Are You Using Your Leadership Voice? An #InflectraCON Live Blog

Amy Jo Esser is starting out her talk by sharing about how she wanted to try out for cheerleading when she was younger and how she did not make the team the first time and why she didn't make it. While she wanted to be a cheerleader, she didn't really realize what it would take to be effective in that role. After she was told the reasons she was not chosen, she took the feedback and applied it to the next year's try out and she practiced many things, the most important being the fact that as a cheerleader, you need to use your voice and it needs to carry.

I have a similar story in that I spent years developing my voice over many years to perform on stage as a singer. I developed a rhino-thick hide (metaphorically speaking) and I focused on getting out there and communicating with people, especially to promote and sell tickets. I jokingly told people that I trained myself to be an extrovert. If that is accurate or not, I do know that learning to project and learning to promote helped me considerably but just as the quietest voice I the room will not be effective, just because I am confident, can project, and can interact with people doesn't necessarily mean I am using my voice effectively, especially as a leader. So what might I learn/consider/apply today and going forward? 

As a lyricist, I tend to place an emphasis on the words that I use but if I'm being frank, strip away the music and just read my words and they more times than not just read like bad poetry. To be fair, most lyrics read like bad poetry when stripped from the music and vocal delivery. It's the emotion of the voice that sells it. More to the point, it's the swelling and falling away, the dynamics and the delivery, that make the difference. IF I sing monotone or quietly for the entire song, much of the impact is lost. Going completely overboard also loses the plot and then no one can take you seriously. It's the ability to measure and gauge when to be quiet and when to be bombastic that makes the song work.

Too often, we suffer from two big issues with our voice. The first is not being assertive and struggling to make ourselves be heard. As a leader, we can't be timid and we can't be shy about speaking out. Our internal voice (what Seth Godin likes to call our "Lizard Brain") tries to keep us quiet and reserved. It also tends to encourage us to couch our words with a lot of filler speech (true story: this resonates, as my most viewed TikTok is me talking about how I mostly avoid filler words in my speech ;) ). To have a more confident voice, eliminating or limiting fill words and also making a point to limit the "semantic bleaching" that we do. What's semantic bleaching? It's when we "overstate" or when we really, completely want to be sure that people really understand the totally valuable thing that we want to share... or I could just say "I want to ensure people understand". The latter is direct. The former is semantic bleaching. 

Something that any speaker can learn from singers is standing and breathing from their diaphragm. This is what singers often call "back breathing, where you feel your lower obliques and spinal erectors expand, and then you expel air by squeezing from the obliques and the spinal erectors. We have a phrase in singing to "sing from your groin". It may sound a little crude but if you do, you will be surprised how well your breathing and breath support is focused.  

One of the things that editing a podcast has helped me do is to stop, pause, and allow my brain and my mouth to synchronize. That pause may feel as though it is forever. Record yourself speaking and review. You may find that the long pause was much shorter in real-time as you listen back. Think about where you would see a period or a comma in your speech. Try to do your best to pause at these points and be deliberate as you speak. I also use hand gestures to help me do this. I often joke that I am part Italian so hand gestures are genetic (LOL!) but they do help considerably.

We have five building blocks we can use to change our speech patterns; pitch, pace, tone, melody, and volume. These are areas there is a lot of play and variation but knowing when and where to make these changes can make a dramatic difference in your received message.

There are a lot of benefits to practicing speaking, especially if you want to be a leader. The key part of leading is encouraging people to follow you and the best way to do that is to have a voice that persuades and encourages people to want to follow you in the first place. The key here is we have to practice it and make it a part of our everyday communication. By doing so, our voices will come across as more confident and that confidence will radiate out and help position us to have people ready and interested in listening to us and what we say.

Am I Really So Ordinary? - a #PNSQC2019 Blog Retro

This has been an amazing few days. I've received a presentation award from my peers here. You all voted with your evaluations and you felt my score warranted the second most highly rated presentation of the conference. WOW!

I'm humbled by this but I'm also a little embarrassed. Why would I be embarrassed? Because for the past five months, my blog has been quiet. Why is that? Because I've felt that I don't have anything important left to say. TESTHEAD has been on the air for almost ten years. There are over 1200 blog posts I have written. What more could I possibly say without repeating myself? What can I possibly add that would be even remotely interesting?


