The Ethics of Quality with Gwen Iarussi (a PNSQC Live Blog)

I'm back. I spent the morning moderating the Management, Leadership & People track, so I wasn't able to do that and live blog like I normaly do but let's suffice it to say that Sophia McKeever (Quality With Hearts Aligned - Bolstering Your Quality with Emotional Intelligence), Heather Wilcox (Is the 'Iron Triangle' Dead?) and Kristine O'Connor (Quality Intelligence: Embedding Customer Voice to Drive Agile Excellence) all did great jobs and if you get a chance to see their talks, do so :).

For the first session this afternoon, I get to see long time friend (and actual hirer of my consulting services during my stint in the wilderness) Gwen Iarussi discuss The Ethics of Quality

PNSQChronicles: The Ethics of Quality & Quality as a Living System with Gwen Iarussi

A great quote to start out this conversation is, "Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should." (Dr. Ian Malcolm, Jurassic Park).  You may well remember this line and it is just as valid a warning about unchecked innovation. It's not enough to ensure a product "works". Additionally, we have a continued need to advocate for not just that something works, but that it works appropriately. We don't have the luxury of testing blindly and ignoring the possible impacts of our work and efforts. 

I remember back in the days of my Cisco Systems work life that the NetFlow protocol tracking software was developed. I was on the team that was ultimately codifying the "call record" or any and all internet data. I remember part of me was a little leery about what we were doing but I recall being told by one of the developers that, "if we don't develop this with our approach and methodology and ethics, then our competition will create it, and we will have no control over the ethics that they choose (or do not choose) to use."We can argue whether or not that was a good idea (we do of course have end to end tracking of all network data but we also have the ability to encrypt that data as well, so yin/yang, I guess ;) ).

My point with that last example may be seen as trivial today but part of me genuinely wondered if our efforts were being done in the appropriate place. At that time, I was young and unsure of my voice, so I just rolled with it. Today me would be less likely to do that, I'd want to ask a number of questions. Granted, I may not have been able to have modified or altered any of the outcomes, but I certainly would have been more direct and focused with my interactions and questions. I would have advocated for positions I felt we should represent.

Our tech environment today is getting even more fragmented and over the top. Speed of execution is taking precedence over the quality and ethics of what we are creating. We have all sorts of areas where the haves are taking advantage of the have nots through these systems, and it's very much by design. Let's not forget the fact that this age of AI and fast, ubiquitous tech is consuming land, fuel and water resources at an alarming rate. Much of the tech advances and buildout to host and serve it is not sustainable in the long term. At least not if we want to make sure that people have access to water, fuel, and food a few years from now.

Much of this comes down to accountability. How do we develop accountability and stand for what we want to see happen in our environments? How do we make our ethics more than just platitudes? By us building a culture of accountability, we are able to foster a culture of ethics and making considerations that go beyond merely speed and efficiency.

Ultimately, this all comes down to a quote that is attributed to Sitting Bull, "Let us put our minds together and see what life we can make for our children". Ultimately, every good or bad decision we make may have an effect on us, but they will surely and certainly effect future generations. With this isn mind, I would absolutely say it would be in our best interests, including business interests, to be able to leave to our children a world and systems that have effective safeguards to prevent our actively destroying our environment, whatever and wherever those may be.

We're Back: CAST is in Session: Opening Keynote on Responsible AI (Return of the Live Blog)

 Hello everyone. It has been quitre a while since I've been here (this feels like boilerplate at this point but yes, it feels like conferences and conference sessions are what get me to post most of the time now, so here I am :) ).

I'm at CAST. It has been many years since I've been here. Lots of reasons for that but suffice it to say I ws asl=ked to participate, I accepted, and now I am at the Zion's Bankcorp Tech Center in Midvale, UT (a suburb/neighborhood of Salt Lake City). I'm doing a few things this go around:

- I'm giving a talk about Accessibility and Inclusive Design (Monday, Aug. 25, 2025)

- I'm participating in a book signing for "Software Testing Strategies" (Monday, Aug. 25, 2025)

- I'm delivering a workshop on Accessibility and Inclusive Design (Wednesday, Aug. 27, 2025)

In addition to all of that, I'm donning a Red Shirt and acting as a facilitator/moderator for several sessions, so my standard Live Blog/post every session will by necessity be fewer this go around as I physically will not be able to do that this go around. Nevertheless, I shall do the best I can.

