Hiccupps

For work reasons, I've recently become interested in resources for those new to line management. I put out an appeal for suggestions on Twitter and  Managing The Unmanageable  was recommended by Thomas Ponnet , with a little cautious reservation: " Hope you enjoy it. I don't agree with everything but that comes with the job description. Not all translates for my context." This quote from the book's preface sets up the authors' intent nicely: There is no methodology for the newly anointed development manager charged with managing, leading, guiding, and reviewing the performance of a team of programmers — often, the team he was on just days before. There are no off-the-shelf approaches. Unlike project managers, who devote hours and hours of study toward certifcation in their chosen career path, development managers often win their management roles primarily from having been stellar coders while displaying a modic...

In a recent episode of Rationally Speaking ,  Samuel Arbesman , a complexity scientist, talks about complexity in technology. Here's a few quotes I particularly enjoyed. On levels of understanding of systems: Technology very broadly is becoming more and more complicated ... actually so complex that no one, whether you're an expert or otherwise, fully understands these things ... They have enormous number of parts that are all interacting in highly nonlinear ways that are subject to emerging phenomena. We're going to have bugs and glitches and failures. And if we think we understand these things well and we don’t, there's going to be tons of gap between how we think we understand the system and how it actually does behave. On modelling reality with a system and then creating a model of that system: ... the world is messy and complex. Therefore, often, in order to capture all that messiness and complexity, you need a system that effectively is often of equ...

The Test team book club at Linguamatics is currently reading  What Did You Say? The Art of Giving and Receiving Feedback . Here's a couple of quotes that I picked out for our last session: If you’re really interested in helping people, you’ll do well to start your feedback by opening your own motives to inspection. Even when it’s given at the receiver’s request, feedback describes the giver more than the receiver. When the data and their model don’t match, most people discard the data. I recall an instance when, engaged in discussion with a colleague I'll call Russell, about the data analysis he was presenting, I spotted an opportunity to offer feedback. It was about something that I knew Russell wanted to change. It was about something that I knew was open to me to give feedback on, because we had talked about it. It was about something that I thought would be beneficial for Russell in multiple ways and, I hoped, would provide some insight into a particular behaviou...

  There's a girl in the park playing with an enormous bunch of balloons. She's running around, clearly very happy to have such a pretty and fun toy. She seems entranced by the way the balloons have life of their own: they hold themselves up, needing no support from her, and animatedly jostle one another as she moves. Her grip on the strings, twined together in her fist, is quite loose, and she's in danger of losing them if she's not careful. And, of course, she isn't and she does.  The balloons float up and up and up from her released grasp, past a tall tree in which two nude men are arm wrestling. On their wrists each sports a watch showing ten minutes past ten, despite the time being 12:57. With their free arms they reach out and catch the balloons as they bobble by, bursting every last one of them, and smiling. In the second exercise of Mira Nair 's Storytelling workshop, which ran at last night's Cambridge Tester Meetup , we were asked to write a s...

Back in Part 1  I started this series of posts one Sunday morning with a very small thought on tooling. (Thinking is a tool.) I let my mind wander over the topic and found that I had opinions, knowledge, ideas, and connections that I hadn't made explicit before, or perhaps only in part. (Mind-wandering is a tool.) I wrote the stuff that I was thinking down. (Writing is a tool.) Actually, I typed the stuff that I was thinking up. 1 I have recently been teaching myself to touch type in a more traditional style to (a) stop the twinges I was feeling in my right hand from over-extension for some key combinations and (b) become a faster, more consistent, typist so that my thoughts are less mediated in their transmission to a file. (Typing is a tool.) I reviewed and organised my thoughts and notes. With each review, each categorisation, each classification, each arrangement, each period of reflection away from the piece of writing, I found more thoughts. (Reviewing and rationalis...

