That Good Morning Cup, by Wespionage on Flickr

I once worked for a manager who did a great job of smiling and saying ‘Hello’ to his employees every morning. He then spent most of his time in meetings during the rest of the day… he was a manager after all, and managers are busy people.

When he was available for his employees, he enjoyed having discussions with his senior staff members to make decisions, decide on new directions, and figure out how to handle challenges.

Sounds like a great person to work for! … Right?

Perhaps so…

… But perhaps only if you paid attention to WHAT they were doing…

… and not HOW they were doing these things.

For instance, you might begin to notice that while your manager made the rounds saying ‘Hello’ every morning, their tone of voice and the words used changed depending on whom he was speaking to.  You might even begin to notice a trend amongst your fellow colleagues in those differences (but what does it all mean?!).

Now let’s say you were one of the fortunate few to be a senior staff member to this manager.  Wouldn’t that be cool?!  To be on the inside track, working closely with your manager to set the direction of your team / department, and getting opportunities to take on more responsibilities.

That sounds like fun to me!

The opportunity would become less fun as you begin to notice that your ideas are rarely considered or used for making decisions or improving the team.   Now you are beginning to wonder what is going on… your ideas and perspectives have been highly regarded by others in the organization.

So what gives?  Why isn’t your manager respecting your ideas or supporting you?  Is this happening to everybody?

Upon further observation, you find that this manager does in fact appear to take ideas from a couple of your peers.  But wait a minute, those peers are just reframing something that your manager said!  They are repackaging his comments to simply agree with what he wants to have happen.

Your manager doesn’t want new ideas, or someone challenging his (obviously perfect) ideas.

Your manager wants ‘Yes’ Men!

People who will agree with what he says and not challenge his ideas.

Aha!  That explains why your ideas are rarely considered or used – you don’t blindly agree to whatever is thrown on the table because a particular somebody said it.

Thinking back to those morning greetings, you realize that the ‘Yes’ Men on the team get meaningful interactions with your manager in the morning… and the people who aren’t?  They are getting a syrupy-sweet-so-you-can’t-actually-complain-about-me-fake greeting that lasts all of one second.

Moreover, you realize that your manager thrives on a dictatorship.  He is happy when he tells people what to do, and they do it.  He supports the senior staff who continue that behaviour with other team members.    So, opportunities on the team for growth and advancement are only given to those ‘Yes’ Men.

Not so nice anymore, is it?

This type of person does exist!

I did in fact work for someone like this after a good manager left.  I ended up leaving the team when I pieced together what was going on.  To say the least, it was a toxic environment, and I stayed in it much too long.

I learned a lot from that experience though, such as:

• Recognizing when I am working with someone like this
• Understanding myself and my own limits better
• How to view painful experiences as valuable learning opportunities
• When to try to work past differences with other people, and when to move on
• How NOT to behave if I wanted to be a good (or even great) manager

On the Flip Side

I did have a manager who did all the things I described in the first two paragraphs who was very sincere in their discussions and greetings, who truly valued their employee’s input, collaborated often to make decisions and generate ideas, and empowered their team to be responsible, creative, hard-working, and have fun.   Paying attention to HOW she behaved, not just WHAT she did, made this obvious.

I have even been this positive manager myself over a number of years in managing teams… but more on that in another entry.

Now, I would like to hear from you!

Have you worked with or for someone who is a dictator-type who thrives on working with ‘Yes’ Men?  What has your experience been like?  Were you able to find a way to work with them, or to deter their behaviours?

Please share your stories!

Finding important, messy, and hard-to-nail-down bugs is easier than by using the old blindly-run-test-cases-anyone-at-all-could-do-because-little-thinking-goes-on variety.  I personally thrive in being able to use my experiences, curiousity, a variety of test techniques, and brain power to test software (see more in my recent post Be An Explorer!).

Moving into using session-based exploratory testing to help manage testing across a team and provide metrics to management was easy for me.  It was straightforward to write charters that were not so specific as to be test cases, but also not so generic that they were not helpful.  I was able to quickly write a charter that identified the mission and goal of a test session with appropriate depth and breadth.

In working with many dozens of testers over the years, I discovered that creating appropriate charters was not easy for many of them.

