Category Archives: Retrospective

Minimum Viable Product Manager

29 Wednesday Aug 2018

Posted by in Agile, Agile2018, Approaches, Context, Experiments, Metrics, Protip, Retrospective, Scrum, Soft Skills, Training, User Stories

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At Agile2018, I attended Richard Seroter’s Product Ownership Explained session, where I heard about bad and good product owners. Product ownership/management has many facets including

  • advocating processes and tools
  • style of leadership
  • customer interactions
  • relationship with engineers
  • approach to continuous improvement
  • product lifecycle perspective
  • sourcing backlog items
  • decomposing work
  • running through a sprint
  • meeting involvement
  • approach to roadmap
  • outbound communication

Now I’ve been working alongside many customer proxy team members (e.g. business analyst, product owner, product manager) over the years. I’ve learned how to create testable, executable, deliverable user stories in a real-world setting. I wasn’t going into this talk blind. I just haven’t always focused on the Product role.

This time, I looked at the role with the mindset of what it would take for me to check all the boxes in the “good” list. As each slide appeared, my list of TODOs lengthened. I started to feel overwhelmed by the number of things I wanted to improve…

“How you doin’, honey?” “Do I have to answer?!?”

I walked out of that talk thinking I’m not sure I want to sign up for this epic journey. The vision of the idyllic end state was more daunting than inspiring. How could I possibly succeed at this enormous task? Would I want to sign up for that? My initial reaction was no! How could I take on all the technical debt of stretching into a new role like Product? How long would the roadmap to “good” take?

Analysis

When I evaluate things off the cuff, I often consider good-bad-indifferent. Maybe knowing what “good” and “bad” look like wasn’t helping me. I knew I didn’t want to be merely “indifferent”… maybe what I really wanted to know was this:

What does a minimum viable product manager look like?

One of my big takeaways from Problem Solving Leadership (PSL) with the late, great Jerry Weinberg was limiting work in process (WIP) or “one thing at a time” (as close to single piece flow as possible) improves effectiveness. If I take that approach to a PO/PM role, I’m afraid that I would completely fail. So I will reduce the practices to as few as I possibly can without completely losing the value of the role. I want only the *critical* path skills or capabilities! Everything else can be delegated or collectively owned or done without. So what can I discard?

In this thought experiment, I’m proposing finding the least possible investment in each essential aspect of the PO/PM role that would move from bad past merely indifferent to viable (but only just!). I needed to reduce my expectations! If I allow minimum viable to rest somewhere in my default scale, then it fits between indifferent and good. That means I deliberately do *not* attempt to inject all of the good practices at once. So let’s revisit the axes of expertise and the lists of behaviors that are good and bad…

What’s the least I could do?

Decomposition

Advocating processes and tools

Good: contextual & explanatory & collaborative (fitting process to team + pragmatic tool choices + only important consistency + explains process value + feedback leading to evolving)
Minimum viable: pragmatic minimalism (choose a simple process & let practices earn their way back in as value is explained + choose an available tool + allow consistency to emerge + request feedback)
Indifferent: status quo (follow existing process/ceremony w/o questioning + let others choose tools + don’t justify)
Bad: dogmatism (one practice fits all + adhere to ceremony + prescribed toolchain + standardization + trust process + don’t justify)

Style of leadership

Minimum viable: leads by example (models behaviors for others without trying to modify their behaviors) + doesn’t worry about respect + consultative decisions + experiments/loosely decides + sometimes available to the team but not constantly + flexible + defaults to already available metrics

Customer interactions

Minimum viable: meets with customers at least once + builds casual relationship with a key customer + gets second-hand reports on Production pain + occasional customer visit + default information sources

For me, this one slides a bit too far toward indifferent… I’m not sure how little I could care about customers and still get away with being acceptable at PO/PM…

Relationship with engineers

Minimum viable: physically co-locates when convenient + T-shaped when it comes to the technical domain (i.e. aware but not trying to develop that skill as an individual contributor) + attends standup + shares business/customer/user information at least at the beginning of every epic + champion for the product & trusts everyone on the team to protect their own time

Approach to continuous improvement

Minimum viable: default timebox + takes on at most 1 action item from retrospective, just like everyone else + plans on an ad hoc/as needed basis (pull system) allowing engineers to manage the flow of work to match their productivity + prioritizes necessary work to deliver value regardless of what it’s called (bug, chore, enhancement, etc)

Product lifecycle perspective

Minimum viable: tweaks customer onboarding in a small way to improve each time + cares about whole cross-functional team (agile, DevOps, etc) + asks questions about impact of changes + allows lack of value in an existing feature to bubble up over time

Sourcing backlog items

Minimum viable: occasionally talks to customers + cares about whole cross-functional team (including Support) + backlog is open to whole team to add items that can be prioritized + intake system emerges + tactical prioritization

I do have twinges about the lack of strategy here, so I guess I’m looking at this part of minimum viable Product *Owner* (i.e. the mid-range focus that Richard points out in his 10th slide).

