Skip to main content

Talking Shop


It can be tempting to confuse training with learning, with skill acquisition, or with the ability to recognise situations in which training material could be used. Attending a workshop is, in general, unlikely to make you an expert in a thing, equip you to apply the thing in your real world context, or even necessarily make you aware that the thing could be applied. Attendees would do well to remember it (particularly when sending me a CV!) and their managers would do even better.

I'm an attendee and a manager: do I do better?

I hope so. In the test team at Linguamatics we spend our training budget on the same kinds of things that your teams probably do: books, conferences, courses, subscriptions, workshops and occasionally something different like an internal conference or escape room. Crucially, as both manager and attendee, I try hard not to mistake having and doing for knowing and being confident in practice.

It's important to me, as a manager, to participate in training and to demonstrate ways that I think it can be a productive experience: training shouldn't be something that's simply done to others. From the attendee side, training isn't about just turning up, listening up, and getting skilled up. Training, I've found, rewards a positive mindset and active participation rather than passive attention and the sense it has to be got over with.

Training is an opportunity to step outside the bunker and the usual mindset, to get exposed to new perspectives or tools or ways of working. It's a place to inspire, challenge, and compare notes. It's often a place to get a broad view of some field, rather than a deep one, and to identify things that might be useful to follow up on later.

Providing training sessions is one way that, as a company, we can show that we care about our employees, and making an effort with our training is one way that I can show that I care about my team mates. We organise in-house workshops for the whole team to do together, at work and inside regular working hours. These are the topics we've covered in the last five years:

  • Experimentation and Diagnosis: a workshop on design and interpretation of experiments (James Lyndsay)
  • Think on Your Feet: strategies for reporting, particularly when put on the spot (Illumine)
  • A Rapid Introduction to Rapid Software Testing: highlights from RST in one day (Michael Bolton)
  • Workplace Assertiveness: remaining calm and getting your point across whatever the situation (Soft Skills)
  • Web Testing 101: introduction to HTTP, REST, proxies, and related testing tools (Alan Richardson)

Quite apart from exposure to those topics, bringing training to work has other advantages. I don't underestimate the value of team-based exercises in building esprit de corps, encouraging collaboration, and promoting empathy through shared experience. I also want to be sensitive to my teams' personal situations where, for example, family commitments can make travel to outside events difficult.

From a practical perspective, whole-team training can be financially worthwhile; it tends to be lower cost per person than the same content at an external location, there's usually more opportunity to customise it, and questions about your specific context are easier to ask and have answered. It's also a convenient way for me to satisfy my personal goal of providing a training opportunity to everyone on the team every year.

But still there's the question of internalising the material, practising it, finding ways that it can work for an individual, team, and ultimately company. (Or finding that it doesn't.) Again, we probably do the same kinds of things that you do: those attending conferences might reinforce their learning and understanding by sharing aspects of their experience back to the team; those with subscriptions to resources like the Ministry of Testing Dojo often summarise articles or organise lunchtime video watching; as a team, after a workshop, we might each verbalise something that we felt was a valuable takeaway to the rest of the group.

Afterwards, taking the training into our own context can be challenging. When work needs to be done, it's not always easy to find time and opportunity to practice, particularly in a way in which it feels safe to fail or just take longer while unfamiliarity is worked through.  There's an often-quoted (and also widely-disputed) idea that 10000 hours of practice are required to become an expert in something. The truth of the claim doesn't matter much to me — I rarely need to be ninja level at anything — but my own experience dictates that without any practice there's little likelihood of any improvement.

I try to pick an aspect of the training that I think could be valuable to me and apply it pretty much everywhere there is a chance to. This way I learn about the tool or approach, my aptitude for it, my reaction to it, the applicability of it in different contexts, and its inapplicability in different contexts. I wrote about eagerly using the Express-Listen-Field loop in conversations after our assertiveness training last. This year, after Alan Richardson's training, I focused on making bookmarklets and now have a handful, largely as efficiency tools, which I've shared back to the team. They are not pretty, but they are functional, they have cemented the idea in my head, and they are delivering benefit to me now.

Pretty much every training session I've ever attended has some kind of key points summary at the end, so it seems appropriate to finish with something similar here.