Many ‘charters’ I saw were a test-case in disguise, and in some cases, a really bad one that you could see right through to the meat-and-bones of it.  I wondered if these testers did not have the right mindset to be able to understand what made a charter different from a test case.  Or maybe they weren’t given the coaching they needed to be able to write a good charter.  Or maybe something else entirely.

Other ‘charters’ I came across were akin to a movie title or headline, like ‘User Phone Home’, ‘Save The File’, or ‘When Files Go Bad’.  Sure, these ‘charters’ could be appropriate in some situation, but they leave something to be desired in communicating the mission of a test session.

What should a Charter look like?

James Bach says that Charters:

Are intended to communicate the mission of a test session clearly and succinctly to testers who have already been trained in the expectations, vocabulary, techniques and tools used by the organization. Remember, in ET we make maximum use of skill, rather than attempting to represent every action in written form.

Elaborating and combining with my own experiences, the basic questions a charter is likely to address are:

• Where do you want to go?
• What do you want to learn about?
• What should you use to get there?

I recently worked with a group of testers in a workshop to practice different testing skills, paired testing, and in writing test charters and session notes.  Day-to-day, many of the testers were writing test cases instead of charters, which was in opposition to their work environment.  So one key objective for the workshop was to help them learn how to write appropriate charters that clearly communicated the mission of a test session.

Participants finished with a brainstorming session to identify what constitutes a good charter – results are included below.  The applicability of some attributes will depend on the skill and experience level of the tester, so consider your context and what fits for you.

Attributes of a Great Test Session Charter:

• Defines objective, a clear purpose
• Identifies the area of focus
• Identifies general scope of the test coverage intended (features, test approaches, depth of testing)
• May provide guidance on what to look for (if someone else will test the session, and is inexperienced)
• Uses language that encourages exploring!
• It is clear, concise, accurate, and to the point
• It is generic and non-precise in the domain of the focus area (NOT a specific test case – it wouldn’t be exploratory testing then!)
• May associate application under test with another similar application (as an oracle – this is helpful if application very new, and there is little information available about how it should work).
• Contains NO mention of expected results
• Does NOT direct the testing that should occur, or identify what the tester should or should not find
• Generalized, leave open to interpretation to who is running it (don’t assume who will test it)
• Provide guidance for things to look out for
• Bullets not numbered lists (if you are going to use them)
• Consider though that lists may be limiting for people (not mind expanding)
• Examples can be helpful if generic enough, helps guide and think of other ideas
• Be careful of being too generic!  Don’t want to necessarily create a charter that can be applied to anything
• All depends on context – whether people are experienced or not, whether you have information or not, etc..

What do you think?

Is it helpful to apply these types of attributes to help people create better test charters?  Are there any that you would add, or some you would take off the list?  Or, do you think that the writing of charters themselves is limiting and unhelpful?

I would love to hear from you about this!

For some it is a passion, and the only way to do testing critically, skillfully, and effectively.  It is an opportunity to use your brain, not only in day-to-day life, but also at work (imagine!).  …To be paid for questioning and thinking, not to blindly do what someone else said should be done.  …To feel alive!

After being introduced to exploratory testing by Michael Bolton several years ago, I never looked back.  It supported all the feelings I had about the dire write-tests-run-tests-ho-hum-drudgery I found myself in early in my career in testing software.

In those days I believed there was a better way to do testing, and so I did it amongst the management-mandated ‘test plans’ (word documents with lists of test cases to be executed).  I explored the software, aiming to find the next bug all on my own, using my wits and smarts.

I never knew that others were doing this too.  I never knew that other people were alive on the high of being software detectives just as I was; that they were hunting down the elusive bugs that everyone knew existed, but only a small few could find.

I especially did not know that people like James Bach and Michael Bolton had put a name to the testing I enjoyed – Exploratory Testing.  How wonderful it was to discover that a revolution was afoot!

I was even more excited when I discovered that James had created something called Session-Based Test Management (SBTM) to help manage the exploratory testing that people did for a project. Wow!  It was exactly what I needed at the time to take exploratory testing into the main stream in my department.  It created an opportunity to work with team members to more formally and effectively coach on and track the work we were doing and the coverage we were obtaining.  It was just enough data collection to satisfy management, yet not so much that it was seen as unruly overhead for the testers.