Decomposing work

Minimum viable: progressive elaboration (i.e. I need to know details when it’s near term work and not before) + thin vertical slices and willing to leave “viable” to the next slice in order to get a tracer bullet sooner + trusts the team to monitor the duration of their work & to self-organize to remove dependencies (including modifying story slicing)

Running through a sprint

Minimum viable: doesn’t worry about timeboxes (kanban/flow/continuous/whatever) + focus on outcome of each piece of work (explores delivered value) + releases after acceptance (maybe this is just continuous delivery instead of continuous deployment, depends on business context)

Meeting involvement

Minimum viable: collaborates with team members to plan as needed (small things more often) + participates in retrospectives + ongoing self-study of PO/PM

Approach to roadmap

Minimum viable: priorities segmented by theme + roadmap includes past delivery/recent accomplishments + adjusts communication as needed/updates for new info + flexible timeline in a living document + published roadmap accessible to all stakeholders on self-serve basis

Outbound communication

Minimum viable: allows org to self-serve info + shares priorities with manager & customers + environment for continuous self-demo/trying features + transparency

What are the minimum viable versions of the tools of a product owner?

  • Backlog – list of ideas not fleshed out until it’s time to run them
  • Sprint planning – ad hoc meetings in a pull system initiated by the need for work definition to execute
  • Roadmap – technical vision of system capabilities + compelling story of the product value proposition
  • Prototyping, wireframing – whiteboard pictures + text-based descriptions
  • Team collaboration – a big TODO list that everyone can access
  • Surveying/user testing – chat program that both team & user can access
  • Analytics – NPS score informally collected from customer conversation
  • Product visioning – I think this goes in with Roadmap for me?

So I’ll agree that the PO/PM role is critical and necessary. I would like for creative problem solvers to fill the role – and to be fulfilled by the role! In order for that to be viable, for people to grow into a Product role, there needs to be education on how to begin – and it can’t be spring-fully-formed-from-the-head-of-Zeus! Christening someone PO/PM doesn’t endow them with sudden wisdom and insight. Skill takes time to develop.

Set realistic expectations for beginners. Help teams to welcome people to grow in the role by offering both challenge and support from all the team members. As with any team need, the agile team has collective ownership to solve the problem, not relying on a single point of failure in the role specialist. Having a beginner PO/PM is an excellent time to reinforce that!

Don't worry, people. I so got this!

If I were a Product Manger, I would definitely prefer to be a full-featured representative of that specialization! However, I encourage you to revisit Richard’s presentation and do your own decomposition of the Product role. What is absolutely essential? What can you do without?

What is *your* minimum viable Product Manager?

Organizing meetups

03 Friday Mar 2017

Posted by in Approaches, Context, Experiences, Experiments, Lean Coffee, Protip, Retrospective, Social media, Soft Skills, Software Testing Club Atlanta, Speaking, Training, Unconference, Volunteering

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Announcing Ministry of Test Atlanta

Last fall was the last of our Software Testing Atlanta Conference (STAC) events. An attendee at my Intentional Learning Workshop chatted with me afterward. I mentioned that I have been a local meetup organizer and have struggled with how much control to retain. My attendee urged me to give the meetup back to the community and I have been pondering that ever since.

I’ve been the primary organizer of the Software Testing Club Atlanta meetup since we began as an affiliate of the UK-based Software Testing Club in October 2013. My charter has always been to serve and develop the local testing community including connecting it with the global virtual community. Not everyone agreed about including digital attendees, but I am willing to experience the friction of a virtual meeting to help people to attend who otherwise would not have a chance. Inclusion matters to me.

I also prefer small groups and experiential events/activities that Justin talks about. I have never had a goal of increasing the size of our meetup beyond what a single facilitator could manage in a workshop.

STAC was just a bigger extension of the meetup for me. I always wanted to reach more people in the local community, so putting together a conference focused on my geographic region was a great chance to bring new local voices to the fore. I never wanted it to be a big formal event, so I’m working on an ATL software testing unconference for the fall: shortSTAC. More on that to come!

This has been an awesome ride over the last 3 years, but we’re re-branding and branching out into our very own Meetup now known as Ministry of Test Atlanta!

Please join us to keep up with our events!

 

As part of our reboot, I wanted to share some thoughts on what challenges a meetup organizer confronts every month and why monthly events are so difficult to sustain!

