Gonzo QA: Fear and Loathing at Scrum Day Europe 2014 (part 2)

A savage journey to the heart of evidence-based management for software organizations in 1,000 words or less

Dateline: 3 July 2014, Amsterdam

(Read part 1.)

Lunch-time sandwiches behind me, Forrester’s Diego lo Giudice’s Keynote: The State of Scaling Agile In The Age of The Customer roared into life in the ‘Grote zaal’. Sporting a sharp goatee and an even sharper suit, Diego started talking at 160 words per minute. Having warmed up on his introductory slides, he passed 250 words per minute on slide 4 and was soon speaking at speeds exceeding the limit of normal human comprehension, around 500 words per minute. Facts and figures filled the air. Nobody moved for fear of getting hit. Towards the middle of the presentation, smoke was clearly visible coming from the left hand side vent of his jacket. ‘*’-uniformed roadies immediately appeared on the stage and sprayed his torso with a thick coat of fire-retardant foam, allowing him to continue to present uninterrupted. Diego’s 27,500 word presentation finished without warning to deafening silence followed by thunderous applause. There was 5 minutes left for questions but we knew we had just witnessed a tour de force and there was nothing left to say.
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Gonzo QA: Fear and Loathing at Scrum Day Europe 2014 (part 1)

A savage journey to the heart of evidence-based management for software organizations in 1,000 words or less

Dateline: 3 July 2014, Amsterdam

I approached Scrum Day Europe with a mixture of excitement and trepidation. Ken Schwaber was giving the opening and closing keynote speeches. Ken Schwaber! Ken co-developed the Scrum process and signed the Agile Manifesto. He founded the Agile Alliance, Scrum Alliance and Scrum.org and I was going to hear him speak. Would the first row of seats be reserved for acolytes dressed in white robes? Would the audience chant his name? Would there be fruit juice to drink at the end? The man who wrote ‘Scrum’s roles, artefacts, events, and rules are immutable and although implementing only parts of Scrum is possible, the result is not Scrum,’ does not sound tolerant of dissenters.
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Extreme participation marketing

Don’t get me wrong, as an agency person I am all for enthusiastic participation in marketing the client’s product, and as a committed testing specialist, I am all for putting my money where my mouth is, but in the following article from The Times, journalist Catherine Philp buys a bulletproof jacket from tailor Miguel Caballero and then allows him to shoot her in the stomach.
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You pays your money and you takes your choice

Excellent article in today’s Guardian technology supplement by Bruce Schneier, security technologist and author. His hypothesis is that cars are well designed and software is not. This is because car manufacturers face liabilities if they make mistakes but software vendors do not. Further, both the market and the law support the status quo. He writes:
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Befehl ist Befehl

The Nuremberg Defense is a legal defense that essentially states that the defendant was “only following orders” (“Befehl ist Befehl”) and is therefore not responsible for his crimes. The defense was most famously employed during the Nuremberg Trials, after which it is named.
Source: Wikipedia, Nuremberg Defense

The QA Department often hears the phrase “but it is signed-off” used by staff & clients to defend the indefensible. At this point, it is the QA Department’s job to persuade the team to do the right thing.
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The Eighth P in Quality

Why would we not want to include packaging in the marketing mix for Quality Assurance?

Packaging. It is very important how the product is presented to the customer. The packaging is often the first contact that a customer has with it. Packaging can also be considered as a subfield of promotion and/or if the primary intent of the packaging is to protect the product during shipping, as a subfield of placement.

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Gonzo QA: Blast from the past #2 – Social evolution

Dateline: London, March 2009

“I’m in. Start Outlook, MSN Messenger (isn’t the new Windows Live Messenger limp?), Yahoo! And Gmail. Much Spam has arrived overnight, so I take a quick look at what’s getting through; is there anything new or clever of which we should take note? No. There never is, but you never know; inspiration comes from the strangest places. Much of the bulk-mail we sent out last night has come through as well, so I take a quick look at that while I’m on. It’s far too late to correct anything that has gone out, but it’s never too late to spot mistakes and learn. Here’s an unusually long newsletter from one of our clients that, yes! It has the body copy repeated twice. Fortunately it’s not one of ours. Ha! It’s tempting to dump on the other agency that sent it but discretion is the better part of valour. Unless you’re pitching for new business, of course.”
Source: Gonzo QA: Fear and loathing in the morning, December 2006.

