Rules and Process, Process and Rules

Recently my old boss transitioned out and my new boss transitioned in.  The new boss, is for the most part a pretty good guy.  Head firmly on his shoulders with brain intact.  So far I've enjoyed working with him and expect that trend to continue. 

He has brought with him a skill/habit that I haven't encountered very often.  He's been consulting at the VP Eng level for a while now and as such, with his multiple engagements he's had to build up a skill set around figuring people out quickly.  He is well versed in a number of frameworks of personality assessment and uses these as tools of his own for understanding.   As far as I can tell, so far, he allows these to provide a snap profile for people that he then uses judgement and experience to evolve into a more accurate and true picture.  

I do know that there are people out there that loathe this type of approach, of pigeon holing people instead of treating people as individuals.  Loath might, in fact, be too light of a word for it, I've watched people start foaming at the gums with glowing red eyes over the entire notion. I, however, think that it's a moderately reasonable approach to your interactions as long as you're fairly open to allowing ongoing evidence to alter your opinions.  I've been pretty happy with this aspect of the new boss as well.

By way of an example - I found out that this boss had tagged me as a person who pretty closely tracks to rules and processes.  This highlighted itself in our meetings as we've started transitioning the team to agile in comments that indicated he believed that I would be the person being a stickler to following process.  And indeed in some ways I am, not so much in that I insist that we follow a process but rather in that we acknowledge that there is a process that has been set in place for a particular situation before we proceed down a different pass.  But within the objection itself, he believed that I was trying to keep us on the path.  After some discussions about these facts he no longer believes that I am so stuck on the process trail. 

 I am a firm believer in the value of having process for anything that you do that is repeatable.  Whether it's in your personal life or in your business world.  Process isn't necessary defined, for me, as 'the best way to do something.'  Process for me can rather be defined as 'a way of doing something such that you are getting a reasonably high return value from your actions, each and every time that you do it.  It must also be a way that is effectively follow-able by each team member without being so complicated as to be a barrier for compliance."  It's not necessarily the best way, every process can be improved. It's more important to find a reasonable process and implement it rather than wait for the best way.  It is essential to make sure that your process isn't super complicated as well because if it's too hard, people simply won't do it, or at least won't do it right.  There's nothing saying that you can't improve process after you've declared one, they should be considered to be living entities, ready to evolve...with the right process being followed. 

Process is important because it's the thing that helps you perform something correctly when you're not really paying attention, or you're a little sleepy that day, or you don't perform a task on a regular basis, or you're just new and don't understand things completely.  Process is the thing that tracks the little things when you don't want to so that the whole is accomplished with a greater level of success.  Process also helps define success so you know when you're done.  

So OK, now that I've made it seem like my new boss was right and that I'm a rules Nazi there's an extension to what I've said above.  It's only when you understand a process that you can make a decision to remove yourself from that process, go another way and still hope for success.  More often than not when we're doing something that doesn't quite match up with process I find myself asking the question, 'This is what the process says we should be doing, if that's the case, should we be doing what we ARE doing?'  If you have a reasonably intelligent answer and can field my follow up questions that start with, 'have you considered...' (questions that flow from the actual process themselves) then I'll be your biggest backer in going off the reservation. 

If everyone thought the same, worked the same, made decisions the same and went into everything fully aware of all the factors in play then we wouldn't need process because every time you'd still get the same result.  So that's what process does, it helps you to success when people aren't aware of all the factors or aren't thinking clearly.  By asking the questions of whether you should be breaking the process you're ensuring that you are thinking of the important factors and it's OK to move off process.  

Maybe. 
You might still be dooming yourself. 

temporary difficulties

My apologies. It would appear that my site stopped working late last week.  Something to do with the auto-forwarding to qaisdoes.  After attempting to self troubleshoot with no success I put in a trouble ticket.  Today it miraculously started...well, behaving differently which allowed my self-troubleshooting to be more successful.  

We're back up now.  I apologize for the absence. 
Additionally, I have an actual entry near post-able - it will be up soon. 

Scrum Challenge - Little White Lies II

This scrum challenge is pretty closely based upon a team building challenge I found off the internet in a number of places.  Sometimes it is called Two Truths and a Lie.  In fact this was the second time I ran this challenge - the first time was last year.