The opening keynote is being delivrered by Olivia Gambelin and she is speaking on "Elevating the Human in the Equation: Responsible Quality Testing in the Age of AI"

Olivia describers herself as an "AI Ethiscist" and she is the author of "Responsible AI". This of course brings us back to a large set of questions and quandaries. For a number of people, we may think of AI in the scope of LLM's like ChatGPT or Claude and many people may be thinking, "What's the big deal? It's just like Google only the next step." While that may be a common sentiment, that's not the full story. AI is creating a much larger load on our power infrastructure. Huge datacenters are being built out that are making tremendous demands on power, water consumption, and on polluion/emissions. It's argued that the growth of AI will effectively consume more of our power grid resources than if we were to entirely convert everyone over to electric vehicles. Thus, we have questions that we need to ask that go beyond just the fact that we are interacting with data and digital representations of information. 

The common refrain of "just because we can do something doesn't necessarily mean that we should". While that is a wonderful sentiment, we have to accept the fact that that ship has sailed. AI is here, it is present, in both trivial and non trivial uses, and all of the footprint issues that that entails. All of us will have to wrestle with what AI means to us, how we use it, and how we might be able to use it responsibly. Note, I am thus far talking about a specific aspect of environmental degradation. I'm not even getting into the ethical concerns when it comes to how we actually look at and represent data. 

AI is often treated as a silver bullet and something that can help us get answers for areas and situations we've perhaps mnot previously considered. One of the bigger questions/challenges is how we get to that information, and who/what is influencing it. AI can be biased based on the data sets that it is provided. Give it a limited amount of data, it will give a limited set of results based on the information it has or how that information was introduced/presented. AI as it exists today is not really "Intelligent". It is excellent pattern recognition and potential predictive text presentation. It's also good at repurposing things that it already knows about. Do you want to keep a newsletter fresh with information you present regularly? AI can do that all day long. We can argue the value add of such an endeavor but I can appreciate for those who have to pump out lots of data on a regukar basis, this is absolutely a game changer.

There are of course a number of areas that are significantly more sophisticated and data that is much more pressing. Medical imaging and interpreting the details provided is something that machines can crunch in a way that a group of humans will take a lot of time to do with their eyes and ears. Still, lots of issues can still come to bear because of these systems. For those not familiar with the "Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy", it's basically the idea of someone shooting a lot of shots into the side of a barn over time. If we draw a circle around the largest cluster of bullets, we can infer that whoever shot those shots was a good marksman. True? Maybe not. We don't know how long it took to shoot those bullets, how many shots are outside of the circle, the ratio of bullets inside vs. outside of the circle, etc. In other words, we could be making assumptions based on how we are grouping something that a bias and prejudice is leaning on. Having people look at these can help us counter those biases but it can also introduce new ones based on the people that have been asked to review the data. To borrow an old quote that I am paraphrasing because I don't remember who said it originally, "We do not see the world for what it is, we see it for who we are".  AI doesn't counteract that tendency, it amplifies it, especially if we are spcifically looking for answers that we want to see. 

Olivia is arguing, convincingly, that AI has great potential but also has significant liabilities. It is an exciting aspect of technology but it is also difficult to pin down as to what it actually provides. Additionally, based on its pattern matching capabilities, AI can be wrong... a lot... but as a friend of mine os fon of saying, "The danger of AI is not that it is often wrong, it's that it is so confidently wrong". It can lull one into a false sense of authority or reality of a situation. Things can seem very plausible and sensible based on our own experiences but the data we are getting can be based on thin air and hallucinations. If those hallucinations scratch a particular itch of ours, we are more inclined to accept the findings/predictions that match our world view. More to the point, we can put our finger on the scale, whether we mean to or not, to influence the answers we get. Responsible AI would make efforts to help combat these tendencies, to help us not just get thr answers that we want to have but help us challenge and refute the answers we are receiving.

