I just posted a blog entry sharing the news about Gil Broza’s upcoming interview with Johanna Rothman. As an advocate of the Gil’s Spot On interviews I often blog about them to help spread the news. I am especially excited about this month’s special guest.

Johanna is a much sought-after speaker and consultant, working with people to improve how they manage their product development. I started following Johanna’s work in 2006 after attending the Better Software Conference in Las Vegas. At the time I had tried registering for the “Behind Closed Doors – Secrets of Great Management” tutorial with Johanna and Esther Derby and was disheartened to learn it was sold out. Dang it!

Since 2006 I have really enjoyed Johanna’s blogs Managing Product Development and Hiring Technical People. I have also read Johanna’s book Behind Closed Doors: Secrets of Great Management (co-authored with Esther Derby) and found it really useful. I wrote a blog several months back on the book that you can read here. Last year I had the pleasure of meeting Johanna in person at the AYE Conference and attending several of her excellent sessions. Johanna’s style for sharing her knowledge and experience really resonated with me and I had many fantastic takeaways.

I really encourage you to attend this upcoming interview for the chance to spend some valuable time with Johanna and Gil. Read more about the interview on my my blog post here. You can read more about Johanna including a listing of her books and articles on her website at www.jrothman.com or follow her on Twitter @johannarothman.

Gil is hosting an excellent series of “Spot On” interviews with guest experts every 2 months. I recommend you check out his “Spot On” series and his “Q & Agile” podcasts on his website at www.3pvantage.com. You can also find Gil on Twitter @gilbroza.

3P Vantage Agile Coaching, founded by Gil Broza, is bringing another industry expert to you! Every two months Gil is hosting “Spot On” interviews. This interview series is intended to open new horizons for IT professionals interested in effective software development. The selected guest experts, while not strictly promoting Agile methods, teach and consult in related areas. Their specialties overlap and align with Agile; like Gil, they promote effective, humane software development.

The interviews are 45 – 60 minutes long and are free to attend. You should attend if:

• you love learning new perspectives and ideas about your work
• your haven’t been lucky enough to meet the expert at work or at a conference
• you could use help with your professional development

Gil has been bringing pragmatic, effective Agile software development to companies for almost a decade. Relying on his vast experience in programming, management and organizational development, he helps professionals implement non-dogmatic Agility that truly works. Beyond teaching skills and methods, Gil helps people overcome limiting habits, fears of change, blind spots and unhelpful beliefs.

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“Agile Management Beyond The Single Project”
Date: January 24, 2011
Time: 2:00pm EDT / 12:00pm MDT
Register: Registration Link

January’s guest expert is Johanna Rothman. Johanna is a much sought-after speaker and consultant, working with people to improve how they manage their product development — to maximize management and technical staff productivity and to improve product quality. Johanna is the author of several books:

• Manage Your Project Portfolio: Increase Your Capacity and Finish More Projects
• The 2008 Jolt-award winning Manage It! Your Guide to Modern, Pragmatic Project Management
• Behind Closed Doors: Secrets of Great Management (with Esther Derby)
• Hiring the Best Knowledge Workers, Techies & Nerds: The Secrets and Science of Hiring Technical People

Johanna writes columns on “extreme project management” for Gantthead, and writes two blogs on her website, www.jrothman.com. She is also a host of the Amplifying Your Effectiveness (AYE) conference.

The topic will be “Agile Management Beyond The Single Project” and the interview will cover:

• balancing keep-the-lights-on projects with growth projects
• who’s responsible for managing the portfolio, and the qualities they need
• politics in portfolio management
• making portfolio schedule promises when the underlying projects are Agile

The interview will take place on January 24 at 2:00pm EDT / 12:00 MDT. Register to secure your spot. As an added bonus you can submit questions for Johanna and Gil when you register. If you are unable to attend the call you can register and receive the recording afterwords.

Read more about the “Spot On” interview with Johanna Rothman here.

This week I posted the blog entry “Next “Spot On” Interview Oct 21 – Guest Expert Naomi Karten” sharing the news about Gil Broza’s upcoming interview with Naomi Karten. I am very excited about this interview and I am hoping to spread the news about this great opportunity.

Naomi is an internationally respected speaker, seminar leader, author and consultant, known for helping individuals and organizations improve customer satisfaction, manage change, and strengthen communication and presentation skills.

I have heard many wonderful things about Naomi although I have not yet had the opportunity to meet her in person. Earlier this year I purchased two of her books, Managing Expectations and Communication Gaps and How to Close Them, and I have thoroughly enjoyed them. These books are now amongst a collection of 10-15 books that are in my “must read” referral list for software testing folks.

You can read more about Naomi including a listing of her books and articles on her website at www.nkarten.com. Also consider checking out Naomi’s Blog or following her on Twitter @NaomiKarten where she frequently tweets insightful thoughts and references great articles and blogs.

I encourage you to attend this upcoming interview for the chance to glean invaluable insights from Naomi and Gil. Read more about the interview on my my blog post here.

Gil is hosting an excellent series of “Spot On” interviews with guest experts every 2 months. I recommend you check out his “Spot On” series and his “Q & Agile” podcasts on his website at www.3pvantage.com. You can also find Gil on Twitter @gilbroza.