The challenge is pretty simple. Each person 

Instructions

During Scrum

1. Each person is handed a piece of paper.  (they've been told to bring pens)
2. Each person has 2 minutes to write down three statements about themselves and their name on a piece of paper.
1. the statements can be things like their shoe size, their birth place etc.
2. one of the statements will be a lie.
3. that statement should be marked as a lie.
3. The judge reads out each person's statements anonymously, randomizing statement order for each person.
1. going around the table each person votes on who wrote the three statements.
1. the judge records the people that get it write, anonymously.
2. a person voting for their own entry gets that point.
2. going around the table again, each person votes on which statement is a lie.
1. the judge records tallies against each statement.
2. a person voting on their own lie doesn't get counted.
4. At the end the judge tallies up the scores.
1. one point for each person's vote for the right person.  ie if Joe has 3 people pick his entry, that's 3 points for joe.
2. one point for each person's vote for the right lie.  ie if Joe has 3 people choose the statement that was actually a lie that's 3 points for Joe,
5. Winner is the entry with the fewest points.

The Results

I'm adding in the results from my team, although i am changing the names to protect the innocent from payback from the less innocent.  These results aren't really going to be that interesting to you I don't think, however they are indicative of the types of things you're going to see in a challenge like this.  

Author	​​​Statements (red is lie)
​T1	1.     ​I've done ballet 2.     I play the flute. 3.     I'm a black belt.
T2​	1.     ​I am a good swimmer. 2.     I am a good dancer. 3.     I am a good snowboarder.
T3	1.     Star Wars is my favourite movie. 2.     I've been to Belgium. 3.     My legs have been shredded by kittens.
T4	I play the piano. I play the saxaphone. I play the trumpet.
T5​	1.     I was born in German. 2.     I lived in Germany until i was 2 years old. 3.     I have been married twice.
​T6	1.     I don't wactch TV. 2.     I don't drive 3.     I have 4 cousins
T7​	1.     ​I lived in Alberta when i was younger. 2.     I think some hip hop bands are really good. 3.     I used to compete in skateboard competitions..
​T8	1.     ​I was born in Hong Kong 43 years ago with a bad weather morning. 2.     I had my first car which was a Toyota. 3.     I joined DPT 5 years and 8 months ago.

Reception

Maybe it's the challenge of writing down things that other members of the team aren't going to know or being given permission to write down a lie but this game has gone over quite well both times that we've played it.  People get into writing down their statements and seem to enjoy the process. 

What Went Right

The right level of statements came out right.  People were able to tell lies sometimes and not other times.  People learned things about each other.  It seems to have all worked rather well. 

What Went Wrong

We ran out of time on this one so the review of the statements was a little rushed.  A little more haste in the early parts would make things work better. 

Lessons/Team Benefits

There's always a benefit from a team strengthening their bonds and forming stronger relationships. This challenge does that directly through passing information about people back and forth.  It also provides good interaction as a team, solving problems, laughing at the situation and one-another and providing that bit of stress around being caught out in a lie that makes you a little more open in the situation. 

Scrum Challenge - QA Couplets - Random Style

The other day while the team and I were watching Test Bash 3 from Ministry of Testing we discovered as a team that the best entries were the ones where the testers recited 60 seconds of poetry about testing.  We were watching this video during our bi-weekly 'Team Learning Panel,' which I should tell you about some time.  

Towards the end of the same day, a Thursday, one of the team members sent me the question that I am invariably asked on the day before Scrum Challenge.  "Is there any hint?"

Scrum Challenge hint is as much a tradition around here as the scrum challenge itself.  I don't always give hints, based more upon knowing what challenge will be when asked than being secretive, but when I do they are cryptic, strange and difficult to relate to anything challenge-like.  This does not stop the question from getting asked. 

Once again I didn't really have any idea as to what the scrum challenge would be on the next day but I provided the following hint.  "I’m thinking that today’s learning panel will be a hint to tomorrow’s challenge."  Not knowing what the challenge was actually going to be about, I had now given myself some boundaries in which to create.  I do enjoy this type of challenge.   Gets my creative/nefarious juices running. 

I still hadn't come up with anything by the time I was getting into bed that night and mentioned such to my wife.  Five minutes later the two of us had come up with the following challenge. 