In Part 1 of this series I observed my behaviour in identifying problems, choosing tools, and finding profitable ways to use them when cleaning my bathroom at home. The introspection broadened out in Part 2 to consider tool selection more generally. I speculated that, although we may see someone apparently thoughtlessly viewing every problem as a nail and hence treatable with the same hammer, that simple action can hide deeper conscious and unconscious thought processes. In Part 3 I find myself with these things in mind, reflecting on the tools I use in my day-to-day work. One class of problems that I apply tools to involves a route to the solution being understood and a desire to get there quickly. I think of these as essentially productivity or efficiency problems and one of the tools I deploy to resolve them is a programming or scripting language. Programming languages are are tools, for sure, but they are also tool factories . When I have some kind of task which is re...

In Part 1 , I described my Sunday morning Cleaning the Bathroom  problem and how I think about the tools I'm using, the way I use them, and why.  In particular I talked about using a credit card as a scraper for the grotty build up around the sides of the bath and sink. On the particular Sunday that kicked this chain of thoughts off, I noticed myself picking the card up and using a corner of it vertically, rather than its edge horizontally, to remove some guff that was collecting around the base of a tap. This is something I've been doing regularly for a while now but, before I got the scraper, it was a job I used an old toothbrush for. In Part 1 I recounted a number of conscious decisions around the way I keep the littlest room spic and span, but switching to use the card on the tap wasn't one I could recall making. Observing myself taking a tool I'd specifically obtained for one purpose and using it for another put me in mind of this old saw: When all you ...

It's early on a Sunday morning and I'm thinking about tools. Yes, that's right: Sunday morning; early; tools. Sunday morning is bathroom cleaning morning for me 1 and, alongside all the scrubbing, squirting, and sluicing I spend time evaluating the way I clean against the results I achieve. My goal is to do a good job (in terms of the cleanliness and appearance of cleanliness of the bathroom) balanced against expense, time and effort. I've got a set of tools to help with this task. Some are traditional and obvious, including sponge, J-cloth , glass cleaner, bathroom cleaner, toilet brush, Marigolds , ... Some are reasonably well known but not mainstream, including citric acid crystals, squeegee , old toothbrush, ... and some are more niche, including a credit card, flannel, and car windscreen coating, ... By tool  I mean something as basic as this, from Oxford Dictionaries :  A thing used to help perform a job And I'm being generous in my interpretat...

In another happy accident , I ended up with a bunch of podcasts on failure to listen to in the same week. (Success!) Here's a few quotes I particularly enjoyed. In Failing Gracefully on the BBC World Service , David Mindell from MIT recalls the early days of NASA's Project Apollo : The engineers said "oh it's going to have two buttons. That's the whole interface. Take Me To The Moon , that's one button, and Take Me Home is the other button" [but] by the time they landed on the moon it was a very rich interactive system ... The ultimate goal of new technology should not be full automation. Rather, the ultimate goal should be complete cooperation with the human: trusted, transparent, collaboration ... we've learned that [full autonomy] is dangerous, it's failure-prone, it's brittle, it's not going to get us to where we need to go. And NASA has had some high-profile failures. In another episode in the same series of programmes, Fast...

Andrew Morton tweeted at me the other day: Does being able to make a joke about something show that you understand it? Maybe a question for @qahiccupps — Andrew Morton (@TestingChef) August 9, 2016 I ran an on-the-spot thought experiment, trying to find a counterexample to the assertion "In order to make a joke about something you have to understand it." I thought of a few things that I don't pretend to understand, such as  special relativity , and tried to make a joke out of one of them. Which I did, and so I think I can safely say this: @TestingChef Wouldn't have thought so. For example ... Einstein's law of special relativity says you /can/ have a favourite child. — James Thomas (@qahiccupps) August 9, 2016 Now this isn't a side-splitting, snot shower-inducing, self-suffocating-with-laughter kind of a joke. But it is a joke and the humour comes from the resolution of the cognitive dissonance that it sets up: the idea that special relativi...