I don't know if anyone else has these thoughts from time to time... or often... or every single day... but yeah, I do. I had a great conversation last night with a fellow presenter (they may or may not be cool with me sharing this so I'm cloaking in a little anonymity... but I'm pretty sure anyone who knows us can guess ;) ). As I was talking about how I struggled to come up with an idea this year and that I wondered if my experience would even be all that interesting, we recapped a few things and thoughts:

- experiences are all we can really share and there what people actually relate to. Me setting myself on high and offering pronouncements is boring. Me telling how I got completely lost or frustrated with a situation and what I learned from it is much more valuable.

- I joked that so much of my talk was "blinding flashes of the obvious" and the response back was "was it really? If it was so obvious, why was it a revelation when you addressed it?" Point being, what may seem patently obvious in hindsight may be hidden or not understood by everyone else. In short, if you are confused, it's a good bet a lot of other people are, too.

- it takes a lot to get people to get up on a stage or in front of a group of people to be willing to speak. What we may see as banal and every day is a major step out of the comfort zone for 95% of people. The act of presenting is courageous in and of itself, much less someone willing to do it again and again, year after year.

- what's more, think about what people do to agree to come to a conference in general. They give up their time, their families, their work commitments, their home commitments, many of them pack themselves into a plane for several hours and are not at all thrilled about the experience, yet they go because they want to hear what might give them an edge, a new idea, a new angle to help them do better work every day. They want to hear what you have to say, and really, the only worthwhile thing that you can share is your own experiences.

I should also mention that the thoughts for my talk didn't come together fully formed. The paper I submitted went through three revisions and extensive feedback from two other individuals that helped me take ideas that were half baked and get them to make more sense, as well as to be able to step back and help me emphasize the areas that needed to be and push back or disregard areas that didn't add as much as the parts they suggested I emphasize. For those who voted for my presentation, I must be absolutely clear that "I HAD HELP!"

Others have asked if I will be back next year and what I might talk about? The answers are "likely, yes!" and "I really do not know at this stage" but I have a few ideas. One thing I want to do is go back and review the other "30 Days" challenges that the Ministry of Testing has put together. I have several areas in my own work environment that is requiring me to step out of my comfort zone (have I mentioned I'm trading in my MacBookPro for a Windows 10 machine? Have I mentioned that I'm looking into what it takes to program in C# and run on .NET Core? Yeah, those are new realities for me. If you asked me last week, I might have said "yeah, no one is really interested in that." Today? I have a totally different opinion on that front. I'm still learning things and there's a lot to learn so it only seems reasonable I keep learning in public the way I've said I would :).

PS, I've been on a voyage of musical discovery with my younger daughter recently and part of that has been to introduce singer/songwriter Paula Cole to her. Today's title borrows from her first single "I Am So Ordinary" so credit where credit is due ;).

Is This Testable? - my talk at #PNSQC2019

All right, one down! My talk, I think, went well.

My huge thanks to Jennie Bramble (@jenniedoesthings) for live-tweeting basically my entire talk. Thus, I'm going to capture for posterity her stream of consciousness and again offer my enthusiastic gratitude :).
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Jenny Bramble @ #PNSQC2019

@jennydoesthings

 

 Profile

an hour ago, 27 tweets, 23 min read

 

It's time for Is This Testable? A Personal Journey to Learn How to Ask Better Questions From My Applications and Engineering Team with @mkltesthead at @PNSQC #PNSQC2019 

Also, I'm taking selfies with his phone. :D @mkltesthead #PNSQC2019 

mentions I like playing dress up in many forms. @mkltesthead #PNSQC2019 

mentions It's a voyage of discovery! @mkltesthead #PNSQC2019 

mentions The @ministryoftest 30 Days of Testability just got a shout out by @mkltesthead #PNSQC2019 

mentions Testability involves a few things: communication, involvement, and a willingness to look at a product objectively. @mkltesthead #PNSQC2019 

mentions A hypothesis is testable if there is some real possibility of deciding wether it is true or false based on real experience. @mkltesthead #PNSQC2019 

mentions What is light? What is dark? We don't really know, so we can't really test it. But if we use actual numbers for light and dark, then we can test if they are too close. @mkltesthead #PNSQC2019 