Since then my sign-in ritual has got worse. I ditched MSN Messenger in favour of Windows Live Messenger some time ago. I now enjoy Version 2009 which does the same old but in must-have full colour, yowsah. To Outlook, Gmail and Yahoo! Mail, I have added occasional LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter checks. Social networking arrived between then and now and I have fallen for it big time. Prim and proper LinkedIn was first, a low-key romance quickly maturing into a monthly assignation in an anonymous hotel satisfying both our needs. Then came flighty Facebook. A whirlwind courtship was followed by a rude awakening; did it have to be so all-consuming? My reaction to it’s first makeover was disappointment. It has just had a second but I think we have gone our separate ways now; we have grown too far apart for anything more than occasional drinks after work to catch up on mutual friends and talk about the old days. Twitter and I circled each other for some time before I felt able to make any kind of commitment. I am currently post-infatuation, resigned to the fact that without a business model, this pretty butterfly must surely die. In the meantime, I tweet 10 times a day; any more and I will go blind.

Notes

First posted: 14 March 2009 on www.participationmarketing.co.uk

Gonzo QA: Blast from the past #1

Dateline: London, March 2009

“I arrive at work somewhat frazzled. I had set off an hour early in order to storm up a mountain of work before the mist had lifted but events have conspired to make me arrive at my desk 30 minutes later than usual. I log on to my PC knowing there will be a 15 minute delay between entering my username and password and seeing the desktop, due to network policies, virus scans and Windows patches. Every day this happens. Note to self: raise this to IT Support once more. Two hundred people at an average of £50 per billable hour waiting 15 minutes is, ooh, £2,500 per day lost income, around £625,000 per year. I’d commit to fixing that for half the price, cash in hand, no questions asked. Fortunately my diary is paper-based and the café around the corner is staffed by Croatians with a vigorous approach to coffee-making. As I wait, I plan my day with a vengeance, knowing that whoever booked me yesterday for work due today will get priority over anyone trying to book me today for work due yesterday. I kill the next 14 minutes by taking a walk round the building. There’s no one in. Reasons will vary from “my goldfish was poorly in the night” through “my social worker wouldn’t bail me” to “I forgot”. “I was working till midnight” there’s no argument with. Commitment to the work, each other, the client is all.”
Source: Gonzo QA: Fear and loathing in the morning, December 2006

With respect to the paragraph above, what’s changed between then and now? Not much. Slow starts, coffee and commitment are still the order of the day. Two and a quarter years real-time is about nine internet years though, which would explain why I have aged faster than the Queen.

Notes

First posted: 7 March 2009 on www.participationmarketing.co.uk

 

Gonzo QA IV: Mistakes, I’ve made a few

Dateline: London, September 2007

My biggest mistake was to delete the UK master invoice file of the major chemical company I worked for at the time, shortly before going home for the evening. I had been promoted to Database Administrator (DBA) a few weeks before and I was carrying out routine house-keeping activities – or so I thought. It turned out that my recently-departed predecessor had not been naming database objects logically, had not been carrying out routine house-keeping activities and further, the database management system (DBMS) was quite capable of deleting files in use without warning or protest. The result of all this was I went home unaware. Further, the overnight batch file which wrote the days invoices to the master file and then deleted itself wrote the days invoices to null and then deleted itself. When I came in the next day, Accounts Receivable staff had just been told that as well as inputting the day’s invoices, they would have to re-input the previous day’s too, essentially doing two days work in one day and nobody was to go home until it was done. They gave me the cold shoulder, the Finance Director gave me an earful which included the full cost of my error rounded to the nearest five thousand pounds and the IT Director sent two of his people down to give me a kicking on his behalf. The Senior Systems Programmer beat me up himself; he always was a hands-on kind of guy. The previous night’s dump had been restored in my absence but it turned out that transaction logging had never been enabled, so roll-forward until a few minutes before I had accidentally deleted the file was not possible. At the time I did not know that you could run a DBMS without transaction logging enabled. My response of “how about that?” was not appreciated by sysadmin staff at all.
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