Meetups are tough for reasons

 

1. Location, location, location!

People interested in testing are spread out across ATL and traffic suuuuuucks. Plus, I have no budget, so someone has to be willing to host for free or sponsor the venue fee $$. I don’t want to hold the meetup only in one part of the city since that alienates interested test enthusiasts. Proximity to public transit is something I’m not sure matters, but it would make the meetup more accessible to more testers.

Over the past 3 years, we’ve had completely different crowds depending on which part of the city we chose. I preferred to rotate locations to give everyone some opportunity to attend, even though that introduced uncertainty that probably negatively affected attendance… It’s impossible to make the “right” choice for everyone who *might* attend…

Anyway, I work at VersionOne now and that means I can host, so that’s one variable taken care of!

2. Scheduling

We hold meetings on weeknights assuming that people are more likely to do work-related things on workdays – and would be more reluctant to give up their weekend fun time to work-ish things. Getting all of the stars aligned to schedule these meetups monthly *and* give enough time for people to RSVP and then work out the logistics of showing up… Timing is hard.

Since we tend to meet after work, providing food and drink encourages people to attend, but that’s not free… and I have no budget.

3. Funding

Food and drink cost $$ – someone has to be willing to sponsor the foodz, and drink

Possible sources of funding:

4. Content

Not everyone wants to present or run a workshop or host a round table or … yeah. People will show up but may not want to provide content. I have to find a willing volunteer to do it for free or someone to sponsor a fee $$.

We infrequently have presentations. Most of our events are workshops or rountables or some sort of interactive experience. My go-to is Lean Coffee since it lowers the barrier to getting groups together and provides value to attendees every time.

I’m definitely interested in scheduling joint events with other Atlanta meetups in the future.

5. Publicity

How do people find out about meetings? I do the social media management, but I have no budget so … mostly word of mouth otherwise? Maybe chat rooms?

6. Audience

I assume that most of the people who want to come to a testing meetup are testers, but not all test enthusiasts are testers. We’ve had development-types show up, so I want to keep it open and inclusive.

7. Viewpoint advocated

I refuse to insist people agree with me. I won’t call it a context-driven testing meetup or an agile testing [PDF] meetup because I want to welcome people who subscribe to other philosophies of testing. That said, I also don’t want vendor talks (and yes I work for a vendor now). This group is for engaging with ideas focusing on and around testing, not for mind-clubbing or selling or exchanging business cards. Active participation is expected and encouraged.

8. Volunteers

Organizing: While I have always had a core group of enthusiastic participants, I’ve never had a formal organizing committee. Being a one-woman-show most of the time is pretty exhausting, y’all. The meetup consumed lots of my free time. I made my professional hobby the primary thing I did for fun outside of the office for years. Um… not a sustainable model. I do not recommend it. At the same time, working with others means compromise, so consider carefully the tradeoffs and find allies who believe in your mission.

Presenting: Members of my core group have all helped out with content for the meetup – for which I am eternally grateful! I’ve also encouraged other local aspiring presenters to practice on us. Occasionally, someone I know from the wider testing community is in town and joins us to share their wit and wisdom. I resisted presenting at my own event for a long long time… until I needed content LOL

Est testing parfait?

19 Tuesday Nov 2013

Posted by in #testchat, Agile2013, AgileConnection, Experiments, Exploratory Testing, Hackathon, ISST, Lean Coffee, Podcast, Retrospective, Skype Test Chat, Social media, Software Testing Club Atlanta, Speaking, Tea-time With Testers, Techwell, Test Retreat, Testing Circus, TWiST, Volunteering, Weekend Testing

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I heard that Gerry Weinberg has an exercise called “Mary had a little lamb,” in which you analyze each word in the sentence to elicit implicit meaning that might be important. This sounded interesting enough to try, so when the opportunity came to propose a topic at Test Retreat 2013 I went for it. My topic “Is testing for me?” didn’t end up formally scheduled but made a nice interstitial topic to discuss with those milling about in the main room.

I chopped the sentence into separate words and wrote them top-to-bottom on a large sticky note. Then, instead of giving some sort of prepared remarks, I elicited brainstorming from the gathered participants. Having received interesting feedback on my professional and personal strengths at Agile2013 that had left me questioning how best to use my evil powers for good, I wanted to hear how others were thinking about the testing field and how it fit them.

The resulting scrawled notes ended up a mindmap, the path of least resistance for me. I won’t say the discussion solved all my problems, but it did give me some direction for future exploration – exploration that might also be helpful to a newbie wondering whether to pursue a career in testing.