mentions "Generally speaking, math is pretty consistent. We'll leave string theory out of this." @mkltesthead #PNSQC2019 

mentions You can't automate a subjective feeling. You can automate objective things. @mkltesthead #PNSQC2019 

mentions Get familiar with your log files! Welcome to your first flash of the blindingly obvious. @mkltesthead #PNSQC2019 

mentions We can all agree this is generally how cars work. Tesla owners, don't get at me. @mkltesthead #PNSQC2019 

mentions We have to look at the things that plug into our application--each component has log files that I need to keep track of. @mkltesthead #PNSQC2019 

mentions The takeaway I want to encourage is to champion unified log files wherever you can. @mkltesthead #PNSQC2019 

mentions How many of you have a good relationship with your sales engineers or customer support engineers? Only a few? Okay, homework: go home, find one, buy them a drink, and learn about their pain points. @mkltesthead #PNSQC2019 

mentions If you can collaborate with someone like a sales engineer for CSR, they can help you have the best test environment available.@mkltesthead #PNSQC2019 

mentions Being able to plug in feature analytics will let you know how people are adopting your features. What features are they actually using? @mkltesthead #PNSQC2019 

mentions We can guess, but real data is much better. @mkltesthead #PNSQC2019 

mentions Automat-able does not necessarily mean testable. @mkltesthead #PNSQC2019 

mentions Second piece of homework: everyone go look up @eviltester and follow him. @mkltesthead #PNSQC2019 

mentions "How am I going to test this?" If you don't ask this for every feature, you will regret it. @mkltesthead #PNSQC2019 

mentions "What are situations I can throw at this problem that go beyond the status quo?" @mkltesthead #PNSQC2019 

mentions I'm a reenactor and a cosplay nerd--I love persona testing! @mkltesthead #PNSQC2019 

mentions Conduct regular show and tell--show people what you've been working on! @mkltesthead #PNSQC2019 

mentions Pair with your developers. Work on tests together! @mkltesthead #PNSQC2019 

mentions Identify your dependencies. Your application is not just your application--it is only as testable as he most remote dependency you have to interact with. @mkltesthead #PNSQC2019 

mentions Heat seeking: check your source code and find where you're making frequent changes. @mkltesthead #PNSQC2019  

En Route to Portland - a #PNSQC2019 "Live Blog"

It's been a while since I've done this.

As I sit in San Francisco International Airport, I am laughing at the change this year has brought about. One o the more interesting ones is just how many times I actually come and go from this airport every day, albeit for different reasons than most. My daughter started working or SFO during the summer. Should you fly on Scandinavian Air or  Air New Zealand, you might get to interact with her :). However, it's because I'm flying out today that I'm seating and gearing up the little blog engine that hopes to.

Yes, it's time for the Pacific Northwest Software Quality Conference, one of my officially most attended and participated in conferences. I will be giving a talk on Monday morning called "Is This Testable? A Personal Journey to Learn How to Ask Better Questions From My Applications and Engineering Team". It's all about my adventures in Testability Land. What, you expected an Accessibility talk ;)? I can't say I blame you as that's been my go-to advocacy for the past five years but this year I decided to try something a little different. This time I'm going to share the details of my experiences with looking at Testability and what I learned from that process. If you are attending PNSQC and want to check it out, here's the details and a link to my paper:


Also, tomorrow at Lunch, Bill Opsal and I will be playing a little game with those who want to attend called "The Release Day Crime Scene":

Join Michael Larsen and Bill Opsal for a game of sleuthing. It is release day and a crime against code and customers has been committed. Can we help identify who done it? Take part in this interactive panel and discuss ways to identify and examine clues, build a case with evidence and make the streets safe for functions and methods.

All in the name of truth, justice, and the releasable way.

So, yeah, if you are at the conference, I look forward to seeing and talking with you. With that, it looks like it's time to check-in and get ready to board. Next stop, Portland :).

Saab 99 GLE vs Mazda Miata MK1: Adventures in Car Restoration and Test Framework Building

Now that I have had a couple of times (and some dress rehearsals leading up to them) I feel pretty good about the material that I've been presenting in my workshop "How to Build a Testing Framework From Scratch". Actually, I need to take a small step back and say that the "From Scratch" part isn't really the truth. This workshop doesn't really "build" anything from the initial code level.