QA Couplets - Random Style

The Rules:

 

Phase I

Setup

1. Choose coupled rhyming words, one per person in the challenge.
1. If you have an even number of participants, MC stays out.  If you have an odd number, MC plays.
2. On a long thin strip of paper, write on the right hand side one of your rhyming words.
3. Repeat until all of your words are on pieces of paper.
4. Shuffle.

 

Play

1. Each person is given a random piece of paper and asked not to speak about it. 
2. Each person is asked to write a sentence ending in the word on their piece of paper.
1. you may not change the word in any way (tense or pluralizing)
2. the sentence should be about the over-arching theme.
3. today's theme was 'Testing'
4. the sentence should be a complete thought.
3. After 2-3 minutes, collect all the pieces of paper.

Phase II 

1. Take the first shuffled piece of paper.  Write the sentence on the white board.
2. Find the piece of paper with the sentence that rhymes and write that sentence next.
3. Take the next piece of paper and write it up.
4. Find the rhyming sentence and etc.
5. When all the couplets are up - voila - a QA poem.

 

The Results:

The beautiful of testing is how much bugs you CAUGHT!
I'm working on verification of fixed bugs that developers BROUGHT!

After a while testing goes like a BREEZE.
When I find a bug I start to SNEEZE.

Great product is not deliverable if QA's lazy!
Too many bugs makes function HAZY.

Testing is like a FLOWER
QA gives developers all the POWER

Through work the bug count SHRANK
Monster Trucks give QA the highest RANK.

Reception

This was received well by the team.  It is not the first time we have tackled poetry and even with a fairly nebulous direction at the start it was not questioned too much.  People just dug in and wrote their line.  

What Went Right

We ended up with a poem that while not great, was amusing and fit the bill. 

What Went Wrong

Oddly enough it was difficult to get the length of the sentence kept at similar lengths.  Much re-explanation was required and it still didn't' really work out.  It did not, however, end up being that important for the results of the challenge, the quality of the poem just didn't care that much. 

Lessons / Team Benefits

The big lesson in this challenge was about how difficult it is to produce a cohesive, high quality product when the project members are not able to coordinate their efforts and collaborate on a solution.  What you get in the end might be technically correct (although ours wasn't really) but will not really be beautiful.  The team readily accepted this lesson from the challenge, it quickly made sense.   

We will definitely play this game again.
On a side note, our new VP of Engineering sat in on our scrum this day, on his second day with the company.  He was a great sport and played the game well. 

service announcment

Sorry for the little blip there for the past few days. 
In doing some fiddling with some of the hosting configuration I have set up I ended up buried in a morass of hosting confusion for the better part of a week.  

We're all better now and qaisdoes points back to where it should. 

My apologies. 

Someday we'll talk about quality of instructions and how to's around hosting. 

Put a little laugh in it.

"There is little success where there is little laughter." ~Andrew Carnegie
(this entry inspired by this other blog entry over here)

You ever work in a place where people didn't laugh?  Did you enjoy it?
I never have worked in a place that didn't have laughter.  I guess in some ways I turn down opportunities where i know that laughter is even a little bit less likely.  I mean there are other reasons that I shy away from stodgy financial companies but the formality of their situations which can reduce the freedom for fun or laughter is one of them.  

One of the best professional compliments that I've ever received came at the end of the era where the railroad company i worked at was breaking up and the entire IT dept was going their separate ways. The Director I worked under thanked me personally for my time, telling me that I had brought life back to the department.  Even in those days, starting as a junior employee and leaving years later as a lead, I worked hard at bringing joy and laughter to the work place.  This doesn't just mean being friendly and jovial, always having a joke at the ready, although that is also an important factor in workplace enjoyment.  No, I was definitely an instigator of hi-jinks.  Pranks on people's cubicles, roasts when people were leaving, awards for silly things - these were all things that I was a major driving force behind. 

I have maintained this habit throughout my career.  I have had to dial some of it back a little as I became a more senior manager but even my scrum challenges bring laughter to my teams and to other teams either through through-the-wall laughter contagion or in hearing the war stories of the last challenge. 

"What's the benefit really?" you might ask.  Isn't laughing in the work place a sign of low productivity due to frivolity?  I couldn't disagree more.  To my mind, laughter is the grease that keeps things moving.  It fosters stronger team building, it builds positive relationships that allow for easier to trading of favours, it pulls your brain out of the rut that it falls into after staring at the same screen for too many consecutive minutes and allows it to refocus in a more positive way, it leaves you in a better mood, allowing to have higher more positive energy towards your work  and most importantly of all, it helps you love your job.  

