Earlier in the year
Lena Wiberg posted an
interesting
challenge
on Twitter:
I would like to pair up with other writers and do a series of pair blog posts. So we agree on a topic, we both write a post on our own blogs and publish at the same time. 2 perspectives for 1 topic! Any takers?
Swaps are fun, so I signed up and Lena asked me for a topic. After some consideration I
proposed "testing skills I use in management" for the selfish reasons that
I'm interested to hear what she has to say on it and also to collect
thoughts that I've had over the years into one place.
--00--
I spent quite some time early in my managerial career observing how I went
about my work, finding what I liked and what I didn't, and deciding what my
guiding management principles appeared to be and should be. This is what I
came up with:
- Be clear and present
- Be congruent
- Provide motivation, organisation, information, and the occasional jiggle.
To gloss these a little, I want to:
- be open about what I think, what I will do, and why; be available, approachable, and responsive (see e.g. Clear and Present Manager)
- in any situation, take into account the interests of the people involved, myself, and the wider context (see e.g. What Did You Say? in Book Notes)
- try to find ways of working that suit the team and the task (see e.g. Naomi Karten's MOI paper)
When I cast it this way, management skills and testing skills don't seem so
far apart. In both cases I want to gather data and understand something about
where it came from, when, how, and so on. I then want to integrate it with
other data I have from other sources and decide where I should go next. I want
to think about how I'm working, be transparent about why, and open to
suggestions for change. I want to be prepared to explain the reason for
actions I've taken, and to take those actions in a balanced way.
Let's look at an example. As a manager, I am regularly criticised by members
of my team. Amongst other things I'm sometimes accused of being overly logical
or too analytical. The subjective nature of "overly" and "too" give me leeway
to dismiss this assessment as a matter of degree, viewed from a jaundiced
perspective, should I choose to. But I don't choose to; instead I regard it as
data. (And, yes, I am aware of the potential irony there.)
It's valuable information when someone on the team is feeling sufficiently
strongly to tell me to my face that I have the wrong take on an issue. (Aside:
finding out that someone is saying it to others but not me is also valuable,
but different.) I will always by default respect it as given honestly
with good motivation.
For me, this is data from a known source in a particular context and is to be
integrated with other data from other known sources in their particular
contexts. Other sources include me and the team and the company, and other
contexts include mine and the team's and the company's.
I am likely to want to ask questions to try to understand what is beneath an
observation which is critical of me. (The data question, due to Jerry Weinberg
e.g. Perfect Software is
"What did you see or hear ... that led you to that interpretation?") I think
that, over the years, I have got better at doing it in a way that is both
non-judgemental and non-defensive and, crucially, comes across that way too.
On any given issue, I will want to give individual pieces of data different
weights depending on the context they come from and the problem at hand.
But, and this is a big one, the kind of data gathered this way is rarely
quantifiable. It's usually messy and incomplete and it's often tangled up with
other issues in complex and non-visible ways. We are human, after all.
This feels a lot like testing to me.
In testing, I find, data comes from all sorts of disparate sources with
different motivations, including the stated requirements, the market
conditions that make these requirements relevant now, the level of
understanding of the problem we're solving for the customer, the informal
conversations with stakeholders, the developer's personal opinions on the
approach requested and their personal preferences, the technology stack's
prejudices, what the software tells you when you engage with it, and so on and
so on.
How do I, as a tester, balance this data? I use critical thinking and
heuristics based on experience and social interaction and investigation and
research and modelling and empathy and pragmatism and numerous other skills.
My overriding aim is that of pursuing relevant incongruity, by which I mean
helping the project to be the best that it can be within the known constraints
that it has, by targeting my efforts and finding issues and potential issues
that threaten it.
And as a manager? Well, in all honesty, this is how I approach management
problems too.
So where is the difference between being a manager and a (cough) individual
contributor? For me, I think it's in the degree of responsibility for people
and wide-scope decisions. As a manager there are many bucks that stop with me
which intimately involve other people whose happiness, career, and actions I'm
responsible for. As a tester I'm generally only responsible for my own
decisions and actions.
See also:
--00--
Testing Skills I Use in Management is Lena's post on the same topic over at her blog. We agreed to swap comments too, so you can find mine with her piece, and her thoughts on what I said here:
I did what I shouldn’t and instinctively messaged James after reading
with: “So interesting! Completely different takes!” Funny enough, he
thought we had come to very similar conclusions. Which of course had
me read his comment before writing this, thus influencing me. So, I cannot
write a completely unbiased comment. But on the other hand I can now
try to analyse why I felt we had so different takes while James felt we
ended up so alike.
First of all, I haven’t known James long. And I’ve mostly gotten to know
him through his blog posts, his twitter and through our work on board for
the
Association for Software Testing. My view of him has been that he is very calm, methodical, well
spoken (and written) and with a great sense of humour. I have gotten a lot
of inspiration from his blog posts in my own writing and I have very much
appreciated our discussions both in real life and online.
When I read his post my gut reaction was that ours were completely
different but analysing it a bit more I can see why James feels we ended
up in the same place. Because we did, just by different routes. I write a
lot about feelings, James writes a lot about data - our conclusion however
seems the same: A lot of skills from testing are definitely transferable
to managing. Reading our posts it is clear to me that the way we used to
approach testing probably spilled over to how we chose to approach
management. I can see that we have the same goal, we care about the
same things but the road we would choose would probably look completely
different. Thank you so much James for giving me your perspective!
Image: https://flic.kr/p/27DSFeY