Instead, it deals with finding various components and piecing them together and with additional glue code in various places making everything work together. As a metaphor for this, I like to make a comparison to restoring cars. I'm not super mechanically inclined but like many people who were young and had more imagination than common sense, I harbored a desire to take an older car and "restore" it. My daughter has had a similar desire recently. Both of us have undertaken this process in our late teen/early 20s but both of us had dramatically different experiences.

When I was younger, I had the opportunity to pick up relatively cheaply a 1978 Saab 99 GLE. It looked a lot like this:

For those not familiar with Saab, it's a Swedish car brand that produced cars under that name from 1945 until 2012. It's a boutique brand, with a dedicated fan base. It has a few distinctive features, one of the entertaining ones being the fact that the ignition (at least for many of the vehicles) was on the floor between the driver seats. The key point is that it was not a vehicle where a large number of them were made. It's a rare bird and finding parts for rare birds can be a challenge. In some cases, I was not able to find original parts, so I had to pay for specialized aftermarket products and those were expensive. It also had a unique style of transmission that was really expensive to fix. Any guesses on one of the major projects I had to undertake with this car? The price tag for this was $3,000 and that was in 1987 dollars :(. When it ran, it was awesome. When it broke, it was a pricey thing to fix. Sadly, over the few years I had it, the number of days where it didn't work or needed work outweighed the days when it was working in a way that made me happy. I ultimately abandoned the project in 1990. There were just too many open-ended issues that were too hard or too expensive to fix.

By contrast, my daughter has embarked on her own adventure in car restoration. Her choice? A 1997 Mazda MX-5 Miata MK1. Her car looks a lot like this:

Her experience with "restoring" her vehicle and getting it to the condition she wants it to be, while not entirely cheap, has been a much less expensive proposition compared to my "Saab story" (hey, I had to put up with that pun for years, so you get to share with me ;) ). The reason? The Mazda Miata was and is a very popular car, what's more, a large number of them were made and they have a very devoted fan base. Because of that, Mazda Miata parts are relatively easy to find and there are a large number of companies that make aftermarket parts for them. With popularity and interest comes availability and access. Additionally, with a small size and relatively simple construction, there are a lot of areas that she can do work on the car herself that doesn't require specialized parts or tools. In short, her experiences are night and day different as compared to mine.

Have you stuck with me through my analogy? Excellent! Then the takeaway of this should be easy to appreciate. When we develop a testing framework, it may be tempting to go with something that is super new or has some specialized features that we fall in love with. There is a danger in loving something new or esoteric. There may or may not be expertise or support for the tools you may like or want to use. There may be a need to make something that doesn't currently exist. The more often that needs to be done, the more tied into your solution you are and will have to be. That may or may not be a plus. By contrast, using something that is more ubiquitous, something that has a lot of community support will be easier to implement and will also be easier to maintain and modify over time. It also allows for a greater flexibility to work with other applications where an esoteric or dedicated framework with exotic elements may not have it.

Stay tuned in future installments as I tell you why I chose to use Java, Maven, JUnit, and Cucumber-JVM to serve as the chassis for my testing framework example. Consider it my deciding I'd rather restore a Mazda Miata over a Saab 99 GLE.

Talking About Talking - a 1 1/2 armed #LiveBlog from #STPCON Spring 2018

Any time I attend a conference, I tend to go with 70% new content and about 30% familiar speakers. Over time, I've found it harder to look for new people because many of the people I get to know get asked to repeat present at conferences. With that out of the way, I consider Damian Synadinos a friend, but I picked his discussion for a specific reason. While I think he is intending for this to be about public speaking, I'm looking to see how I can leverage public speaking focus on my own active company interactions.

Why do I speak at conferences, at meetups, or at events? There are a variety of reasons but if I have to be 100% honest, there are two reasons. The first is wholly professional. I want to develop credibility. I want to show that I walk the talk as well as that I know at least an aspect of something. The second is personal and depending on how well you know me, this is either a revelation or so obvious it's ridiculous. I'm an ex-"RockStar". I used to spend a lot of time entertaining people as a singer and I loved doing it. I get a similar rush from public speaking, especially when people say they actually enjoy what I'm talking about and how I deliver the messages I prepare.