In the years since, I have moved away from doing a lot of hands-on testing myself.

Instead I have enabled dozens of people to become skilled testers, and transitioned several departments over to using exploratory testing (for small projects through to large programs).

I have found ways to meld the management of exploratory testing into uber-SBTM spreadsheets, home-grown applications created by co-op students, small test management applications, and even popular large scale test management programs.

I have continued to coach and teach testers to think, to be critical, to question, to become skilled at a variety of test techniques, and to find passion in their work (or find it elsewhere!).  And I have learned so much from each of these people along the way.

I did all this by working and collaborating extensively with a number of equally passionate, skilled, questioning, and thinking testers.  I feel privileged to have worked with so many talented people.

While I love the work that I have done, and am doing now, I admit that I sometimes miss the thrill of the hunt.

• I miss tracking the scent of a bug, and the thrill of a capture.
• I miss solving the riddles of elusive bugs that are so challenging to locate that it takes a collaboration of several people to figure it out.
• I miss the quiet satisfaction in unearthing a problem that is both disturbing and unexpected, where team members stand in awe of your accomplishment.
• Most of all, I miss the day-to-day collaboration and learning from other testers while working together on the latest and greatest software.

But I love what I do, and I am passionate about my work.  I am an explorer by nature, yet there are more technically capable testers out there than I.  So instead, I am fortunate in being able to enable their abilities as skilled, thinking, exploring, questioning, passionate testers.

So now I ask you….  Are you a software explorer yet?    If not, what are you waiting for?!

How do you react when you are frustrated?

Calm and balanced?  Mean and spiteful? Do you drive your teammates bonkers? Or perhaps you run away and hide in a quiet place.

Whatever your reaction, you are not alone!

Everyone has some reaction to being frustrated, and you may discover that people with similar personality types have a tendency to react just like you.

So, as someone who gets frustrated, what do you do?  How do you want other people to interact with you?

Communication Workshop #1, Part 2

… Exploring Personality Types and Communication Preferences

In a workshop I recently facilitated, participants explored how they handled themselves and interactions with others when they were frustrated.  After dividing into temperament groups, they discussed and reflected on two different questions:

• How do you react when you are frustrated?
• How do you want other people to interact with you when you are frustrated?

SJ Temperament

Participants with an SJ temperament agreed that they tend to be organizers and stabilizers.  They believe that long hard work will lead to success, and that organizations should run on facts.  SJ’s like accuracy, order, discipline, and data – sometimes to the extreme.

The SJ group in the workshop discovered some interesting correlations when discussing the questions posed, and found that they sought information and analysis when stressed, just as they would under normal circumstances.

If you know someone who is an SJ, or want to pinpoint who might be an SJ, when they are stressed you may see behaviours like:

• “Holy Crap!”
• Sitting down to assess the situation, including what went wrong, and collecting readily available data.
• Checking assumptions, and searching for the root cause:
  • If they find a root cause, they will let you know what’s going on
  • If they don’t find one, they will ask for help

When you have come upon a stressed SJ, be sure to give them some space and time to think.  They will ask for help when they need it.  If you do decide to approach them, make sure you bring them data to work with that will help their current predicament.

SP Temperament

People with an SP temperament are often mediators and trouble-shooters.  They focus on the present moment, are strong in crisis management, and are action-oriented.  They may seem to be careless due to limited planning, but are simply just focused on doing what’s necessary for the current need.

In the workshop, the SP participants discovered that they sought fun and immediate action when stressed, and tended towards fire-fighting in resolving problems.

If you know someone who is an SP, or want to pinpoint who might be an SP, you may find that when they are stressed they:

• React immediately, and will do something (anything) over doing nothing
• Try to find the positive in every situation
• Will not keep things inside
• Shift focus to the most important thing at hand

When you have come upon a stressed SP, don’t waste their time with unimportant things.  They don’t want meetings to address an issue.  To help them become less stressed, only go to them with the right solution… and when a solution is identified, just go for it!

NT Temperament

Those with an NT temperament tend to be visionaries and strategists.  They are creative, and appreciate intellectual skill and critical analysis.  They want organizations to grow and develop, but may seem to take contributions for granted.

