not bad because they are managers, this problem of trust comes from the difference of understanding and a long history of miscommunication that exists between different social groups).

This is not an article on phychology (and I'm not a professional psychologist), but being familiar with such notions as psychological defences and rationalization as a special case of it may be of help. To say it plainly, these defences came to life with the best of intentions, and as many other originally good things got a bit rogue in a course of time. And, in attempt to keep you safe, integral and unfamiliar with pain, they may slightly distort your view of yourself, your priorities and your life. Thus preventing you from being able to get to the root cause and fix it, and hurting you on the way.

So here are some of my favorite job-related biases and the reasons behind them as I see it.

Troubleshooting checklist

Anybody, who is facing a necessity to troubleshoot, hopes for a miracle. 

For something like closing your eyes and seeing the problem just solving itself without much fuss or explanation, when you open them. We all know this feeling. We all know it almost never works this way, because there is no such a thing as a miracle. 

But there are causes and effects instead. And some brain energy is required to make sense of what you see and to get out of the entanglement. And that brain energy is something that is taken for granted but is not that available.

Those little gray cells

Brainwork is something we think is always there and always will be. You probably no longer believe that storks bring children[1], but for some reason you are sure that your brain is a kind of perpetuum mobile which functions under any condition and knows nothing about sabotage.

That's a lie. It does. And a good (really boring but really good) book[2] by Daniel Kahnneman reminds you a good number of times that the rational, non-automatic, weighing part of your mind is lazy (which is where Kahneman ends and general phycology begins) and being lazy means that your resource is far from enough.

What if test certification systems put us in a box to think inside it?

With vertical thinking one uses the negative in order to block of certain pathways. With lateral thinking there is no negative.
Edward de Bono, Lateral Thinking

Sometimes I get those anarchistic ideas that may, if voiced at inappropriate moment, seriously damage your reputation, unless you put them in a nice colored gift package of justification and proof. And though some may see this as creating a Pandora box, at the bottom there is always hope of finding an important clue or even leading yourself out of the dead end.

Today's one is the following. Let's say we limit access to any exams or certification systems for any tester with relevant hands-on experience under 2 or 3 years? The same way they do for MBA or certain levels of trainings for the system administrators? Mind you, not information, or books, or trainings, but certification. Because I strongly believe there is a huge difference between critically reading a book and drilling something in order to check certain boxes in test. 

Even if you are fully conscious about the fact that your own opinion is different. Or (which is worse) if you have no opinion and take things on faith. Testing is an activity of the scientific type, not a religious practice, and we need to be extremely careful with faith and our ability to say what you think. Test practice proves that a good tester needs to be honest and courageous, because sometime this is exactly what makes the difference between true and false.

SoapUi, Groovy and the meaning of life

SoapUi is generally known as a tool for testing web services. Opinion divides on whether to call working with it a pleasure or a torture due to certain differences in professional background of those who gives that opinion. Personally, I believe that is it is a really good tool, but, unlike a washing machine, it needs its fantastic manual to be looked though at the very least: http://www.soapui.org/

Like many other IT tools SoapUi comes in two variants: paid and free of charge community edition. And on top of these two there are two ways of using it (which one you chose depends on your level of expertise). They are:
-- using it as any other UI-based tool
-- use it as extendible multi-purpose multi-tool with some UI for backward compatibility with the brains of normal users.
The latter will be discussed as a remedi against professional midlife crisis and the like.

Why meaning of life though? The thing is I see SoapUi and testing of web services as a great opportunity for those people who crave technical tasks, but can not get them either due to a limited skill with Java or because of all the tasty vacancies being filled in already. Practice proves that dissatisfaction with your job does not always result from shortcomings of your profession but from your lack of understanding what would make up for them. In other words, because you failed to identify the root cause of your dissatisfaction. Please note that it is assumed that the root cause is purely professional and not psychological (as psychological issues are out of scope for this post).

Testers biggest grudges

For some reasons testers are believed to be less important than developers. And the less important you are the less paid you get. Most popular justification is that testers are less skilled than developers. I think there is a kind of bias at work as there are more skilled and less skilled people in either profession. And higly skilled testers usually have experience with different areas of sowftware development domain including technical ones. And still testing is considered to be the second best profession compared with development.

Different factors play into it such as country specifics, company and product specifics, cultural specifics and so on, but for the limited scope of this post I will concentrate on the following:
-- history of an issue
-- specificities of test profession
-- specificities of testing mindset
-- professional evolution of a tester