Having a good time during your work day means that you're going to enjoy going to work every day.  When your job has dreary parts, as they all do, getting a laugh here or there helps you through those parts and makes them not so bad. People who like their job are more pleasant to be around, get more done and make the jobs of others around them more pleasant as well.  In fact, they are the type of contagion that you most want in your work place. 

Maybe every workplace doesn't need the distraction of nerf-gun wars but a little laughter certainly makes the day go by a little faster. 

Quality Context.

I was reading the qaisdoes twitter feed and the following post from @ASQ came across:
     
            Quality Quote: "Quality is everyone's expectation!" - Jeffrey S. Schiopota, vice  president of operations, Aspire Brands

And my automatic response was to argue (to be fair i'm reasonably certain that 80% of my friends, acquaintances and family would not be surprised at my willingness to argue) the point.  After all, if you buy something from the dollar store, quality is not necessarily what you expect.  But after further reflection i think that you do expect quality from items that you buy at the dollar store but the quality has a context.  

For example, if i go to McDonald's I don't expect the food to taste like what i'd get at a sit down restaurant.  Mcdonald's has built a worldwide brand based upon the fact that they can build a consistent brand that looks, feels and tastes the same no matter where you go.  So if you consider their quality of process and product, it's pretty high within the context of your expectation.  I don't expect my Big Mac to taste like the burger that my grandpa used to BBQ on those warm summer evenings of my childhood, i expect it to taste like every other Big Mac i've ever had.  If it doesn't then they aren't adhering to their quality standard. 

Part of the problem is the word quality and how it's used.  Quality didn't always mean good, quality started out its life requiring a qualifier so that you would know what usage it was entailing.  This product is of high quality, this is a low quality widget, etc.  But these days if someone just says, 'quality is everyone's expectation' there's an allowed context within of 'high quality is everyone's expectation.'  It's not a very exact statement but it's the intent behind it. 

Of course coming back around to not arguing with the statement due to context i had another thought - I'm not sure it is what the pessimists amongst us do expect.  I don't think that i really expect quality in general anymore.  The bigbox discount stores of the world have started to train us that you get what you pay for.  When i look at the dollar store example in my second paragraph you really do get the quality that you expect, as long as you're looking at things reasonably and rationally.  Every product you buy at that dollar store is built with a particular probable failure rate due to material and manufacturing process.  You've paid a buck, it'll last longer than a use or two but after a dozen uses, count your blessing for having a usable product every use thereafter.  In general, if you know what you're looking for, then the dollar store is a great place to go.  I really don't need gift bags that are higher quality than a dollar store provides.  They will have the quality i expect, for the most part.

For the pessimist however, i think that there is also a belief that the pervasiveness of the bigbox prices that has brought quality overall down in an attempt to compete.  "things don't last like they used to."  Everyone's heard this from a person of an older generation.  If you grew up in the 60's you had a different concept of the quality to expect from things.  Your phone isn't going to last 15 years, you know that, you buy it and expect a quality product that will last until a year or two after your contract runs.  At that point you're probably going to buy a new phone anyway.  This is how products are being designed, because manufacturers want you to pay the bill for new product again and again.  If i buy a big ticket electronics product like a TV or receiver and i pay for the higher quality product, i do have an expectation of quality.  You'd think that for an $800 phone we could expect the same thing but i believe we are being conditioned to really put the quality context into play.  You expect it to work well for the length of the contract and then you start counting your blessings for every year you get past that. 

But even in this example we are trained for quality context.  You expect the quality you receive from such a product.  It's a shame that we're giving up quality for price and are becoming doomed to live in a throw-a-way society and often i try to convince myself that spending the quality dollar to buy a higher lifespan product is the way to go.  Most of the time i even succeed.  But it's not always easy either.  It's hard for a person of my generation who looks at TV's or phones or things in that price point and automatically has an expectation of higher quality.  People older than me, they rail against the machine, people my age grumble and complain, millenials...they just live easily with the concept that two years from now they'll need to replace their everything.

Quality Context is becoming everything.  To rephrase the quote a little, "Contextual quality is everyone's expectation."