Managers:
  • care to find quality training to offer your teams, and attend it
  • don't confuse attendance with expertise and experience
  • demonstrate ways in which value can be taken 

Participants:
  • take a positive mindset into it
  • be alert for things that you can take out of it
  • seek to experiment with those things quickly and regularly afterwards

Naturally, if any of that sounded interesting simply reading it is insufficient to extract its value to you.
Image: https://flic.kr/p/dq4qcX

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Can Code, Can't Code, Is Useful

The Association for Software Testing is crowd-sourcing a book,  Navigating the World as a Context-Driven Tester , which aims to provide  responses to common questions and statements about testing from a  context-driven perspective . It's being edited by  Lee Hawkins  who is  posing questions on  Twitter ,   LinkedIn , Mastodon , Slack , and the AST  mailing list  and then collating the replies, focusing on practice over theory. I've decided to  contribute  by answering briefly, and without a lot of editing or crafting, by imagining that I'm speaking to someone in software development who's acting in good faith, cares about their work and mine, but doesn't have much visibility of what testing can be. Perhaps you'd like to join me?   --00-- "If testers can’t code, they’re of no use to us" My first reaction is to wonder what you expect from your testers. I am immediately interested in your working context and the way

Meet Me Halfway?

  The Association for Software Testing is crowd-sourcing a book,  Navigating the World as a Context-Driven Tester , which aims to provide  responses to common questions and statements about testing from a  context-driven perspective . It's being edited by  Lee Hawkins  who is  posing questions on  Twitter ,   LinkedIn , Mastodon , Slack , and the AST  mailing list  and then collating the replies, focusing on practice over theory. I've decided to  contribute  by answering briefly, and without a lot of editing or crafting, by imagining that I'm speaking to someone in software development who's acting in good faith, cares about their work and mine, but doesn't have much visibility of what testing can be. Perhaps you'd like to join me?   --00-- "Stop answering my questions with questions." Sure, I can do that. In return, please stop asking me questions so open to interpretation that any answer would be almost meaningless and certa

Not Strictly for the Birds

  One of my chores takes me outside early in the morning and, if I time it right, I get to hear a charming chorus of birdsong from the trees in the gardens down our road, a relaxing layered soundscape of tuneful calls, chatter, and chirrupping. Interestingly, although I can tell from the number and variety of trills that there must be a large number of birds around, they are tricky to spot. I have found that by staring loosely at something, such as the silhouette of a tree's crown against the slowly brightening sky, I see more birds out of the corner of my eye than if I scan to look for them. The reason seems to be that my peripheral vision picks up movement against the wider background that direct inspection can miss. An optometrist I am not, but I do find myself staring at data a great deal, seeking relationships, patterns, or gaps. I idly wondered whether, if I filled my visual field with data, I might be able to exploit my peripheral vision in that quest. I have a wide monito

Testing (AI) is Testing

Last November I gave a talk, Random Exploration of a Chatbot API , at the BCS Testing, Diversity, AI Conference .  It was a nice surprise afterwards to be offered a book from their catalogue and I chose Artificial Intelligence and Software Testing by Rex Black, James Davenport, Joanna Olszewska, Jeremias Rößler, Adam Leon Smith, and Jonathon Wright.  This week, on a couple of train journeys around East Anglia, I read it and made sketchnotes. As someone not deeply into this field, but who has been experimenting with AI as a testing tool at work, I found the landscape view provided by the book interesting, particularly the lists: of challenges in testing AI, of approaches to testing AI, and of quality aspects to consider when evaluating AI.  Despite the hype around the area right now there's much that any competent tester will be familiar with, and skills that translate directly. Where there's likely to be novelty is in the technology, and the technical domain, and the effect of

Postman Curlections

My team has been building a new service over the last few months. Until recently all the data it needs has been ingested at startup and our focus has been on the logic that processes the data, architecture, and infrastructure. This week we introduced a couple of new endpoints that enable the creation (through an HTTP POST) and update (PUT) of the fundamental data type (we call it a definition ) that the service operates on. I picked up the task of smoke testing the first implementations. I started out by asking the system under test to show me what it can do by using Postman to submit requests and inspecting the results. It was the kinds of things you'd imagine, including: submit some definitions (of various structure, size, intent, name, identifiers, etc) resubmit the same definitions (identical, sharing keys, with variations, etc) retrieve the submitted definitions (using whatever endpoints exist to show some view of them) compare definitions I submitted fro