From a quality perpective, we need to have a direct conversation as to what/why we would be using AI in the first place. Is AI a decent answer to looking at writing code in ways we might not be 100% familiar? Sure. It can introduce aspects of code that we might not be super familiar with. That's a plus and it's a danger. I can question and check for quality of noutput for areas I know about or have solid familiarity. I am less likely to question areas I am lacking knowledge in or actually look to disprove or challenge the findings. 

For further thoughts and diving deeper on these ideas, I plan to check out "Responsible AI: Implement an Ethical Approach in Your Organization" (Kogan Page Publishing). Maybe y'all should too :).

Experience is Earned, Expertise is Granted

This title is meant to be a little provocative, and some may disagree with it, but I've been thinking about this topic quite a bit recently. First of all, I want to say thank you to Ryan Arsenault and the folks over at uTest for showcasing me in their first "Ask the Expert" blog entry. The questions I was asked centered around career choices for testers and ways that we can succeed, or at least do better than we are now.

I cannot help it, part of me feels very strange using the word "expert" to describe myself at anything. I'm happy to use words like experienced, educated, practiced or even proficient, but "expert" carries a strange weight to it. It's so subjective, and it feels like, once you've been branded one, that there's only one way to go from there, and that's down. Moreover, I don't really believe there is such a thing as an "expert", because that implies that that person has learned all there is to learn and has mastered all there is to master... and that's just fundamentally wrong on so many levels.

I've come to realize that we all own our experiences, and that we all have opportunities to learn from our successes and our mistakes (oh, how much I have learned from my mistakes). This is why I have no problems talking about my experiences or my observations. They are mine, and as such, are certainly open to interpretation, or debate, or scrutiny, or even outright ridicule at times, but they are wholly mine. Expertise, however, is a judgment call. I personally have very little trust in people who proclaim themselves to be "experts" at anything. However, I place a lot of credence on other people who tell me that someone is an expert. Why? because they are witnesses to the skill, acumen and judgment being displayed, and they can then decide if the term "expert" makes sense.

It also often comes down to "expert compared to who?" I have many interests, and things that I spend a lot of time getting into. When I tell people I was a competitive snowboarder for several years, it conjures up an image in their minds; I must be an expert snowboarder. They may even watch me ride, and come to that conclusion because of the technique I can muster and the terrain I can ride on. Yet put me alongside other riders I used to compete with, and any questions of my so called "expert" level goes right out the window. That doesn't take away from what I have learned, the events I've participated in and the medals I won, but to use those hallmarks to say I am an "expert" is, in my mind, misleading. Still, to others who have never raced, or are newcomers to the sport, to them I am an expert, insomuch as I can show or teach them things that they do not know.

Again, I thank uTest for giving me an opportunity to share my experiences, and I am honored to be part of their "Expert" panel. I don't know if I deserve the moniker, but they seem to think so, and so do their readers, and ultimately, I guess that just means it's up to me from here on out to either prove them right, or prove them wrong. Here's hoping my actions and efforts do more to strengthen the belief in the former, rather than proving the latter ;).

Retro Book Review: Tribes

There’s nothing quite like a cross country flight to allow one to tune everything else out, calmly sit down, turn off the cares and distractions of the world, and plow through a much needed batch of learning and focus. Sure the Internet is wonderful. It’s always on (well, almost always). It's 100% available (again, almost always). It’s filled with every tantalizing distraction imaginable, and (almost) always there to keep you busy (for some definition of busy). I asked myself “what could I do if I deliberately avoided al of that? What would I focus on? What could I focus on?" The answer is reading. A lot of reading. My blog readers, for better or worse, are going to get a rather large deliverable from that this week, in that I have book reviews to represent. Some of these books are older, some are from unusual places and interests, and one of them was literally handed to me by a friend with the comment “I think you need this”… and to which I would say “that friend was absolutely right”, but more on that in another post ;).

First out of the gate is  Seth Godin’s “Tribes”.  The subtitle of the book handily describes the purpose and point of this title: "We Need You To Lead Us". For those who are fans of Godin, you already know what to expect, so I’ll make a quick, terse summary that seems to come up with every Godin book. It’s quick, it’s rambling, it’s all over the map, it’s passionate, and it is bedevilingly void of specifics (and yes, I realize that I just totally made up a word there, but work with me here).