There were a lot of NT’s in the workshop, and in true ‘thinker’ style spent a lot more time than other groups discussing the questions posed.  They agreed that when stressed they all tend to have a long fuse, but can become pretty harsh with other people when that fuse is being used up.

If you know someone who is an NT, or want to pinpoint who might be an NT, you may find that when they are stressed they:

• Need alone time to calm down
• Are argumentative, stubborn, and blunt
• Can be sarcastic, cruel, and cold
• Will say things like “That’s not fair!”
• Are irritable, annoyed, and ill-tempered
• Will vent to someone trusted

When you have come upon a stressed NT, you are better off leaving them alone until they have been able to calm down.  Let them finish their task on their own, and if necessary, send them an email so they can respond and follow up with you later.  Otherwise, a beer out with trusted colleagues or friends will help them relieve stress quite effectively.

NF Temperament

The participants with an NF temperament agreed that they can often be the diplomats, team-builders, and catalysts for change.  They are supportive, value the development of people, and believe that the potential of the people are the strength of the organization.  They often take on more than they can handle though, and can seem to be overly emotional and not focused on obtaining concrete results.

In the workshop, the NF people discovered that when stressed they all tended towards thinking and feeling, either about themselves, or others they are interacting with.

If you know someone who is an NF, or want to pinpoint who might be an NF, you may find that when they are stressed they:

• Need time to be quiet & alone
• May lean towards distractions, and take on something new that feels productive
• Will vent to someone trusted
• Can appear short tempered.  They have a long fuse though, but when really pushed beyond their limit, you better watch out!

When you have come upon a stressed NF, your best approach with them will be to establish a personal connection.  Ask them how they are doing, listen to them, do not dismiss their feelings, and provide reassurance.  Don’t force them into a conversation though… if they are not receptive, send them an email so they can follow up with you if, and when, they are ready.

Awareness

The signs of frustration for different personality temperaments aren’t absolutes for every one you meet.  Each individual will have their own unique reactions and preferences for interacting with others when stressed.  I hope that the summaries above help start you on that path to understanding.

Become more aware of the people you work and engage with, particularly in their communication styles and behaviour patterns. Awareness and choosing to interact consciously with others to the benefit of both parties will improve relationships and the effectiveness of individuals, teams, and organizations.

To start to develop self-awareness in your own styles and behaviours, consider:

• How do you internalize stress?
• What behaviours do you exhibit when stressed that others see?
• How can you effectively relieve stress, or simply work effectively with other people when you are stressed?

Next Up

The next entry in my Communication Series will look at congruent and incongruent communication patterns, how to identify them, and what you can do to help make the most of them. Stay tuned!

Are you new to Myers-Briggs?    To learn more, visit the Myers & Briggs Foundation, or check out Myers-Briggs on Wikipedia.

Perimeter Institute, Photo: Marc Cramer

I live in Ontario, Canada, about an hour west of Toronto, in the wonderful city of Waterloo. If you haven’t heard of it yet, you should read about it. Our region is known as Canada’s Technology Triangle, aka the Silicon Valley of Canada. We have loads of technology companies and start-ups. There are hundreds of job openings for tech people. Seriously, what are you waiting for?

In Waterloo at this time of year we usually have several inches of snow and an average temperature of about 0 degrees Celcius. Not this year.

On November 22 in Waterloo it was 10 degrees Celcius. The sun was shining, and the air was warm. Kids were outside playing ball hockey in the street in their t-shirts, while parents were outside putting up holiday decorations.

Really!

Up and down the street people were taking advantage of the beautiful weather to put up their decorations. So, while it was earlier than we typically put ours up, we followed suit. We weren’t going to pass up the chance to put them up when it wasn’t snowing and -10 C (cause that’s when we usually do it). For all we knew, it would be -10 C the next day and we would have a foot of snow. Our weather is quite unpredictable sometimes.

While we were outside, I noticed that we had weeds in our garden to be pulled. Again. With a sigh, I resigned myself to finally getting the rest of them out, or from the front and side gardens at the least. I had hoped we had finished pulling them a couple months ago, but the darn things kept popping up.

So, on a balmy November 22, we put up holiday lights and decorations, AND weeded the gardens. Quite unusual.