Testers are Gate-Crashers

  The Association for Software Testing is crowd-sourcing a book,  Navigating the World as a Context-Driven Tester , which aims to provide  responses to common questions and statements about testing from a  context-driven perspective . It's being edited by  Lee Hawkins  who is  posing questions on  Twitter ,   LinkedIn , Mastodon , Slack , and the AST  mailing list  and then collating the replies, focusing on practice over theory. I've decided to  contribute  by answering briefly, and without a lot of editing or crafting, by imagining that I'm speaking to someone in software development who's acting in good faith, cares about their work and mine, but doesn't have much visibility of what testing can be. Perhaps you'd like to join me?   --00-- "Testers are the gatekeepers of quality" Instinctively I don't like the sound of that, but I wonder what you mean by it. Perhaps one or more of these? Testers set the quality sta

Vanilla Flavour Testing

I have been pairing with a new developer colleague recently. In our last session he asked me "is this normal testing?" saying that he'd never seen anything like it anywhere else that he'd worked. We finished the task we were on and then chatted about his question for a few minutes. This is a short summary of what I said. I would describe myself as context-driven . I don't take the same approach to testing every time, except in a meta way. I try to understand the important questions, who they are important to, and what the constraints on the work are. With that knowledge I look for productive, pragmatic, ways to explore whatever we're looking at to uncover valuable information or find a way to move on. I write test notes as I work in a format that I have found to be useful to me, colleagues, and stakeholders. For me, the notes should clearly state the mission and give a tl;dr summary of the findings and I like them to be public while I'm working not just w

Build Quality

  The Association for Software Testing is crowd-sourcing a book,  Navigating the World as a Context-Driven Tester , which aims to provide  responses to common questions and statements about testing from a  context-driven perspective . It's being edited by  Lee Hawkins  who is  posing questions on  Twitter ,   LinkedIn , Mastodon , Slack , and the AST  mailing list  and then collating the replies, focusing on practice over theory. I've decided to  contribute  by answering briefly, and without a lot of editing or crafting, by imagining that I'm speaking to someone in software development who's acting in good faith, cares about their work and mine, but doesn't have much visibility of what testing can be. Perhaps you'd like to join me?   --00-- "When the build is green, the product is of sufficient quality to release" An interesting take, and one I wouldn't agree with in general. That surprises you? Well, ho

Make, Fix, and Test

A few weeks ago, in A Good Tester is All Over the Place , Joep Schuurkes described a model of testing work based on three axes: do testing yourself or support testing by others be embedded in a team or be part of a separate team do your job or improve the system It resonated with me and the other testers I shared it with at work, and it resurfaced in my mind while I was reflecting on some of the tasks I've picked up recently and what they have involved, at least in the way I've chosen to address them. Here's three examples: Documentation Generation We have an internal tool that generates documentation in Confluence by extracting and combining images and text from a handful of sources. Although useful, it ran very slowly or not at all so one of the developers performed major surgery on it. Up to that point, I had never taken much interest in the tool and I could have safely ignored this piece of work too because it would have been tested by

The Best Laid Test Plans

The Association for Software Testing is crowd-sourcing a book,  Navigating the World as a Context-Driven Tester , which aims to provide  responses to common questions and statements about testing from a  context-driven perspective . It's being edited by  Lee Hawkins  who is  posing questions on  Twitter ,   LinkedIn , Mastodon , Slack , and the AST  mailing list  and then collating the replies, focusing on practice over theory. I've decided to  contribute  by answering briefly, and without a lot of editing or crafting, by imagining that I'm speaking to someone in software development who's acting in good faith, cares about their work and mine, but doesn't have much visibility of what testing can be. Perhaps you'd like to join me?   --00-- "What's the best format for a test plan?" I'll side-step the conversation about what a test plan is and just say that the format you should use is one that works for you, your coll