Now, with the most obvious of details out of the way, let’s get into what makes this fast read really valuable. Seth is drawing a line in the sand and asking us, all of us, to take up the mantle of leadership. Don’t wait to have it bestowed, steal the throne for yourself. How? Create your own tribe, and have others follow you. That’s it. In a nutshell, that’s the very simple message of the book. Of course, simple should never be equated automatically with easy, and in this case, being a genuine leader and creating a meaningful and devoted tribe, while simple, is definitely not easy. It takes time, commitment, passion, determination, expertise, skill, desire, devotion and most important of all, faith. 

Tribes shares many vignettes of individuals that bucked the trend and changed the world. Some of the trend buckers are famous (Jobs, 37 Signals, Nike) and many of them are people that most of us have never heard of. Their stories are still poignant, and the essence of who they are and what they do rings clear to the primary message of the book. Take an idea, work with it, believe in it, and seek others to help champion it. So simple, and so direct. Yet amazingly, so few people ever actually follow through with it, because there is risk, there is a chance of criticism, and frankly, it takes sustained passion and belief that you will prevail where others have not. It’s a risky doctrine… but it’s also an extremely fun doctrine!

The key takeaway (and one that Set puts into other books, and I think is the central theme of his overall message) is that the “tried and true” of olden days is getting pummeled in a world where large established factories and processes are quickly becoming disrupted and obsoleted. Ten years ago, to publish a book, you needed a publisher willing to take a risk on your book. Today, Leanpub and Lulu (and other organizations) make it possible for anyone to write or publish). In that kind of a word, what sustains and grows is not the tried and true, just for the virtue of it being tried and true, but the remarkable, the unique, the interesting, and the desirable. Is everyone going to come up with the “next great idea”? Probably not, but all of us have good ideas, and many of those ideas do not require a major investment or system to enact. Leadership isn’t necessarily creating a startup and becoming rich (though that is certainly fun and awesome when it happens). Leadership can be based in your own group, and being willing to try a new technique or approach, or even trimming away wasteful processes that are slowing a team down. It could be a blogger who writes about an industry that they are passionate about, and how they hope to make changes in that industry.

What stands in the way? Mostly fear. Fear of being branded a heretic. Fear of upsetting the status quo. Fear of being criticized, or laughed at, or mocked. They could possibly be fired, or ostracized, or “burned at the stake” (hopefully metaphorically, though yes, there was a time when that was a real fate for “heretics”). Those fears are all real. They could happen. Seth makes a compelling point that they likely will not, and that the simple fact is that we are being surrounded by heretics, because the cost of being one is going way down in our modern world. With that in mind, why not be a heretic? Be a leader, exhibit some faith, and take that leap. Not only will you likely not suffer slings and arrows, you may just inspire many others to follow your lead, and you may encourage them to do likewise.

Bottom Line: 

This isn’t a long book. It’s not a thorough book. It doesn’t have a lot of specifics. It doesn’t have a lot of examples. It makes the maddening point that there is no map to follow, but if you have some passion, some drive, an idea or two, and a belief that they will come to fruition, the odds of you finding people willing to help you push that idea forward, by forming a tribe around that idea, is pretty high. It’s also likely to be small at first. It may may always remain small, and that is totally OK. In fact, most of us belong to hundreds, if not thousands, of tribes at any given time. In many of those tribes, we are followers. In many of them, we are leaders. The most likely thing is that those of us who are leaders of tribes don’t realize it. Seth gives us some motivation to help figure that out, and then do something with it. For that, I think Tribes succeeds.

Let's Stop Faking It: My "Other" Talk from Øredev 2013

I realized this morning, as I went back to the Øredev 2013 site, that my video for my 2nd talk had been posted. My talk about Balancing ATDD, GUI Automation and Exploratory Testing has been getting most of the press, as well as repeat performances for the Bay Area Software Testers and Silicon Valley Software Quality Association meetups. Still, I want to talk about this one, as it really draws on a lot of things I've been thinking about, as well as a moment of embarrassment and realization during the Q&A.

This talk was all about expertise, and how we all deal with it and represent ourselves around it. I draw a lot on my own experiences and how I like to deal with ways to get beyond faking what I know and moving forward into real knowledge and skill. For those who want to see the actual Prezi presentation up close and personal, it's here.