3P Vantage Agile Coaching, founded by Gil Broza, is bringing another industry expert to you! Every two months Gil is hosting “Spot On” interviews. This interview series is intended to open new horizons for IT professionals interested in effective software development. The selected guest experts, while not strictly promoting Agile methods, teach and consult in related areas. Their specialties overlap and align with Agile; like Gil, they promote effective, humane software development.

The interviews are 45 – 60 minutes long and are free to attend. You should attend if:

• you love learning new perspectives and ideas about your work
• your haven’t been lucky enough to meet the expert at work or at a conference
• you could use help with your professional development

Gil has been bringing pragmatic, effective Agile software development to companies for almost a decade. Relying on his vast experience in programming, management and organizational development, he helps professionals implement non-dogmatic Agility that truly works. Beyond teaching skills and methods, Gil helps people overcome limiting habits, fears of change, blind spots and unhelpful beliefs.

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“Engage Your Audience”
Date: October 21, 2010
Time: 2:00pm EDT / 12:00pm MDT
Register: Registration Link

October’s guest expert is Naomi Karten. Naomi is a much sought-after speaker: She has delivered seminars and presentations to more than 100,000 IT professionals internationally, helping them improve customer satisfaction, manage change, and strengthen communication and presentation skills. Her just published book, Presentation Skills for Technical Professionals, offers guidelines and advice for engaging your audience and taking the stress out of presenting. Her other books and ebooks include Changing How You Manage and Communicate Change, Managing Expectations, and Communication Gaps and How to Close Them, among others.

The topic will be “Engage Your Audience” and the interview will cover:

• Can everyone truly become great presenters? (And should they bother?)
• Presentation anxiety — and why you should not eliminate it entirely(!)
• The majority of technical professionals are introverts. Can they still give good presentations?
• To PowerPoint or not to PowerPoint?
• Agile teams have more challenging presentation needs than traditional ones (e.g. at the iteration demo and when rolling out Agile). How can team members build that capability?

The interview will take place on October 21 at 2:00pm EDT / 12:00 MDT. Register to secure your spot. As an added bonus you can submit questions for Naomi and Gil when you register. If you are unable to attend the call you can register and receive the recording afterwords.

Read more about the “Spot On” interview with Naomi Karten here.

3P Vantage Agile Coaching, founded by Gil Broza, is bringing a free podcast series to you! Each month Gil is hosting “Q & Agile” podcasts intended to help software professionals gain clarity on proper, pragmatic Agility. The podcasts are 45 minutes long and are free to attend. You should attend if:

• you have nagging questions that aren’t getting answered
• your team’s version of Agile involves gnashing of teeth, conflicts, and obvious anti-patterns
• the book or conference version of Scrum/Agile doesn’t apply to your situation
• you’ve solved some of your challenges, but are curious how Gil would solve them
• your development methods aren’t delivering the promised benefits

Gil has been bringing pragmatic, effective Agile software development to companies for a decade. Relying on his vast experience in programming, management and organizational development, he helps professionals implement non-dogmatic Agility that truly works. Beyond teaching skills and methods, Gil helps people overcome limiting habits, fears of change, blind spots and unhelpful beliefs.

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“Agile Teams”
Date: September 22, 2010
Time: 2:00pm EDT / 12:00pm MDT
Register: Registration Link

September’s topic will be “Agile Teams”. Teams are the bedrock of every Agile method. They are the core unit for delivering customer value; they self-organize; they are cross-functional. Behind these brief descriptors is a whole system (or mess?) of relationships, practices, interactions, and conflicts.

Ever wonder about your team(s), how to build them, how to lead them, how to participate in them? Ask Gil.

The podcast will take place on September 22 at 2:00pm EDT / 12:00pm MDT. Register to secure your spot. As an added bonus you can submit questions for Gil when you register. If you are unable to attend the call you can register and receive the recording afterwords.

Read more about the “Q & Agile” podcast with Gil here.

3P Vantage Agile Coaching, founded by Gil Broza, is bringing another industry expert to you! Every two months Gil is hosting “Spot On” interviews with an expert on matters that touch, overlap or extend effective agility. The interviews are 45 – 60 minutes long and are free to attend.
                         

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June’s guest expert is Christopher Avery. Christopher co-founded the Agile Project Leadership Network dedicated to connecting, developing, and supporting great project leaders. Best-known for his cutting-edge work to develop practical team leadership skills for engineers and other technical professionals, Christopher wrote the popular classic book Teamwork Is An Individual Skill for everyone at work who thinks they must put up with bad teams.

The topic will be “Applying Innate Leadership in an Agile Setting” and the interview will cover:

• Self-organization, personal leadership, and demonstrating responsibility in Agile teams.
• What leadership looks like and what the absence of leadership looks like.
• Leadership and one’s place in the hierarchy.
• Does everybody truly have innate leadership?
• Simple ways to develop leadership.

The interview will take place on June 2 at 2:00pm EDT / 12:00 MDT. Register to secure your spot. As an added bonus you can submit questions for Christopher and Gil when you register. If you are unable to attend the call you can register and receive the recording afterwords.

