It has been a trying year, both personally and professionally. However before I flesh that out, I thought I’d try and articulate everything that has happened for me within the world of testing & quality:
- I got a new benefit at work: 10% time! This led to me taking time to learn more during working hours.
- My teams started work on a web browser based product, having been pretty much only working on a thick client talking to devices for years and years.
- Got to do my first 5Ws & 1H.
- I created and abandoned a heuristics based app called Test Addict. We used it a couple of times at work.
- I started a new role as a Quality Coach (which in truth is similar to what I was doing previously, but I cunningly added extra pressure and expectations on myself).
- We did our first Risk Storming.
- I attended TestBash UK – this was great!
- Started creating something cool (but not available yet).
- Was a guest on my first podcast (but not available yet).
- Experimented with different ways of doing test strategies, retros & RCAs to get teams engaged.
Big Fat Failure
In my annual review I was quite scathing of myself.
I failed the teams
We started a new project that whilst not greenfield, was full of opportunity. However we’ve struggled with quality with the teams quite damning in their own assessment. Our automated tests are flakey, we don’t have confidence in how we test and the bug count is beyond anything I’ve worked on before (and that is without me doing the testing!). This is without even touching on technical challenges.
Whilst quality is a shared responsibility and there’s plenty mitigating factors (excuses or reasons?), as the Quality Coach you can hardly walk away feeling like you’ve done a good job when it feels like everything is on fire.
Defeated
Throughout the year I’ve tried bringing new ideas and approaches to the teams but I’m not sure how much has really stuck. The second I stopped being the one to run RCAs or write a test strategy, they largely stop. I did get the teams testing for one quality attribute (I won’t name) for the first time, but we were told to side line it. After resisting taking on the state of our lab & kit, I succumbed, did a load of work and 2 months later its a mess again. Our flakey tests are addressed by “oh just run it again”. We did exercises like using heuristics, risk storming and 5Ws & 1H and the feedback was “that was really useful”… but they won’t get repeated. Finally I had a goal around teaching teams exploratory testing and to date I don’t think anyone has written an Explore, With, To Discover charter.
This isn’t me griping. It is a failing on me. I’m meant to be helping the teams have good habits but they aren’t there.
As for why I called this section defeated, well in Q1 & the start of Q2 I was introducing new ideas for planning testing, thinking about testing and testing techniques. Then over the week or so following my late wife’s birthday I got a wave of requests to “back off” and not take up so much of the team’s time on testing/quality stuff. And I did. I gave up.
Broken
As I’d worried a little in last year’s reflection, I’ve been feeling burnt out and haven’t been able to “over achieve” my capacity as I perhaps did in 2023. With the exception of the odd podcast when gardening, I’ve stopped exploring testing & quality in my spare time. I think the fact that I’ve only written two posts during 2024, one about grief and one written one evening during a conference, is quite telling.
Hope
I’ve been pretty bad at acknowledging my successes this year but there have been a few:
- Teams might not do exploratory testing as Elizabeth Hendrickson describes in “Explore It!” but they are going beyond the ACs and checklists.
- Teams are engaged when I organise activities like collaborative test strategies, round tables & RCAs (in the past that has felt like a struggle).
- In fact in Q1 2025 I’m switching teams that I support and the teams expressed disappointment (and concern!) that I wouldn’t be there to lead on quality discussions.
- Testing is always a topic that we consider throughout the SDLC.
- I pushed for us to adopt analytics and we did!
- I’ve gotten better at being a coach as opposed to a teacher.
- Whilst deprioritized (for now), I did get us looking at new types of testing in our day-to-day.
Generally speaking, I’ve felt like over the past few months I’ve been collaborating with the teams in a positive way. We’re working to solve challenges and started making in roads on the many challenges we’ve faced. When I was previously feeling “unwanted”, I’m now feeling like a valuable resource. Our group of Quality Coaches, spread across the world, are collaborating more too.
I may have felt like everything had fallen to pieces but I’ve been enjoying the collaboration on how we build back.
Perhaps most importantly, I will definitely get myself the counselling I need. I will recover from the neurological effects of spousal grief and hopefully my energy levels too. With that, perhaps we’ll see a Rich resembling something like what existed 740 days ago…