A while ago, I called for some participation on the state of our craft. I promised back then to present some intermediate answers in late January. Here they are.
Responses from the programmer and tester surveys
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Category Archives: Leadership
Some surveys on the state of our craft
One of my colleagues made a claim yesterday which I would viagra to put some numbers on. I raised the question on twitter, and received suspicious answers about the numbers of my colleague. Please forward this survey to anyone you know who is programming: http://www.shino.de/programmer-survey/ It consist of just four question, so you should be able to answer them in a few minutes.
Over twitter I also received the feedback that things are worse for testers. I would like to put numbers on that as well. Therefore I also put up an equally small survey for tester: http://www.shino.de/tester-survey/ Please forward this survey to anyone in the software business that you know of.
From time to time to I will publish some of the results. I aim for end of January for the first set of data.
Complexity Thinking and the MOI(J) Model
Last year I started to dive into the theory behind complexity thinking. What puzzled me ever since is the relationship between complexity thinking and the stuff that I learned from Jerry Weinberg. One sleepless night I stood up from bed, and searched my material from the PSL course. There I learned about a model that helps me leading people in different ways. While thinking over it, it occurred to me, that complexity thinking is a small subset of the MOI(J) model. Follow me on my mind-journey.
“Say, how many books did you read this year?”
At the beginning of November I attended a conference together with my boss Henning Wolf. While flying back to Hamburg, waiting for our plane, we talked about things, and I mentioned some lessons from a book that I was reading at that time. “Say, how many books do you read within a year?” he asked. I couldn’t answer that question directly, as keeping in mind that this was my seventeenth book would distract me from reading the content. So, I looked it up, and was amazed.
I am sure, I do not exceed the number of books that for example Michael Larsen read this year, but I was still amazed about the number – having estimated it at about ten or twelve. I decided to visit back the books I read, and see which lessons stayed current even after having read them. This list is based upon my notes over at Library Thing, where I looked up which books I finished this year. Some of them I started back in 2010. Some of them are also in German. some have an English translation, others don’t. Maybe time learning some German for some of my readers. :)
Lessons from complexity thinking
While Diana Larsen was in Germany in July she spoke about a course she was currently taking called Human Systems Dynamics. Since then some of my colleagues started to dive into it. So did I. I didn’t take the course, but decided to go for some of the books on it. The first one I came across is called Facilitating Organization Change – Lessons from complexity science, and deals with a lot of stuff on complexity science, self-organization, and how to introduce changes in a complex adaptive system (CAS). These are some of my first thoughts after finishing the book.
Computer Programming Fundamentals
Today, I finished reading a rather old book. It was published in 1961. It’s about computer programming. So, what can you learn from a 50 year old book? While reading it, I got in touch with one of its authors, Jerry Weinberg. He seemed pretty astonished that even after 50 years someone was still reading one of his earlier works. Besides the fact that the book Computer Programming Fundamentals by Leeds and Weinberg was one of the first books to mention software testing at all, I got many more nuggets of wisdom out of it – astoundingly still valid, even half a century later. I decided to share my insights with others.
An experiment on Quality and Time
Having recently finished The Gift of Time, a gift written by 15 authors for Jerry Weinberg‘s 75th birthday in 2009, and a present from Michael Bolton when I met him for the first time in 2010, I am inspired by a thought experiment based on two chapters in that book.
The first one is the one from Michael Bolton himself where he defines the Relative Rule:
A description of something intagible as “X” really means “X to some person, at some time”.
The other chapter is from Bent Adsersen on “Time – and how to get it”. I have written before on Michael Bolton’s Relative Rule here. Bent adds a new perspective on the time factor to it. So, I will start with that.
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CAST 2011: Context-driven leadership
On my final day at CAST 2011 I attended James Bach‘s tutorial on context-driven leadership. He challenged us to challenge the principles of the context-driven school of testing, since he became nervous that no one did that in the past decade. This is my write-up of that challenge as a follow-up.
EuroPLoP from a first-timers perspective
Last week I had the pleasure to attend EuroPLoP. I submitted a pattern that I started back on October 1st at the inaugrual AA-FTT pattern writing workshop. Back then I called it Essential Examples, whilst through several round of shepherding and workshops I ended up with the name One clear purpose currently.
From the conference, I had several impressions as well as some insights which I would love to have gotten earlier. I decided to write these down for the next first-timers in the future to consider – even before submitting a pattern in first place.
Problem-solving leadership May 2011
During the past week I had the pleasure to attend the Problem-solving Leadership course in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Johanna Rothman, Esther Derby, and Jerry Weinberg led through the course, generating some insights from their more than 100 years of professional experience. Here are some ideas I would like to share hoping to motivate some of my readers to attend the course as well – I heard there were some places in the August course left.