Is testing for me?Which brings me to some interesting recent events:

I started composing a list of things I’d recommend to people just starting out as testers to help them to evaluate whether to continue. I wanted to encourage them to jump right in but also think big, not waiting them to wait 5 years to reach out to the wider world of testing (like I did).

Here’s my current list. I blogged about various experiments I tried, so you can read for yourself to see what it’s like to select what’s a good starting point for you.

No matter how many times I think I’ve found all the meaning in my testing career, suddenly I realize there are more layers… but like a parfait, not an onion.

Donkey: Oh, you both have LAYERS. Oh. You know, not everybody like onions. What about cake? Everybody loves cake!
Shrek: I don’t care what everyone else likes! Ogres are not like cakes.
Donkey: You know what ELSE everybody likes? Parfaits! Have you ever met a person, you say, “Let’s get some parfait,” they say, “Hell no, I don’t like no parfait”? Parfaits are delicious!
Shrek: NO! You dense, irritating, miniature beast of burden! Ogres are like onions! End of story! Bye-bye! See ya later.
Donkey: Parfait’s gotta be the most delicious thing on the whole damn planet! – Shrek

Thanks for the inspiration to write, EmJayKay80 and Niyi!

Story Time!

16 Monday Sep 2013

Posted by in Acceptance Criteria, Agile2013, Approaches, Context, Experiences, Experiments, Metrics, Personas, Publications, Retrospective, Speaking, Training

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Agile2013-ClaireMossAs Agile2013 considers itself a best in class kind of conference “designed to provide all Agile Team Members, Developers, Managers and Executives with proven, practical knowledge”, the track committees select from a large pool of applicants and prefer vetted content that has worked its way up from local meetings to conferences. I have only one talk that fits this criteria since I presented Big Visible Testing as an emerging topic at CAST 2012. I developed several versions of this talk subsequent to that event and doing so had given me confidence that I would be able to provide valuable information in the time allotted and still leave enough time for attendees to ask questions and to give feedback on what information resonated with them.

I worked to carefully craft this proposal for the experience reports track, knowing that if I were selected that I would have a formal IEEE-style paper to write. Fortunately, my talk made the cut and I began the writing process with my intrepid “shepherd” Nanette Brown. I wasn’t sure where to begin with writing a formal paper, but Nanette encouraged me to simply begin to tell the story and worry about the formatting later. This proved to be wise advice since telling a compelling story is the most important task. Harkening back to my high school and early college papers, I found myself wading through different but largely similar drafts of my story. I experimented with choosing a different starting point for the paper that I ultimately discarded, but it had served its purpose in breaking through my writer’s block. Focusing on how the story would be valuable to my readers helped to hone in on sequencing and language selection. Once I had the prose sorted out, I began to shape the layout according to the publication standards and decided to include photographs from my presentation – the story is about big visible charts after all!

Investing sufficient time in the formal paper made preparing the presentation more about strong simple visuals. I have discovered my own interest in information visualization so prototyping different slide possibilities and testing them out with colleagues was (mostly) fun. I’m still not quitting my day job to go into slide deck production. Sorry to disappoint!

Performance anxiety

Despite all of this preparation, I couldn’t sit still at dinner the night before my presentation and barely slept that night. I woke before the sunrise and tried to school my mind to be calm, cool, and collected while the butterflies in my stomach were trying to escape. This was definitely the most challenging work of presenting!

As a first time speaker, I didn’t know what to expect, so I set my talk’s acceptance criteria as a rather low bar:

    1. Someone shows up
    2. No one hates it enough to leave a red card as feedback

When I walked into my room in the conference center, a lone Agile2013 attendee was waiting for me. Having him ready to go encouraged me to say hello to each of the people who came to my presentation, which in turn changed the people in the room from a terrifying Audience into many friends, both new and old. I think I managed not to speed through my slides despite my tendency to chatter when I’m nervous. I couldn’t stay trapped behind my podium and walked around to interact with my slides and to involve my audience more in the conversation. Sadly, I can’t share my energy with you since I forgot to record it. Oh well. Next time!

The vanity metrics

  • At 10 minutes into the presentation, 50 people had come to hear me speak and at 60 minutes I had somehow gained another 7 to end at 57 people. Thanks so much for your kind attention! I hope I made it worth your while…
  • 43 people stopped to give me the simple good-indifferent-bad feedback of the color-coded cards (which I liked as a simple vote about a presentation) and I received 37 green cards and 6 yellow – with no red cards! Whoo hoo!

Words of Encouragement

Two people kindly wrote out specific feedback for me and I want to share that with you in detail, hoping to elicit some late feedback from attendees who might like to share at this point (Agree or disagree, I want to hear from you!)

