Today, I finished reading a rather old book. It was published in 1961. It’s about computer programming. So, what can you learn from a 50 year old book? While reading it, I got in touch with one of its authors, Jerry Weinberg. He seemed pretty astonished that even after 50 years someone was still reading one of his earlier works. Besides the fact that the book Computer Programming Fundamentals by Leeds and Weinberg was one of the first books to mention software testing at all, I got many more nuggets of wisdom out of it – astoundingly still valid, even half a century later. I decided to share my insights with others.
Continue reading Computer Programming FundamentalsCategory Archives: Leadership
Technical and personnel leadership
An experiment on Quality and Time
Having recently finished The Gift of Time, a gift written by 15 authors for Jerry Weinberg‘s 75th birthday in 2009, and a present from Michael Bolton when I met him for the first time in 2010, I am inspired by a thought experiment based on two chapters in that book.
The first one is the one from Michael Bolton himself where he defines the Relative Rule:
A description of something intagible as “X” really means “X to some person, at some time”.
The other chapter is from Bent Adsersen on “Time – and how to get it”. I have written before on Michael Bolton’s Relative Rule here. Bent adds a new perspective on the time factor to it. So, I will start with that.
CAST 2011: Context-driven leadership
On my final day at CAST 2011 I attended James Bach‘s tutorial on context-driven leadership. He challenged us to challenge the principles of the context-driven school of testing, since he became nervous that no one did that in the past decade. This is my write-up of that challenge as a follow-up.
Continue reading CAST 2011: Context-driven leadershipEuroPLoP from a first-timers perspective
Last week I had the pleasure to attend EuroPLoP. I submitted a pattern that I started back on October 1st at the inaugrual AA-FTT pattern writing workshop. Back then I called it Essential Examples, whilst through several round of shepherding and workshops I ended up with the name One clear purpose currently.
From the conference, I had several impressions as well as some insights which I would love to have gotten earlier. I decided to write these down for the next first-timers in the future to consider – even before submitting a pattern in first place.
Continue reading EuroPLoP from a first-timers perspectiveProblem-solving leadership May 2011
During the past week I had the pleasure to attend the Problem-solving Leadership course in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Johanna Rothman, Esther Derby, and Jerry Weinberg led through the course, generating some insights from their more than 100 years of professional experience. Here are some ideas I would like to share hoping to motivate some of my readers to attend the course as well – I heard there were some places in the August course left.
Continue reading Problem-solving leadership May 2011Are you a member of … ?
In a forum on the Software Testing Club today someone asked a question whether I was a member of some testing organization. I put up a rather longish answer to that which I wanted to share on my blog as well.
Continue reading Are you a member of … ?Management 3.0
Last week I was fortunate to attend Jurgen Appelo‘s class on Management 3.0 in Hamburg, Germany. When Matt Heusser hit me to Jurgen’s Top200 Blogs for Software Developers in 2009, I sensed that Mr. Appelo had a unique view on software development. Last year he finished his book on Management 3.0, and accompanying the course we got a free copy of it. While I had read the stuff from Weinberg on Management, one of my goals was to find out what management is. Though I couldn’t achieve this goal in Jurgen’s class, I got some nice and unexpected take-aways from the training.
Continue reading Management 3.0Best practices for “Best practices”
Last week I crossed the term “best practices” quite often. So I decided to share my thoughts on the term, and offer alternatives.
Continue reading Best practices for “Best practices”The Inbox-Zero Fallacy
On my flight to the Belgium Testing Days I noticed a pattern regarding answering and handling emails. I think there is a vicious cycle between two groups of people dealing with emails.
Thus far, I observed two kinds of behaviors when answering emails. First there are people like the one sitting in front of my row on the plane to Brussels. They take their laptop with them, open them while on the plane, move email from here to there, putting them in different folders, organizing them in thoughtful ways, in order to have everything in its place.
Then there are the guys who are like me. When they get an email, and recognize it, they work at it straight away, hitting the reply button, writing back a quick statement, sending the mail back. Or, if there is no further use, they read it, and forget about it. Sometimes I wonder whether my motivation to directly answer an email is to get the ball back to the person who sent me something – sometimes, but not often.
I don’t have problems with too many unread emails. Though, consider what happens, when I finally get a reply from one of the “move mails in folders”. I open it, read it, hit reply, write whatever comes to mind, send it back. Now, that guy might be trying to reach an Inbox-Zero state quickly working back the 20 mails from me. As he does this, he gets replies in between – often times faster than he can answer. Maybe in the end he gives up.
Do you see the problem? Well, I don’t have a problem from my perspective. But while watching the guy moving mails around on the plane, not sure what to do about them, re-opening the mail and the attachment, that guy looked poor to me. In the end I was considering whether he had a conversation with someone like me.
Of course, this is a self-reinforcing system as you might have noticed by now. But I don’t have the problem, besides I got some longer waiting times from time to time. But who should solve the problem? Well, I think I can contribute to the solution by not answering every email as quickly as I can, and leaving the other people around me some room to breathe, and eventually end up with an Inbox of zero – but let’s see.
A week with Kent Beck
In November I had the opportunity to stay a whole week with Kent Beck. it-agile GmbH invited him for two courses – Responsive Design and Advanced TDD – and one workshop to Hamburg, Germany, and I took both courses and the workshop. Today I was contacted by Johannes Link who was surprised not to find a write-up of this week on my blog. It turns out somewhere during the past year I have turned into a reporter. So, here is my summary from what I could get from my notes. Initially I planned to write it via email to Johannes, but then I though why not share those comments on my blog. Maybe others are looking forward to it.
Continue reading A week with Kent Beck