Before: A Weedy Yard

Last fall we decided to get our property landscaped. Prior to the landscaping, we had what I liked to refer to as a ‘weed farm’. No matter what we did, all we had was weeds. Oh, and a swamp in the backyard, thanks to the builder putting our backyard right over top of a natural pond. Yuck.

So, we had the friendly landscapers come in and overhaul our entire property. It was worth it. We now have a usable backyard, no grass to cut in front of our house, and some nice natural stones down the side of the house into our backyard. The cherry on top was that we were assured they took care of things so all those pesky weeds would not come back.

The following summer we found out how wrong they were.

We spent the better part of our summer pulling weeds on the very few sunny days we had this year. It was one of the rainiest and cloudiest summers we’ve had in memory – which of course the weeds flourished in. While pulling those suckers out, we did our best to pull them out completely.

The thing about weeds is that if you don’t get every last piece of them, they will grow back. So the tiniest little piece of root somehow manages to grow itself into a big annoying weed that invades your gardens and lawn.

Weeds are strong. The roots cleverly manipulate themselves deep into the soil, around the roots of plants you want to keep, and sometimes traverse several feet underground. While pulling a weed out, often just the top green portion will come out. If you’re lucky you might get a couple inches of root too. It’s very difficult to get the entire root, and when you don’t, you likely don’t have the patience to try and get it.

Then it grows back so you can try and pick it out again in a couple of weeks. It’s a vicious cycle.

While I was pulling weeds last weekend, I wondered how many times I had tried to pick those very ones out in their entirety and had failed. How many times had I tried to remove the roots, and ended up only removing the visible parts of the intruder? How often did I lose patience or give up just because removing the entire root was really challenging? And now I was paying the price, sinking more time and frustration into trying to fix the problem.

Bemused, I thought to myself…

In life, how often do we take time to really understand problems that we encounter? At work, how often do we exhibit the patience necessary to navigate an issue to determine the root of the problem? It is so easy to get caught up in trying to fix the visible symptoms to a problem, because working with the actual problem is too challenging.

I see and experience this often.

When it comes to software bugs, some people tend to put in a quick-fix to address them, without ever understanding the root cause. That rarely helps. The problem does come back, though perhaps with different symptoms. In the end, fixing the issue costs many times more than what it would have if the time had been taken to understand and fix it properly the first time.

A lot of other problems occur in organizations too, such as unhappy customers, process adherence issues, unhappy employees, and poor relationships. Many of these are symptoms of a people problem, but rarely is the necessary time invested to learn what that problem really is. Sadly, even when it is understood, the actual problem is often not addressed.

What do you do when you encounter problems?

• Do you take the time to understand the root cause?
• Do you address symptoms, or the root cause(s) of a problem?
• Do you know if you are working to fix all of the root problems? Remember sometimes the root gets tangled up in other matter and can be tricky to extract.
• Do you follow the root along to the very tip? Roots can travel a fair distance from the symptom, so may not even seem to be related when it is.
• Do you put in the time and care needed to help remove a problem, or do you try to quickly eradicate it? The quick approach may mean that the root cause is still lurking, and will need to be revisited again in the future.

I resolved to do better as I continued my weeding.

After: Weed Free!

I went a little slower as I worked on each weed, carefully digging around them to loosen them up and pull the entire root out with it. I treated them as if they were a plant that I loved and wanted to transplant. That actually worked! Whole root systems were coming out with the visible leafy greens.

A couple of hours later, I was done the front and side yards and called it a day. I admit that I wasn’t able to succeed with every one I faced down, but I did collect a yard waste bag full of weeds that would never see the light of day again. And for a good percentage of them, I did address the root of the problem.

After a workshop a few weeks ago I asked what they would like they next topic to be.  Based on recent 1:1 discussions, I expected something on technical skills, but to my surprise, everyone requested communication!

They wanted to learn how to have more effective conversations, handle frustrating situations, and simply communicate better with their team members.

After a couple weeks of cancelled workshops (the flu, and a week away at AYE kept me from the office) I was finally able to hold the first of a workshop series on communication.

Communication Workshop #1

… Introduction to Personality Types and Communication Preferences

My goal for the first workshop was to introduce the Myers-Briggs personality types, look at some type differences, and have participants discuss and collaborate in particular activities relating to types.