Feedback Card #1:
– Best session so far!
– Great presenter – great information – great facilitator
– Would like to see future sessions by this speaker

Feedback Card #2:
Great Talk – speaker very endearing, Her passion for the subject matter is obvious.
A fresh perspective of how Developers and Testers should interact.
Should find ways to engage the audience

Someone else got a kick out of my saying, “I’m serious about my stickies.” and left their notes behind on the table after leaving. So thanks for sharing that. 🙂

One friend spoke to me afterward with some helpful feedback about word choice and non-native English speakers. When I was writing my talk, I was trying to focus on people who would be likely audience members, but I had not considered that aspect of the Agile2013 crowd. Since I was simply speaking off the cuff, I ended up using some words that would have fit in at our dinner table growing up but that would make for tougher translation. And yet, I got some wonderful feedback from Hiroyuki Ito about the “kaizen” he said I made. I can’t read it directly, but Google Translate assures me it’s good stuff. 🙂

uneasy truce

Finally, I discovered that my relationship with a linear slide deck is not a comfortable one. I wanted to be flexible in referencing each of the slides and having to sequence them hampered my ability to respond easily with visuals when discussing questions or improvising during my talk. I haven’t experimented with other presentation options, but I hope there’s an easy solution out there.

Image Credit

What I Did For My Summer Vacation – Part 2

14 Wednesday Aug 2013

Posted by in Agile, Experiences, Experiments, Retrospective, Soft Skills, Testing Humor, Weekend Testing

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For Science!

For Science!

Our geek gals weekend was quite a memorable one! We had an email thread going around discussing all of our excitement that culminated in:

Road Trip Retrospective

Liked

  • Beginning new friendships and rekindling old ones
  • WaHo, or Waffle House for you non-Southerners, is a road trip staple
  • Seeing the sights: art gallery, street musician, architecture walk, shopping
  • Active pursuits: plantation tour, petting zoo, bodysurfing
  • Keeping it mellow: drip castles, collecting shells, yoga, sunbathing
  • Team-building through cooking indoors & grilling out
  • Kitsch juxtaposed with refinement: deep fried peanuts and formal high tea
  • Bizarre medical poster discovery
  • Conversation: discussions of literature, science, and life
  • Creative outlets: lanyards, scrapbooking, board games, magnetic nail polish

Learned

  • Having pricing/rental agreements in writing is essential – but at least one of us was overcharged and our deposit wasn’t fully refunded
  • Foodie friends should always pick the restaurant
  • Crafting doesn’t come as naturally to everyone – but collaborative art is more fun!
  • Twilight is hilarious when read aloud with expression and voice acting
  • About 1 in 10 photographs come out the way I’d expect
  • Vintage gold lamé will cover you in glitter
  • I can disassemble a grill to light it when the starter is broken – but I didn’t expect a fireball when I opened the lid!

Lacked

  • Roadside attractions
  • Strange food venues
  • Pest control (huge roaches landing in my hair? unacceptable!)
  • Respect from the rental agent who told me I was a b*tch on the phone (keepin’ it classy!)
  • Support from the rental agent to operate the hot tub that we were forbidden to adjust when it was tepid

Longed For

  • Working internet connection (seriously, who cuts a bunch of geek girls off?)
  • Privacy: long term renter walked his dog through our space each day
  • Functional bathrooms: inconsistent water pressure, toilets constantly running or clogged and leaking, shower door jammed, scalding hot water hurt a couple of us, and what’s with the toilet installed in the linen closet?!?
  • Stable floors: I fell through the deck once and nearly fell through another part of the deck a second time, squishy kitchen floor
  • Sturdy roofs: bedroom ceiling collapsed
  • Nighttime lighting out on the uneven decks
  • Ovens/grills that heated evenly and to the designated temperature
  • Cleaning crew: moldy air conditioning unit, dust, dirt, bug parts, expired cleaning supplies
  • Maintenance crew to shore up the framing and carpentry

So how did our product turn out? Our execution wasn’t flawless, but we have very fond memories of creativity, conversation, and survival. Nothing like a few disasters to remind us how fortunate we are.

What I Did For My Summer Vacation – Part 1

31 Wednesday Jul 2013

Posted by in Acceptance Criteria, Agile, Approaches, Context, Experiences, Experiments, Retrospective, Soft Skills, Testing Humor, User Stories

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With the First Day of School quickly approaching, it’s time for:

What I Did For My Summer Vacation – Part 1

Exploring Requirements

I get really excited about hanging out with people, especially friends, especially a combination of new and old friends. So it was with great happiness that I set about organizing a geek gal weekend.