The embarrassing moment? In the Q&A, I was asked how I felt about "Impostor Syndrome". I totally botch the definition, and I give an answer that is 100% opposite as to what Impostor Syndome actually is. Maybe it was a combination of lack of sleep or adrenaline rushing through me, but I worked through the answer, moved on to other participants, but as I would look back at the person who asked about Impostor Syndrome, I could tell by the look on their face that I didn't answer their question. 

Fortunately, one of the participants clarified for me what I had messed up. Impostor Syndrome is where you are competent but believe you are not. I felt tremendously relieved to hear this, as it gave me a chance to re-consider, re-frame and add to my understanding. Of course, some are going to ask "How could you give a talk about faking it and not have had a good grasp of "Impostor Syndrome"? It's a fair question. I didn't prepare my talk from a perspective of psychological reasons why people fake it, I approached it from my own memories and working with other people I directly knew. "Impostor Syndrome" was a term that, until that very moment, I'd never actually heard. I mentally walked through what I figured it would be, and answered. Were I perhaps better rested and less amped at that immediate moment, I might have said "what do you consider good examples of Impostor Syndrome?" so I could see their context, and then get an understanding for what they mean by the term. It's what I should have done, but didn't.

So why was that great? It gave me a very public opportunity to come clean, to not be evasive, to actually address head on something I didn't know, but "pretended" to (ironic considering the topic, huh ;) ?). It let me live my creed, and allowed that to be the lingering memory, rather than having no one call me on it, but then have several people walking around afterwards saying "wow, what a hypocrite, he just totally faked his way through that answer!"

It was a terrific reminder, and one I won't soon forget.

What Does Endorsing Me Mean to You?

This has been an interesting experiment. For those who don't know what I am referring to, LinkedIn has an option where people can "endorse" you for skills or attributes that you choose to post. I've given a few of these out to people I know or have interacted with, and I've received quite a few as well.

What's been interesting is to see exactly what I have been endorsed for. The top endorsement? Test Automation. Seems rational on the surface, except for the fact that, if you actually read my blog or my articles, you don't see a lot of "expertise" in those posts. Mostly, what you see is a fair amount of frustration, a lot of questions, and a fair amount of true confessions about how I struggle with programming. Based on this, does this mean that people are endorsing my abilities with test automation, or are they endorsing the fact that I am honest about the trade offs between what test automation promises and what it can actually deliver?

Other areas that have me baffled are the tools that I get mentioned for. Selenium is a tool i actively use, and I attend and report on both the San Francisco and San Jose Selenium MeetUp groups sessions, so that one makes sense. Getting endorsements for HP Quality Center or QTP don't make any sense at all (true confession time, I have never seen a single screen of either application in my entire testing career).

I get what the option is there for; it's a way to give kudos to people without having to go into depth. It's LinkedIn's version of the "Like" button. It's easy to click, and yes, it does look really cool when you can see a wall of icons next to a skill, or even a 99+ next to a particular item. I am grateful to those who have posted these, and I appreciate your willingness to support and back me, but it leaves me with a question... why that skill? What is it about that particular one that makes you willing to click that button that says "Does Michael Larsen know about Agile Methodologies?", or one of the other ones? Example: I spend a lot of time and advocacy on teaching and coaching, and I actively write, a lot, about those areas, but they are way down on the list of things I'm rated much higher for, with little in the way to show my knowledge or expertise.

This brings me back to what I try to do with these listings. I want to have some level of interaction with you on the topic in question. That interaction could be an email thread, a Twitter run, a collaboration on an article, participating in a Weekend Testing event or a BBST class. The venue doesn't matter, but generally, I need to have witnessed your skills. If I can't come up with a concrete place where I've seen you demonstrate said skill, I can't in good conscience endorse you for it. I'd ask that you do the same. Again, I appreciate the good vibes from all, but part of me really wants to know why you feel I deserve that thumbs up. If you can do that, then please, feel free to vote me up on any skill you want to. Likewise, if you see my picture next to a skill you've listed, know that that is what I am doing for you :).