Part of talking in public is the fact that you are putting your ideas out there for others to consider. That can be scary. We own our ideas and our insecurities. as long as we keep them to ourselves, we can't be ridiculed for them. In short, people can't laugh at us for the things we don't put out there. Personally, I think this is a false premise. I have had people laugh at what I presented, but not because what I was saying was foolish or made me look dumb. Instead, it was because what I was talking about was in and of itself funny (actually, more absurd) but people laughed because they could relate. To date, I have not been laughed at. Laughed with, lots of times. If you are afraid people will laugh *at you*, let me reassure you, it's hugely unlikely that will happen.

The biggest reason why I encourage getting out there and speaking is that our ideas deserve to be challenged and we should want to challenge our ideas. Also, we may never aspire to get on a stage and speak, but all of us participate in meetings or presentations at work, in some form or another. By getting out there and speaking, we can improve our ability to function in these meetings. 

Something else to consider for a reason to give a talk or speak in public is what I call the "ignorance cure" for a topic. It's wise to talk about stuff we know about, but once a year or so, I will deliberately pick something I don't know much about or that I could definitely know more about. When I do this, I try to pick a timeline that gives me several months so that I can learn about it in a deeper way. People's mileage may vary with this, but I see a definite benefit from doing this.

Not every talk idea is going to be amazing. Not every talk idea is going to be some revolutionary idea. Truth be told, I'm lousy at revolutionary things. I'm highly unlikely to be creating the next big anything. However, I am really good at being a second banana to take an idea someone else has and running with it. Don't be afraid that something you want to talk about isn't new. We aren't born with ideas, and most of the time, we stand on the shoulders of giants.

My recommendation to anyone who has any interest in public speaking, no matter how small, is to borrow from Morrisey... "Sing Your Life". Talk about your experiences, as they will always be true and real. You may not be an expert on a topic, but you are absolutely an expert on *your experiences* with that topic. Also, if anyone wants to get up and talk, let me know. I'd be happy to help :).

How Do I Work This?

It's another year end, and another chance to come back to the Talking Heads song "Once in a Lifetime", since I feel it to be an apt metaphor for this blog, as well as the past couple of years of growth, change, learning, unlearning, accomplishments and frustrations, steps and mis-steps, and all of the other things that come with being a software tester in a changing software world.

I celebrated five years of Testhead this year, and passed 1,000 blog posts. I also had an opportunity to expand my blogging to some additional areas, including a stint with IT Knowledge exchange and the Uncharted Waters blog. As with many things, times, priorities and situations change, and I wrote my last blog post for Uncharted Waters back in November. It was a good run, and I thank ITKE, Matt Heusser and Justin Rohrman for letting me offer my perspectives on a few things this past year.

This was "The Year of Accessibility" as Albert Gareev and I decided we would combine our efforts and work on talks, test ideas, workshops, presentations, and a stretch goal of preparing a treatment of a book about Accessibility testing. I am happy to say we made some great steps in that direction. we both delivered several talks at various local testing groups, as well as national and international conferences. We proposed and collaborated on ways to present the materials, and we introduced two mnemonics related to accessibility testing (HUMBLE and PaSaRan). We did not complete the treatment for the book, at least, we have not completed it yet. Part of it was time and other things getting in the way, but for me it was also the discovery of and a developing interest in the parallel discipline of Inclusive Design, which I think can be an excellent addition to the discussion Accessibility Development and Testing. 2016 will see me branching into other areas to talk about, but rest assured, this is a labor of love for both of us, and you will see plenty more from us on this topic in 2016 (that is, if Albert wants to keep going with this; I'll not presume to speak for him ;) ).

This year saw many personal changes, most sparked by one defining factor. In April, I said goodbye to Ken Pier, my director, my mentor, and my good friend. He died of cancer, and he left a hole in our testing team that we are still recovering from. After several months of searching, we found another tester to join our team, but we did not replace Ken. We cannot replace him. We can only carry on, while keeping his legacy and influence alive. Part of that meant we chose to integrate our testing team with the broader engineering group. We all report to the VP of Engineering, and we all are "developers" on the same team. In addition, I've taken on the responsibility of being the release manager for the company, which has required some "interesting" lessons in the realities of software development, continuous delivery, continuous deployment and continuous testing, and the limitations that corporate entities may require to make these systems work. In short, this year saw me step into more of a "specializing generalist" role, and to spread into more development initiatives than I had been involved with before. If I thought I was ignorant on software delivery concepts before, it's been made abundantly clear just how much i still need to learn.