Prior to the workshop, participants completed a free online Myers-Briggs Type Indicator test. If you are interested in taking one, try either: http://www.humanmetrics.com/cgi-win/JTypes2.asp, http://www.personalitytest.net/cgi-bin/q.pl. They may not be as accurate as one administered by a trained professional, but have been fairly reliable in my experience.

Myers-Briggs Basics

In the workshop I provided an introductory summary of the Myers-Briggs type preferences and temperaments. I have spent a lot of time learning and reading about Myers-Briggs types over the last five years (and thank the AYE hosts for a lot of that); while I’m not an ‘expert’, I am comfortable introducing and discussing Myers-Briggs concepts.

At a high level, MBTI is used to identify basic preferences of each of four dichotomies. These dichotomies are:

• Orientation of Energy: Do you gain energy from external (E – extraversion) sources, or from within yourself / internal (I – introversion)?
• Information: Do you gather information from facts and details (S – sensing), or by understanding the big picture / gut feels (N – intuition)?
• Decisions: Do you first look at logic and principles to make decisions (T – thinking), or based on the needs and values of the people involved (F – feeling)?
• Structure: When dealing with the outer world, do you prefer to have everything settled and organized (J – judging), or have things open ended and flexible (P – perceiving)?

“Personality type is what you prefer when you are using your mind or focusing your attention.” – Myers Briggs Foundation.

Your personality type is your preferred way of interacting and responding. It is not an indicator of your skills, abilities, or destiny. For example, just as you might eat chocolate cake when you prefer cheesecake, you might make decisions based on logic when you prefer to make decisions based on the people involved.

Learning about your type will help you better understand yourself, the strengths & challenges for both yourself and others, how your preferences are different from those of other people, and how to improve communication with others.

Temperaments

The next concept discussed was Temperaments, the four categories that encompass the 16 different Myers-Briggs personality types. The four different temperaments (from What Type Am I, by Renee Baron) are:

• SJ (sensing-judging): Duty Seekers - Motivated by a need to be responsible in whatever social group (work, community, family) they are in, they value tradition. In work, they focus on the hierarchy of the organization.
• SP (sensing-perceiving): Action Seekers - Motivated by a need for freedom and a need to act, they value living in the moment. In work, they focus on the expedient needs of the organization.
• NT (intuition-thinking): Knowledge Seekers – Motivated by a need for knowledge & competency, they value the theoretical and the powers of the mind. In work, they focus on the mission & systems of the organization.
• NF (intuition-feeling): Ideal Seekers – Motivated by a need to understand themselves & others, they value authenticity & integrity and strive for an ideal world. In work, they focus on the growth needs of the organization.

Type Mapping

In the first workshop activity everyone added their name to a chart to map out the personality types of the participants. Everyone found it quite interesting to see who had the same type, who was similiar, and who was quite different.  People were intrigued, even those who were not particularly interested in this ‘hokey-pokey’ stuff.

At a glance, without even understanding the basics provided above, it affirmed some dynamics in relationships and interactions amongst the participants.

Also intriguing was that the chart showed what my own hiring preferences were.   It turned out that more than 90% of the people I hired were of NF and NT temperament.  It seems I don’t hire in people with different preferences as much as I had thought.

This exercise was a good reminder to be more aware in the interview process, so as not to subconsciously reject people with SP and SJ tendencies. I hope I didn’t offend anyone (says my own NF temperament)!

Next Up

In my next entry, I will share highlights of the collaborative exercises completed in the workshop. Participants were divided into temperament groups to learn more about their temperament (based on information I provided), and explore three different questions:

• Which role or job function in the company would your temperament be best suited for?
• As a temperament group, how do you react when you are frustrated?
• As a temperament group, how do you want other people to interact with you when you are frustrated?

I look forward to sharing that with you soon!

See Communication Series Part 2!

Are you new to Myers-Briggs?    To learn more, visit the Myers & Briggs Foundation, or check out Myers-Briggs on Wikipedia.

It was beneficial as I was able to help employees learn new concepts and improve skills,  in a manner that fit for them.  The added bonus for me was that I learned something new from them as well.  What powerful experiences those were!