Our first conversations centered around budget (fixed), deadline (fixed), and features (flex). We started talking over the various activities that different destinations could provide to entertain us. Then, I paused the conversation to bring the focus back to value: when we looked back on this weekend, how did we want to remember it? how would we feel about the way we spent that time together? would features even feature in these stories we would tell? Instead of features, we realized that functions (what the product was going to accomplish) and attributes (characteristics desired by the clients) mattered more. (Why yes I was reading Weinberg this morning. How could you tell?)

Vintage gold lamé (see that gaw-jus totally 80s animal-print metallic finish? oh yeah.)

Vintage gold lamé (see that gaw-jus totally 80s animal-print metallic finish? oh yeah.)

We wanted to relish the simplicity of being together, whether wearing goofy vintage clothes (gold lamé for the win!), cooking our own meals together, telling silly stories, or engaging in feminine activities with a geek spin (magnetic nail polish was not as simple as expected) that would be low-key and more about togetherness than busyness. We wanted to craft something lasting (collaborative artwork – packing the craft supplies was a must not a want!) and reinforce durable friendships that appreciated our differences.

With this clear focus in mind, suddenly the locale was much less important than inclusivity to maximize togetherness.

Planned For Sand

So we made an informal backlog of tasks to tackle researching options (beach vs mountains), reviewing results, and prioritizing options (beach!) before presenting our findings to the group for dot voting. (Typical agilists, I’m tellin’ ya.) Fortunately, we found a viable approach and went forward with making arrangements to execute this solution (road trip!), adjusting as we went to accommodate discovered needs.

How did it all turn out? Stay tuned for scintillating tales of laughter and danger in What I Did On My Summer Vacation – Part 2!

Last Family Lunch

14 Friday Dec 2012

Posted by in Experiences, Experiments, Retrospective

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It’s been a nostalgic week for me as I’m finishing up my time at Daxko today. (Case in point, I’m wearing this year’s bight purple Kickoff shirt as I type this.)

I’ll miss finding you on Twitter, displacing the printer, walks to Taco Mac, counting down my check-ins, dueling LifeSize remotes, commit message mentions, dangerous Centurion helmets, Plank A Day Nation pix, 2 drink tickets, the gangsta Ashoka Scrum-board avatar, mysterious moustaches, Monster-fueled afternoon shenanigans, Keep Calm and…, Portal references,  being kind of a disaster, Hackathons, a closet full of branded T-shirts, sticky notes everywhere, launch party, singing on the patio until we shut down the restaurant, winning The Go Game, the quote of the day, attempting Cajun accents, the Women of SWE, surprise attacks by Angry Birds, Family Lunch indecision, punchy road-trip conversations, Whirlyball, batting long eyelashes, last-minute costuming, musical parodies, calling dibs on the napping couch after family lunch – we love free food! – and most of all the people. (Special shout out to my Atlanta crew! I’ll follow you to whatever end.)

I expect to see some ridiculousness coming out of next month’s talent show, so make it count, people!

So Long and Thanks for ALL THE THINGS!

“Now, bring me that horizon.”

Seize the Initiative

15 Thursday Nov 2012

Posted by in Agile, Context, Experiences, Experiments, Retrospective, Soft Skills

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Antistress Autoreverse

So last year I joined the YMCA. My employer works in this space and they supplement our memberships … on the condition that we attend with a minimal frequency. Nothing to understand your customers quite like becoming their customer! However, working out isn’t really my thing. The “race to nowhere” has no appeal for me. But I went anyway, determined to learn something. Despite my stubbornness on that point, the inertia of years of study was hard to overcome. I needed backup.

Joining the coach approach program was explicitly about wanting to make improvements. The Y coaches promote “adopting healthy habits and changing the way [the participants] live their daily lives.” I knew I wanted to make a change, but I also knew that I didn’t want it badly enough to go it alone quite yet. Having never had a personal coach, I wasn’t quite sure what to expect. What I encountered resonated with my recent experience learning about the role of ScrumMaster.

In particular the sprint activity of retrospective is “an opportunity to learn how to improve.” Defining success in this particular context was the first step. My ScrumMaster watched the process and guided it, making it okay to talk about uncomfortable topics, but it was up to me to do the work. The first big step was being able to establish a safe environment to talk with a more experienced and professional person about a potentially sensitive topic.

In the case of my workout routine, this was my minimal compliance rather than wholehearted adoption of lifestyle change. My Coach Approach coach helped me to develop a vision for the future that would be better than the past. We focused on setting goals while recognizing that the plan had to fit into my work/life balance with the loose structure of frequent check-ins rather than plugging my height, weight, and weight loss goal into a one-size-fits-all spreadsheet.