Utilize Your Courage and Display It: 99 Ways Workshop #57

Tomoe Gozen
(巴 御前) (1157?–1247)
Late twelfth-century "Bushi",
known for her bravery and strength.
Illustration by Clovery

The Software Testing Club recently put out an eBook called "99 Things You Can Do to Become a Better Tester". Some of them are really general and vague. Some of them are remarkably specific.

My goal for the next few weeks is to take the "99 Things" book and see if I can put my own personal spin on each of them, and make a personal workshop out of each of the suggestions. 

Suggestion #57: Utilize your courage (and display it) and stand up for what you believe in. Don't bend on your morals and ethics. Test the best way you know how, despite being told otherwise. Before doing this... make sure you have mortgage insurance. ;0) - David Greenlees

I smiled when I saw the contributor of this suggestion. David Greenlees is known to many as "The Martial Tester". His interest in and practice of martial arts informs his testing. The metaphors of martial arts often are found in what he writes and how he presents his ideas. 

Therefore, I feel it only fitting to place this workshop inside of the context of martial arts in general, and specifically within that of an amazing "warrior society", known collectively in Japan as "Bushi". In the West, we know them as "Onna-bugeisha" and "Samurai". 

Their "code of conduct", in many ways, beautifully mirrors our own.

Workshop #57: Read about "bushido", and other texts that relate to the idea of living to a code of conduct. Consider the ethical foundations that are vital and important to you. Ask if you would be willing to (metaphorically) "commit your life" to your testing. Demonstrate ethical behavior to your team and colleagues. Establish standards that will pass your own personal code of conduct, where you could say "I have done nothing that would dishonor the name of 'Tester'.

In Japan, from it's earliest recorded history up to what is referred to as its "early Modern era", there existed an amazing warrior society. Bushi trained extensively, fought on behalf of ruling clans and feudal lords, and did so for the glory of the clan, their land, the Emperor and, during several critical centuries, the Shogunate. 

They dedicated their strength, their prowess, their lives and, most importantly, their honor to represent their society. Though there are many disciplines and philosophies that helped develop and inform this code (Confucianism, Zen Buddhism, Shinto) it is encapsulated, and most widely familiar, as "bushido" (or "the way of the Bushi").

Bushi placed the highest value on honor and service, to the point that violating that honor and breaching their code were considered offenses so great that death alone, at their own hands, would allow for atonement.

In our modern era, that may seem extreme, and even alien, to many of us, but the code of conduct fires our imaginations today because it was so high and exact. Discipline, focus, drive, integrity, honor, service, devotion to ideals and the willingness to stand for them, and die for them, stands in stark relief to much of today's "slippery and situational" ethics.

Software testing is a world of contexts. There are many situations that require flexibility, adaptability and the ability to pivot and consider different angles. A common phrase is that "there are no "best practices", just good practices in context". I agree with this phrase, but I will say that there are indeed "Best Practices".  Here's a short list of them:

• Honesty
• Loyalty
• Self Improvement
• Education
• Integrity
• Compassion
• Creativity
• Empathy
• Bravery
• Love

If you must embrace any "Best practice", consider starting there.

Do I have a code of conduct, my own "Bushido"? I do, and for me, it's fairly simple. I'm a Boy Scout. World Scouting's code of conduct is how I consider and determine the vast majority of my testing decisions (and, indeed, my life decisions). I consider them core principles center to my being. The exact wording of the Scout Law varies around the world and in different countries. Since I was raised in the United States of America, I state it as:

"A Scout is: Trustworthy, Loyal, Helpful, Friendly, Courteous, Kind, Obedient, Cheerful, Thrifty, Brave, Clean and Reverent"

If I am ever asked to do anything that would violate any of those principles, I need not call on context, situational ethics, or anything else. My answer is simple:

"NO".

Bottom Line: 

Family, culture, government, nationality, belief systems, organizations, companies, all are areas of our life where our devotions are focused, and our patterns of action and our "Way" is defined. My way very likely may differ from yours. Much comes into informing how we view the world and the way that we approach our ethical and moral compass. We need not be the same, but we need to stand for integrity and honesty in what we do as testers. While the code of the Bushi may seem extreme today, it's an interesting thing to ponder… if we were to devote ourselves to the same level in our testing careers as the Bushi did, to the extent that we would end our own lives if we violated that trust… what would we do differently?