Surely you can meditate on that for a while and see how it applies to QA.

They’re obvious, and they’re pretty good ideas, but your organization will not follow them for long, even if your team catches on.  Why?  Because institutional memory is fluid.  By the time you drum that into your developers’ and designers’ heads, they move onto a different teams or onto different companies.  They will be replaced by people who are less expensive and less knowledgeable or they will be replaced with experienced sticks in the mud who know the right way to do things: their way.

And their way does not include to stooping to IE.

And so it goes.

The best you can hope for is to become such an archetypal nemesis to your developers and designers that they carry the fear of you beyond your team and company so that they do things the right way even when they’re somewhere else.  Somewhere, some lucky QA professional will get a n00b on their team that does things right.

All those things at which thou wishest to arrive by a circuitous road, thou canst have now, if thou dost not refuse them to thyself. And this means, if thou wilt take no notice of all the past, and trust the future to providence, and direct the present only conformably to piety and justice. Conformably to piety, that thou mayest be content with the lot which is assigned to thee, for nature designed it for thee and thee for it. Conformably to justice, that thou mayest always speak the truth freely and without disguise, and do the things which are agreeable to law and according to the worth of each. And let neither another man’s wickedness hinder thee, nor opinion nor voice, nor yet the sensations of the poor flesh which has grown about thee; for the passive part will look to this. If then, whatever the time may be when thou shalt be near to thy departure, neglecting everything else thou shalt respect only thy ruling faculty and the divinity within thee, and if thou shalt be afraid not because thou must some time cease to live, but if thou shalt fear never to have begun to live according to nature- then thou wilt be a man worthy of the universe which has produced thee, and thou wilt cease to be a stranger in thy native land, and to wonder at things which happen daily as if they were something unexpected, and to be dependent on this or that.

At least, that’s how I felt when I quit the daily work world and went to test consulting.  It’s liberating in that it allows me to focus on the testing and avoiding the office politics and the other trappings that fall into the “administrative” bucket on the time sheet.  On the other hand, you do have to have a certain faith that those contracts will keep coming.  QA doesn’t make a fellow optimistic, but you do need it a bit when there’s no sure knowledge that you’ll be logging the same defects against the same features against the same application a year from now.

 In everything which happens keep before thy eyes those to whom the same things happened, and how they were vexed, and treated them as strange things, and found fault with them: and now where are they? Nowhere. Why then dost thou too choose to act in the same way? And why dost thou not leave these agitations which are foreign to nature, to those who cause them and those who are moved by them? And why art thou not altogether intent upon the right way of making use of the things which happen to thee? For then thou wilt use them well, and they will be a material for thee to work on. Only attend to thyself, and resolve to be a good man in every act which thou doest: and remember…

Hrm, you know, that’s not very inspirational mentorship, true though it may be.  Maybe we’d better cling to Henry V at Harfleur:

Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more;
Or close the wall up with our English dead.
In peace there’s nothing so becomes a man
As modest stillness and humility:
But when the blast of war blows in our ears,
Then imitate the action of the tiger;
Stiffen the sinews, summon up the blood,
Disguise fair nature with hard-favour’d rage;
Then lend the eye a terrible aspect;
Let pry through the portage of the head
Like the brass cannon; let the brow o’erwhelm it
As fearfully as doth a galled rock
O’erhang and jutty his confounded base,
Swill’d with the wild and wasteful ocean.
Now set the teeth and stretch the nostril wide,
Hold hard the breath and bend up every spirit
To his full height. On, on, you noblest English.
Whose blood is fet from fathers of war-proof!
Fathers that, like so many Alexanders,
Have in these parts from morn till even fought
And sheathed their swords for lack of argument:
Dishonour not your mothers; now attest
That those whom you call’d fathers did beget you.
Be copy now to men of grosser blood,
And teach them how to war. And you, good yeoman,
Whose limbs were made in England, show us here
The mettle of your pasture; let us swear
That you are worth your breeding; which I doubt not;
For there is none of you so mean and base,
That hath not noble lustre in your eyes.
I see you stand like greyhounds in the slips,
Straining upon the start. The game’s afoot:
Follow your spirit, and upon this charge
Cry ‘God for Harry, England, and Saint George!’

Super achievers don’t manage their time, they create, manage and maximize their opportunities. At any given time they know the one critical, must complete, task and they work on that task. It is the most important and therefore deserves their full attention.

Curly said there was only one thing in life, but you had to figure it out.  If you’re working in quality assurance, you’ve already figured out what that one thing is: to keep your hanger-on-to-technology job by being pleasant in innumerable pointless meetings, not rocking the boat, and spending a lot of time generating metrics systems to justify your continued employment.

Well, maybe that’s just a lot of the quality assurance people with whom I’ve worked briefly.

No, the one thing you need to focus your time on is delivering a quality product.  Knowing the product, knowing the business problem it’s designed to solve, and making sure the damn thing works is that one thing.  Sitting in kickoff meetings, no matter what kind of doughnuts they have, isn’t it.  Neither is pulling together another test strategy document from the template that no one will read or understand.  It’s not about creating a perfect process that Plato would be proud of.  It’s delivering a quality product.