I was surprised to find that discussion about my health could be fun when my counselor was so friendly and supportive. I would have expected an intervention to be really uncomfortable. Retros can be that way sometimes. But they can also be a welcome change of pace. Roughly every 2 weeks – after we catch up on socializing and the excitement we’ve had since our last chat – my coach and I looked at the artifacts of my progress, paying attention to the time line of events going on in the background and how that influenced the results. Keeping this cadence allowed us to build a healthy relationship that encouraged risk-taking and speaking from the heart. So when my coach suggested adding a weights routine to my cardio, I felt fine with scoffing openly and she felt fine with reminding me of my goals, not allowing my emotions to derail the discussion but remaining fully present and focused.

As our meetings progressed, she offered appreciation of the progress I made, while encouraging me to try new approaches that could yield better results. Even when I felt like I was backsliding, she found a way to put more emphasis on understanding what I had accomplished and focused on encouraging me to keep going. We talked about what parts of the routine were working well, what lessons I learned (like when I hated the treadmill but loved the AMT – hey, participation in individual exercises is optional!), what I could do differently next time, and what might need more scrutiny. We tried to analyze the problems and propose solutions to the boredom, considering a variety of alternatives. It was honest but not accusatory. (Hey, eveybody gets bored with the routine.)

So I’ll admit she’s done me some good. I agree with another participant who said, “My personality is better, my production has gone up, my mental clarity has improved, and my energy level has increased dramatically.” Granted, I just have a lot of energy in general, so I wasn’t likely to sit back and passively take it in – well, as passive as you can be while sweating profusely. I started to recognize my excuses as just excuses, feeling more empowered to modify the situation, learning to manage that impulse to excuse myself from the hard work of changing. Accepting that I actually knew something about working out and lifting weights and could be responsible for designing more of the workout and analyzing my progress on the path to wellness? Yeah, last week was weird.

One ScrumMaster wrote, “At the end of a successful project, everybody says, ‘Gee, I wish we could do it again.’ Using this definition, was the project a success?” Well, I can’t say that I’ve enjoyed every moment of it, but figuring out that I could test software and sweat profusely at the same time? Priceless! But seriously folks, having my coach express sincere and significant appreciation for the care and work I put into making progress sent the message that she cared about and me personally, not just reducing the failure rate of some anonymous gym member. And that’s where the magic happens.

(Special thanks to my dev James who pointed out that coach approach is workout retro!)
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Yo dawg, I herd you like ET

19 Monday Mar 2012

Posted by in Context, Experiences, Experiments, Hackathon, Retrospective, Testing Humor

≈ 1 Comment

I wrote out my Lab Days experience recently but didn’t get to bring you down the rabbit hole with me to experience the recursive testing goodness.

My project for Lab Days was an enhanced logging tool, but the logging is the heart of the matter, with users putting it through its paces much more stringently then the analysis functionality.

Since I usually do exploratory testing of applications at the day job and the time pressure of Lab Days left little room for formal test cases anyway, I decided to try out a new exploratory testing session logger: Rapid Reporter.

I didn’t have a lot of time to devote to learning Rapid Reporter, so I didn’t bother reading any documentation or preparing myself for how it worked, essentially exploratory testing my exploratory testing tool while exploratory testing my application under test.

It turns out this kind of recursive testing experience was just what I needed to liven things up a bit, all in the spirit of trying something new! I discovered that rapidly learning about a session logger while testing/learning a session logger, pulling log entries from an original session log, and reporting bugs via a session/chat room (HipChat) made for some perilous context-switching. More than once during the day, I had to stop what I was doing just to get my bearings.

I clearly enjoyed the experimentation because I decided to repeat the experience, though with a little less context-switching, when we upgraded our usual ET tool: Bonfire. The funniest thing about using Bonfire after working on my Lab Days project was that I realized there were tags available for log entries but the tagging indicators weren’t the same as our choice for our usability testing tool. I kept trying to use the tagging that I’d been testing all week and had to retrain myself, improving their documentation as a result of my questioning.

Still, seeing how another logging tool uses tags gave me some functionality to consider for our usability logger: how would users want to interact with tagged log entries? Clearly time to circle back with my UX designer to discuss some enhancements!

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The status is not quo

09 Friday Mar 2012

Posted by in Context, Experiences, Experiments, Hackathon, Retrospective, Tester Merit Badges

≈ 3 Comments

Dr. Horrible http://drhorrible.com/

We tend to run “FedEx” with a fairly open format where you can do whatever you want as long as you can somehow relate it to our products.
– Atlassian

Last week, my company gave us an exciting opportunity: 5 days of work on a project related to our business.

