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By Lynn McKee, January 4, 2012 9:03 am

Unimagined Testing and Quality Perspectives are excited to offer the Powerful Project Leadership Skills course instructed by industry recognized leadership consultants Wayne and Eileen Strider. Wayne and Eileen each have over 30 years IT experience including over 20 years experience with the Virginia Satir Growth Model. They have instructed numerous workshops including Problem Solving Leadership, Congruent Leadership Development with Jean McLendon, and participated in the Amplifying Your Effectiveness Conference and the Annual S&C Leader’s Forum. Wayne authored the Powerful Project Leadership book that the workshop has been adapted from. This three day course will be offered in Calgary on April 23 – 25, 2012.

Course Overview
You are an experienced information technology professional. Regardless of your position, role or title, you may find yourself managing projects. You know the mechanics of project management—initiating, planning, scheduling, staffing, executing, monitoring, controlling, and closing projects. Now you want to strengthen your leadership skills—skills that enable you to work effectively with customers, bosses, peers, staff, and vendors as well as help them work effectively with one another.

This workshop will help you balance your needs and expectations as a leader, the needs and expectations of other project individuals, and the realities of your project’s context. This workshop addresses directly human relationship situations that can put your project at risk—when stresses emerge, tempers flare, and uncertainties and self-doubts arise.

Adapted from the book Powerful Project Leadership by Wayne Strider, this workshop can benefit anyone whose work involves managing relationships among project team members, sponsors, committees, functional users, customers and vendors.

For more details on the Powerful Project Leadership Skills course, please see the PPLS Course Details page.

Registration
Early bird registration of $1625.00 per person will be offered to Satir Global Network members and $1699 to non members until January 31, 2012. Starting February 1st registrations will be $1925.00 per person to Satir members and $1999.00 to non members. Fees include training materials, lunch, and refreshments. Participants will also receive a copy of the Powerful Project Leadership book. Please note there is a maximum of 28 spots available.

Register Now »

Interested in knowning more about the Satir Global Network? Visit http://satirglobal.org/about/ for more information and to join.

Do not miss this great opportunity! We look forward to seeing you at the course. Should you have any questions or concerns, please contact Lynn or Nancy.

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By Lynn McKee, August 31, 2011 3:59 pm

This week I tried canning for the first time. It was exciting for me as I had seen my grandmother canning jams, pickles and more when I was a kid but did not have an opportunity to learn from her. After much consideration I decided my first attempt would be to make raspberry jam. With careful planning I read as much as I could about canning and at least 20 different recipes. I was surprised by all the different approaches and the numerous tidbits of advice provided regarding pectin vs sugar, freezer jam vs boiled jam, sterilization techniques, boiling times by altitude, and general references to “this works” and “this doesn’t work”.

My gut response to all the advice I was reading was interesting to me, particularly the advice on using pectin. After reading much advice on simply using pectin to make canning quicker and easier, I was convinced NOT to use it. Subconsciously the advice made me want to try the more challenging technique even more. For those who have not canned before I will elaborate on the pectin debate. Pectin is naturally occurring in fruit although some fruits contain very low amounts and this can affect how well the jam “jells”. To increase the chances of ensuring your jam “jells” every time, many recipes simply use a pectin additive which is extracted from apples. Many folks debate whether the pectin affects the flavour of the jam and whether the old fashion approach to making jams is more natural.

Despite all of the advice that pectin would make my canning experience more enjoyable, I ended up determined to try making my jam without the pectin additive. I was delighted to find my jam “jelled” just perfectly and the end result was fantastic! Mmmmm homemade jam.

Next I moved onto raspberry-blueberry, raspberry-rhubarb, and strawberry recipes. Along the way I found I stumbled into several traps and challenges that I had read about in my early preparation. The strawberry jam was the most challenging. From early on it foamed up like crazy, something I read about and heard you should use butter to prevent. Did I do that though? Nope, I wanted to see what would happen for myself. Next, I had to boil it for a very long time to achieve the “jelling”. Yep, there were lots of warnings about this too and recommendations to just use pectin with this particular fruit. Of course I skipped that “sage old advice” and stuck to my goal of using no additives.