Now, as a manager for 18 testers who are spread across several different agile teams, I find it difficult, if not impossible, to coach testing skills one-on-one.  On a weekly basis I also spend time coaching the agile teams, management-level initiatives to improve company-wide practices, and the usual management administration.  Such is life in a ’start-up’ type of company.  As a result, my one-on-one time with each person is limited to 30-60 minutes over two weeks.  This seems a miniscule amount given they are working a minimum of 80 hours in that same time period!

I am someone who is motivated and energized in working with others to learn new skills, to understand and be able to apply new skills appropriately, and to have those ‘light bulb’ moments where things just click.  Given my work situation, I have been frustrated with how little I have been able to do this.  This left me with a problem!

How can I increase the amount of coaching and teaching time each individual is receiving?

Solutions:

• Forget about it: Nope! I’m too invested in helping others learn and grow.
• Clone myself: Not feasible, as in I don’t know how, and it is kind of icky to think about.
• Shift responsibilities to other people: The possible people to offload to are just as overloaded as me.
• Find additional ways to teach and coach skills so each individual gets more opportunities to learn and improve: There are lots of ways to do this!  I just need to invest some more time to create these opportunities.  Some possibilities:
  • Coach a smaller group, and have them coach small subsets of the larger group.
  • Direct them to other people who I trust will coach them appropriately.
  • Move our 1:1’s to their work space & turn it into a paired testing session.
  • Create workshops where they can learn and practice skills.
  • Coach other people to create workshops where they can learn and practice skills.

What I’m Doing:

Ongoing learning and growth are important to me.  Happily, I discovered that they are important to my department as well.  They requested regularly scheduled workshops/training sessions to be reinstated after being cancelled during the agile training the entire engineering organization went through over the summer.  They missed them!  They missed the learning, new perspectives, and much needed ‘down time’ at work.

So, regular department workshops / training sessions were reinstated on a biweekly basis.  We are currently shifting to make them weekly.

Our first workshop back was a brainstorming session to come up with a list of loosely prioritized workshops the team members would like to have provided.   They came up with a lot of great topics, which we are adding to on an ongoing basis, and are adapting priorities as needed.

The workshops we are doing are typically 2 hours long, and are created by myself or a team member, and contain both teaching of concepts, and time to explore, practice and apply concepts.  We customize workshop focus and content based on the people involved, what they want to learn about, and their current knowledge-base and skill sets.  A blend of ‘teaching’ time and ‘experience’ time are proving vital to help people go back to their day-to-day work and integrate new learnings – which when applied to hands-on work become new-found skills when they invest time in practicing them.

The workshops also allow me to engage with everyone both as a group and individually, and determine how I can add more value for them when we have our regular one-on-one conversations.

Final Thoughts:

I am not yet satisfied with the amount of coaching and teaching I am able to provide to each individual. However, I am happy with the progress I am making in increasing the amount of learning opportunities they are getting from me.  These workshops have allowed me to stretch the limited time I have to teach, coach, and add more value for all of my department members.   This is an improvement, and a step forward to incorporating other learning opportunities for my department.

I plan to share some of the workshop experiences in future blog entries, so keep an eye out for those!

On Teaching Software Testing:

My thoughts on this have been bouncing around in my head for a while – how can we improve on how testing skills are taught?  What is the best way to teach and coach them?

For myself, there are things I am doing now which are helpful, but there is so much more I would like to do, and I’m sure could be doing that I haven’t considered yet.  I know I am not the only person in that position.  So where do we begin?

Matthew Heusser recently blogged on this very topic.  He invited people to comment on what types of teaching and training are wanted by organizations for their employees, and what would be most effective for the employees.   I added my comments to that entry, alongside some brilliant thinkers in this field.  Thank you to Matt for starting a great conversation thread!  You can read it at http://blogs.stpcollaborative.com/matt/2009/11/18/you-say-you-want-a-revolution/.

Your turn!

What are your experiences and thoughts on how to coach and teach software testing skills?  As a coach/teacher/trainer, what have you done to do this when you have had little time to do it well?  As a tester, how do you want to be coached and taught – what would be most effective for you?

I welcome your comments, and encourage you to share them both here and on Matthew’s blog.