This change, and the necessities of the demands of work, required that take a hard look at the things that I could effectively do, as well as the things I could not do any longer. After four years of involvement, I stepped down from involvement as part the Board of Directors for the Association for Software Testing. I did this for a number of reasons. First was the demands of work and home were making it less possible for me to deliver on what I felt the organization should do. I would rather say I cannot do something than say "yes" and not deliver. Sadly, I saw more of the latter happening than I wanted to. Additionally, I feel that organizations are not well served when people become "too comfortable" and "too entrenched". We as people stop growing, and the organization loses out on new ideas and innovations that others can provide. I am still actively involved with AST, both as an instructor and, going into 2016, as what I hope will be more of a content provider role as we develop new materials to supplement current classes and, we hope, create brand new ones.

One area that I have likewise addressed, and has been a big part of my life for the past few months, is a focus on my personal health, and a change of habits that I became determined was necessary. The deaths of two coworkers within the past year, both from the same condition, and one I have genetic markers for, have made it a priority with some urgency for me. Many of my posts have been written around fitness, health, and using software testing principles to re-create myself. For some of you, that's been a nice addition to this blog. For others, probably an annoyance ;). Still, it's part of my learning, and I think much of what I have learned has relevance to testing and discovery, so I will continue to talk about and post those items here. I will, however, be making a slight change going forward. From now on, when you see a post with the word "Aedificamus" in it, know that that post likely has something to do with health, fitness, food or some other learning on my journey to get and stay as healthy as possible. Aedificamus is Latin and, loosely translated, means "rebuilding through practice".

As I bring this year to a close, sometimes I wonder if people still consider this blog relevant, or if what I write has had an impact for other testers out there. Needless to say, I was both humbled and gratified to hear Brent Jensen and Alan Page both mention the TESTHEAD blog as one of their picks for 2015 on the A/B Testing podcast. It was really touching to hear Brent say that he appreciated that I was learning about, and publishing as I went along, the changing landscape of software testing, and where I felt my role in it might lie both currently and in the future. Some years ago, I did an extended review of 'How We Test Software at Microsoft" and I recall Alan Page writing about how he appreciated that I "got it", that I understood ultimately what he and his co-writers were trying to say. For me, it's my turn to return the favor. Thank you, Alan and Brent. thank you for "getting" TESTHEAD, and thank you so much for the shout out in your year in review podcast. I am proud to have you at the top of my list of alphabetically ordered favorite podcasts ;).

This year requires a lot of thanks to a lot of people, some of which I have mentioned already, but additionally I want to say thank you to Erik Davis, Markus Gaertner, Keith Klain, Alessandra Moreira, Justin Rohrman and Pete Walen, my fellow Board of Directors members with AST for the 2014-2015 year term. Thank you for your support during my year as President, and all of your help and encouragement along the way. Additionally, thank you to Ben Yaroch for being an advisor, for letting me know when I was doing something good, as well as when I was doing something stupid. I appreciated the advice every time, even if I did or did not always act on it. My thanks also to Ilari Aegeter,  Alex Bantz, Roxanne Jackson and Eric Proegler for stepping in this year and becoming Board Members to keep the work moving forward. I love the energy you all bring, and I am excited to see what we all do next. My thanks to Justin Rohrman (again), Albert Gareev (again) and JeanAnn Harrison for your continued efforts along with me to facilitate Weekend Testing Americas. We celebrated our fifth anniversary this year, and I am happy to say we are still going strong, thanks in no small part to your efforts. My thanks also to Matt Heusser for his willingness to include me on a variety of projects and to always be a springboard and feedback for ideas both well formed and, sometimes, in need of considerable polishing. I look forward to many more opportunities to keep storming the castle. Thank you Josh Meier and Curtis Stuehrenberg for working with me to keep Bay Area Software Testers a thing. We have a lot of software testing talent in the Bay Area, I want to see that talent grow and us help that process. There's lots to do :). Finally, my thanks to everyone who listened to me speak, participated in a class, joined a weekend testing session, came to a meetup, or read and shared a blog post of mine throughout this year. Thank you for making 2015 a great year for me, and here's looking forward to 2016. I'm curious to see what the title will be next year ;).