Apparently, they’ve done something like this before, long before my time, so you’d have to ask some of the more tenured folks at Daxko about it.

I worked with the same folks who volunteered with me at the WebVisions Hackathon earlier this year and we kept in mind what my colleague Will said about that experience: “The short time box and no feature constraints necessitated a laser-sharp focus on one thing.”

So we noodled over several viable candidates and finally settled on building a better mousetrap – or, in this case, UsabLog.

A clarification on terminology from my UX colleague:
“Logging” in this context doesn’t mean “system logging of events.” It means human capture of what the user said, what the user did in the app (e.g., where user clicked), and any additional comments to provide context. The point of logging is to provide us with a record of what went down so we have an accurate recollection for later analysis.

I had the good fortune to be a user of the original UsabLog application over the course of many usability sessions as a session logger, so I was rather familiar with its strengths and weaknesses. I was able to contribute some bug reports and feature suggestions for consideration during our lunchtime planning discussions, but my Scrum team’s UX designer was our team’s sponsor. She compiled an experiment plan that identified our purpose and detailed the problems we considered in the pre-existing Usablog and the opportunities we had to satisfy those needs.

Our usability sessions up to this point involved an interview led by the facilitator (i.e. UX designer) and logged by another team member (e.g. me) via the free, open source, web application Usablog, which then exported logs to CSV for use in a program such as Excel and which we in turn manually fed into a mindmap program such as FreeMind. While this process did work for us, the export and manual copy-paste was rather tedious and laborious, or as she put it “it would directly contribute to user research process efficiencies.” We knew there could be a better way.

Goals of the experiment:

  • Rapidly capture rich user feedback during research interviews and usability tests through logging of user events and comments
  • Organize logs from multiple sessions into one study for ease of access and visibility
  • Use log entries to synthesize findings
  • Quickly jump to a spot in the session’s video by clicking on the associated log entry

In particular, we wanted these features:

  • Multi-session logging.
  • Log entries are timestamped when the logger starts typing for video synchronization.
  • Custom tags.
  • Multi-logger logging.
  • One tool for logging and post-session analysis.

We established a definition of done and recognized our dependencies since any impediments would have serious impact on our progress during the limited time of the competition.

I would love to tell you that we were entirely successful in meeting our goals and implementing all of our features, and then going on to take first prize in the competition. Alas, this was not to be. We only accomplished some of our goals and features and awesome projects from other teams placed above us.

However, the experiment was a roaring success in many ways:

  • I had first-hand experience with paired UX design under the tutelage of my UX designer colleague. She suggested that I man the helm and she steered me back on course when I went astray. I won’t claim that my first UI mockups were beauties, but the process and conversation certainly were.
  • I made my first commit to a Github open-source repository and thereby qualify for the Open Source Nerd Merit Badge (which happens to feature the Github mascot Octocat) which I had been hankering to do ever since I discovered its existence. Also, this was the first time I fixed a bug in the source code, so even though my changes were minor it was thrilling.
  • Exploratory testing based on Github commit notifications in the HipChat chat room we used for the team. Rather than pursuing session-based test management, I tried a looser structure based around the latest and greatest changes instead of setting charters and time-boxing exploration around the stated goal.
  • Real-time bug reporting of issues found during exploratory testing via HipChat messages and screenshot attachments was new and interesting. This is the lowest overhead asynchronous bug management approach I’ve tried and it was effective. Granted, we didn’t come out with a backlog of known issues written down somewhere, but we rectified the most critical problems before they had a chance to fester.
  • We didn’t let a little thing like heading home for the day stop us from collaborating remotely when we got back to business after hours. Being able to work at odd hours put some of my insomnia to good use. I also learned a bit about .NET and model/view/controller architecture, which turned out to be good preparation for the following – and last – day.
  • When one of our programmer teammates fell ill, I paired with our remaining developer to push on toward the goal. Although I think I spent more time asking questions to help think through the implementation than actually contributing code, it was a fruitful day, wrapping up an important feature a mere 30 minutes before the Big Reveal.
  • I used the resulting product to real-time log the presentations during the Big Reveal. Oh so meta, but also hopefully illustrative of the capabilities of the application for future use. If nothing else, it gave our sick friend a way to catch up on the excitement as he recovered over the weekend.
  • We accomplished only some of our goals and features but they were the most essential. Our product is usable as-is, though with some known bugs that do not inhibit happy-path use.
  • Why do they call it FedEx days? Because you have to ship! Our resulting application is ready for use – or enhancement if you’re feeling ambitious!
  • And last, but certainly not least, victory lunch! Nothing so sweet as celebrating effective teamwork.

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