Stubborn you might say? Perhaps, I was being stubborn but I think it is a more a matter of needing to learn things first hand. Seeing something for yourself is very different than trying to glean the insight from someone else. As children we are the same way. How many times do you tell your child not to do something and they just can’t stop themselves from doing it anyways! There is so much to be gained from the experience of trying something even if the end result is not what you were hoping for.

The same message is true in software testing. However, I often find that courses, conferences, coaching sessions, and even collegial conversations to be filled with advice on how to avoid pitfalls, traps and difficult situations. While this advice is valuable insight, at the end of the day many people are likely to employ the very approaches, techniques and tools they may have been cautioned to avoid.

A recent experience rings very true to this for me. Over 10 years of my experience in IT has been on traditional software projects with several of those being large, enterprise wide initiatives. When a good friend of mine accepted a role on a very large project, my head filled with warnings and mine fields to share. As the project got underway my friend and I shared numerous conversations, discussing insight based on my experience on similar projects. However, as the months passed my friend found herself in many of the mine fields as I had warned her of, and as can be expected, had stumbled across a fair number of new ones too.

We have talked about how the project unfolded many times and it has been interesting discussing the insights that can only be gained by experiencing something for yourself. Sometimes in the moment of success or failure you hear a distant voice reminding you that things might happen this way. I had this exact moment when my strawberry jam began foaming like crazy! My memory was triggered and I tried to recall all the tips and tricks I had read about. In the end I tried a few different ideas, a combination of sage advice and my own ideas, and the jam turned out wonderfully. Along the way I gained insight into the advice I had read about but more importantly gained first hand experience into why “this works” and “this doesn’t work”.

“If you hold a cat by the tail you learn things you cannot learn any other way.” – Mark Twain

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By Lynn McKee, August 2, 2011 11:33 pm

The Calgary Software Quality Discussion Group, SQDG, is ramping up for the upcoming 2011/2012 season. This season’s team of directors includes:

• Nancy Kelln, Programme Director
• Al-Noor Pardhan, Outreach & Logistics Director
• Lynn McKee, Communications Director

In June we were busy with the 2010/2011 Season Survey which provided very positive feedback for us as we head into the next season. With the first session of the upcoming season to be held in September, we are busy putting together the schedule and lining up the topics and presenters. A first glimpse of the 2011/2012 schedule is targeted for release in early August.

If you are interested in presenting for the SQDG, we are currently accepting abstracts for the upcoming 2011/2012 season and would like to hear from you. Check out the Be a Speaker page for more details on speaking for the SQDG.

I look forward to seeing many familiar faces in the upcoming September session and meeting new people passionate about software quality. Hope to see you there!

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By Lynn McKee, August 2, 2011 10:39 pm

I am really excited to be heading to my fourth consecutive CAST conference next week! The Association for Software Testing is hosting the sixth annual Conference of the Association for Software Testing, CAST 2011, in Seattle, Washington on August 8th – 10th.

As noted on the AST website, “This year’s conference promises to be the most unique to date, it will be the first Context-Driven Testing conference to ever be held. This year’s program features some most outspoken context-driven testers in the world. This international gathering will span three days in August and offer attendees the opportunity to discuss, debate, question, and learn about Context-Driven Testing.” I am an advocate of the context-driven approach and am keen to see the direction some of the sessions take. I think the talk I am looking forward to the most is the tutorial Context-Driven Test Leadership by James Bach. This will be my first time seeing James present on the topic of leadership and I am looking forward to his perspective on many aspects.

As much as I am looking forward to the conference content, I am just as excited for the opportunity to reconnect with friends and meet new people passionate about software testing. The conference schedule includes a diverse group of international presenters, some of whom I have been looking forward to meeting for several years now.

I plan to tweet like crazy and hope to to crank out a couple of blog posts as I am going as an AST board member and attendee but I am not presenting. I am looking forward to focusing on attending some great sessions and participating in all of the facilitated and non-facilitated (hallway) “conferring” that makes CAST so unique.

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By Lynn McKee, April 11, 2011 12:56 pm

I have noticed something interesting about the way we learn over the last year. I have singled out the past 12 months as I have had the opportunity to observe hundreds of people actively learning through the numerous conferences, workshops and training sessions that I have attended or presented. What I observed was fascinating to me. People seem prone to identify what they are learning to be in alignment with their current knowledge and experience even when in reality there are wildly contrasting differences.