Last month Gil Broza kicked off his “Spot On Interviews” by interviewing Michael Bolton. Gil and Michael discussed “Is There A Problem Here?” including:

• Testing as an Exploratory/Investigative vs. Confirmatory Pursuit
• The Trouble with the Ubiquitous Testing Goal of Completing Tests
• Are you Testing, or are you Checking?
• You Cannot Test Everything, Where do you Invest Your Time?
• Agile Testing

I enjoyed the recording immensely and made several pages of notes. Although many of the discussion points shared insights I was already familiar with I appreciated the reminders. I found Michael’s perspective and approach to articulating the challenges in testing to be very helpful. I have captured a variety of the discussion points to share with you.

Exploratory vs Confirmatory Testing

• Exploratory testing is a process where we are seeking new information.
• Confirmatory testing is a process where we are verifying and validating things that we thought or hope are correct.
• Testing is a thinking process and we need to be using critical thinking skills. “Critical Thinking is thinking about thinking with the intention of being fooled.” Michael encouraged testers to be mindful of our capacity to be fooled.
• “It Works.” According to Jerry Weinberg this is the shortest and most ambiguous sentence possible. I believe that is very true and yet it is used so often by testers when questioned about a feature or program they are testing.

Test Planning in Exploratory Testing

• Planning can be expensive. There are long feedback loops between planning to find something out and then finding it out.
• “With Exploratory Testing we want to try to find out, in as many ways as we can, as many things as we can, about the program.” Michael encouraged testers to consider that the traditional test planning approaches are not effective in accomplishing this as it leaves out a great deal of learning.

Testing vs Checking

• Testing vs Checking was covered in the interview. Check out Michael’s blog entry Testing vs Checking for full context on this excellent discussion point.
• Michael shared an excellent reference from the book Computer Programming Fundamentals by Gerald M. Weinberg and Herbert Leeds. Back in 1961 they wrote that testers are not really in the job of proving repeatability, machines can do that, we are really looking to prove or test adaptability by the machine. The machine can handle whatever we through at it. In order to do this well we need a suspicious nature and a lively imagination. I love that!

Practicing Exploratory Testing

• Indulge your curiosity. Follow where your research leads you. Be innovative.
• Play is exploratory learning. Michael referenced the book Play as Exploratory Learning: Studies of Curiosity Behavior by Mary Reilly. The book talks about how we have de-valued play. Kids learn faster than anyone; and kids in pursuit of knowledge are not even aware of their learning.
• Michael shared his excitement with the Weekend Testing Movement. This was started by four testers in Bangalore. Acting as their own managers, coaches and critics, they find a piece of open source software and test it. As Michael put it, every weekend these testers are sharpening their saws. You can read more about the Weekend Testers here http://weekendtesting.com.

Test Coverage & The Impossibility of Complete Testing

• “As a tester you are acting as the eyes, ears, nose and fingertips of the client. You are a sensory instrument for your client.” For me, this quote from Michael is one of the best definitions of a tester I have ever heard. Excellent!
• As that instrument the testers job is to identify the kind of information your client wants. There are things we know we don’t know, and then things we don’t know we don’t know. There are ways to find out about the things we don’t know we don’t know.
• Development and testing are constantly dancing with circles and feedback loops. It is impossible to schedule invention and discovery. I felt this was another excellent perspective.
• What is done? Do we honestly believe we know enough to move on? Have we achieved good enough? Can we take the next step with this product (may be a release, or next feature, etc.)? There is no “standard” we can reference to define this.
• One approach is to consider when the cost of the task exceeds value of the return.
• “Testing is always sampling strategy. The number of conditions we can test is infinite. The number of platforms and variations on platforms that we can test is intractable if it is not infinite. Perspectives that people have on value are infinite. The input domain of valid input for any program is potentially finite but certainly is intractably large for anything except the most trivial program and invalid inputs are infinite. No matter what we do, we are always doing some subset of the testing that we could do that is asymptotically close to zero.” This was a great description!
• Michael referenced “Try Again, Fail Again, Fail Better, Fail Faster” by Samuel Beckett.

Regression Testing

• Michael referenced the RCRCRC mnemonic for regression testing by Karen N. Johnson. The mnemonic stands for:
  • Recent: new features, new areas of code are more vulnerable
  • Core: essential functions must continue to work
  • Risk: some areas of an application pose more risk
  • Configuration sensitive: code that’s dependent on environment settings can be vulnerable
  • Repaired: bug fixes can introduce new issues
  • Chronic: some areas in an application may be perpetually sensitive to breaking

  Here is the link to Karen’s blog entry on this mnemonic: A Heuristic for Regression Testing.

If you have not already heard the interview, I really hope you will take the time to do so. There was a wealth of information covered and each topic warrants a deep dive to fully grasp the concepts presented. I believe that for each of the concepts Michael shared there is a extensive information available on the web in the form of blogs, articles and white papers. I encourage you to indulge your curiosity, follow where your research leads you, and to be innovative in applying your new learning.

Here is the link to the recording: Spot On Interview with Michael Bolton. Enjoy!