Focus your time and energy on that, not the trappings of the Quality Assurance industry.

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It has crashed so badly that not only is the update portion not working, but it’s returning a 408 error, which means that the Web server is timing out while looking for the custom error page.

Which leads me into a short bit of rant about a piece entitled In A Web 2.0 World, Quality Is Irrelevant (link seen here):

Still, I’m not in full rosy concurrence with the idea that we should kick quality completely to the curb. For one, it’s not that quality doesn’t matter — it’s that the definition of what constitutes quality is changing. The old idea that quality is defined by editing an article six ways from Sunday so that it’s denatured of all passion and advocacy, and so that that it has every freakin’ semicolon and middle initial in the correct place — that’s what’s dead.

So what’s the new definition of quality? It’s a bit early to say definitively, but I believe what’s gelling is consistent with the post-literate society I believe we’re now amidst. (At this point I should probably send a friendly text message to my teenage daughter. To which she’ll respond: KK LOL ROFFL TTYL.) Namely, quality is now measured out more in engagement — videos, pictures, short and pithy commentary — than in llooooooonng, boring blocks of dense text. Which nobody reads anyway!

The author is speaking mostly about writing style and typos, but of course developers are happy to generalize it to code and everything else.  However, shifting the definition of quality away from, you know, quality and to strengths the definer has (speed, relevance, authenticity, a blog on a magazine’s domain, an espresso machine in the kitchen) ultimately only serves the complacency of someone who defines quality down.

For in a Web 2.0 world, particularly one with eager Noah Websters out there who’ll tell you their application is the alpha and the omega, flaws and all, quality will remain a differentiator, and a bigger differentiator at that.  Although one expected a certain floor of minimum quality standards with most products up until about 1996, with software and applications, particularly those written poorly like Twitter, one gets first-to-market as the goal or tipping-point users or something other than stability and quality.  Once better quality products come out, though, users will migrate to them.  Blogs with fewer typographical errors will garner respect more than those rife with things like Steev Jobs had a herat attack!!!!

Of course, if your goal is to build it and cash out rapidly or to grab the youth market where newness and authenticity trump quality and stability instead of building a solid, long term user base, I guess quality isn’t for you, but then again, you probably don’t have a test team anyway, so worrying about redefining quality isn’t even a problem you’re addressing.

I never inappropriately discharged a firearm in the presence of coworkers. I’m stuck on deciding which punchline to go with here, so you choose whichever you like best:

• In all cases, the discharge was appropriate.
• I wish I’d thought of it.

You might be tempted to keep your eyes on the tabletop and hope no one knows you’re there and no one calls on you (no one will, of course, because they don’t know why you’re there and, if you’re doing your job effectively, they don’t like you anyway). You might be tempted to make snarky comments and deploy the normal gallows humor, frightening the client. Well, do so, but sparringly. Mostly, though, you’re there to do two things.

One, you need to shoot for the moon on features. You have to ask the client pretty much if he or she wants the application to wash his dog for him. The more features you throw out, the more chances the client can say, “Yes, I want that,” and work that into the estimate, or the client can say, “No, that doesn’t make sense,” or whatnot. Because the client’s going to take a look at whatever your organization puts together at some milestone after the company has expended pizza budget on getting something mostly working by the milestone, and the client will then say, “You know what else I want it to do?” At that time, the yippy customer service person will agree to anything just to get his or her commission, and the timelines and budget might take a hit, especially if the client said he wanted it to wash his puppy in the first place, but also wanted it to wash his golf balls. A little change directive won’t account for major refactoring, especially since the client will want to have secure login next time so that his business partner can wash his or her dog or bowling balls.

You need to get out ahead of that and try to think of how many features and enhancements and alternative workflows you can think of to get them down on paper before you begin.

Two, you need to make sure that the requirements account not only for happy path use cases, but also that they capture how the application should behave when the user steps off of the happy path. Most of your defects are going to come from this area, particularly if you leave it to the developers to come up with their own ad hoc solutions and assumptions. Face it, you’re in QA. You’re the best one in the room for imagining and creating disasters. Create them here, get them on paper, and then make sure they’re handled according to plan. Otherwise, when you do the black magic you do so well in the testing cycle, the developers will have to send down to the gift shop for more chewing gum to implement their fixes–if they bother to at all.

So there you have it. Swing for the fences in requirements gathering. Sure, it makes more work when the client loves half the ideas, but the client was going to come up with those on his or her own halfway through the project. And then the client will like a couple more of them, and you can point out where he or she said no when they were proposed, and fixing it will add cost to the project.

Sure, some of this is the work of business analysts, but I’ve worked plenty of places where they fell down on the job. So get yourself to A rating and get into those requirement meetings. At best, it will save you and your organization time, effort, and refactoring. At least, you might get lunch and the opportunity to frighten a real live client.