I am familiar with the learning pattern where people relate new information with their existing knowledge and experience. I realize that these linkages aid people in connecting with the new information and hopefully increasing both their retention and adoption rates. The focus of my intrigue is when new information that is distinctly different, and often times radically different, is somehow interpreted to be the same or very similar to the person’s existing knowledge and experience. Essentially the person is reaching the conclusion “Yes indeed, this is just like what I do on my project.”

It has been interesting to see this recurring theme even across a diverse group of presenters, facilitators and instructors with varied teaching approaches. The material covered has been a combination of everything from testing approaches, techniques, management skills, soft skills, agile practices, etc. The duration of the sessions has ranged from 20 minute presentations, experiential workshops, to 3 day courses. Time permitting most sessions have included group exercises and the opportunity for attendees to reflect, question, and compare.

Many of my observations have been with individuals whom I do not know very well and I am gleaning my conclusions based on conversations typically 15 minutes to an hour in length. I recognize that it is not easy to gather significant detail about a person’s existing knowledge, experience and testing practices is in such short time periods, however, there are still interesting observations that can be made in these time spans. Conversely, I have had the opportunity to observe the same behaviour with people that I know and whose current testing practices I am familiar with.

In one particular example, I had the opportunity to attend a 3 day training course with a person whom I have known for many years. The course was the Rapid Software Testing course and it was being instructed by Michael Bolton. As this was my 2nd opportunity to attend this course I was familiar with the numerous opportunities for aha moments and was keen for my colleague experience them. I was intrigued by the conclusions my colleague reached throughout the course. Although I knew that their practices were distinctly different somehow the new information was registering as something my colleague was already doing! Imagine concluding the use of mindmaps for creative, exploratory test idea generation equates to the use of pre-emptive, prescriptive test cases?

Why does this happen? My good friend Nancy Kelln has a degree in Psychology and is intrigued to research this further. I think it would be fantastic to better understand how these seemingly dubious connections are being made. In the meantime we need to challenge our own learning connections and strive to improve the learning connections of those who share our ideas with.

For your own learning connections, consider asking yourself about the parallels you are drawing from the new information to your existing knowledge and experience. Do those parallels really exist? How would you know? What questions could you ask? How might you challenge yourself to dig deeper into the material? Are you motivated enough to pursue understanding the material better or are you stopping at your current conclusions? What valuable insights may you be missing by not further questioning your conclusions?

I welcome any recommendations on books, articles or blogs about people and learning that you have found particularly insightful. Kudos to all the fantastic presenters, facilitators and instructors that I had the opportunity to glean tips from last year.

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By Lynn McKee, April 8, 2011 1:25 pm

This year I decided to tackle presenting the dangers inherit with metrics and measurements. The topic has been well covered in books, articles, and blogs and I was fortunate to have such great material to learn from. I am passionate about encouraging people to understand the many ways we can be deceived.

I cover many concepts in my presentation including:

• What is Measurement?
• Why do we Measure?
• Measurement & Context
• The Qualitative vs Quantitative Debate
• Deductive & Inductive Reasoning
• Entomological & Ontological Assumptions
• The Positivism Viewpoint & Empiricism
• The Post Positivism Viewpoint Including Reality, Observations & Perceptions
• Orders of Measurement
• Measurement Models and Validity
• Construct Validity
• Abstraction & Aggregation
• Measurement Side Effects
• Inquiry vs Control

The emphasis is on asking “What is the question we are really trying to answer?”. It is important to understand that measurement is difficult as many things we seek to measure are subjective: complex, qualitative, non-repeatable, and involve human judgment or human performance. This is further complicated when we develop complex, scientific models in our attempt to measure more accurately. We need to question the validity of our models and understand concepts such as construct validity, abstraction and aggregation.

We must also understand that measurements do not have validity, only our inferences or conclusions can have validity. Be mindful of the notion of truth and the need to be critical of our ability to know reality with certainty. This combines the affects of epistemological and ontological assumptions, causal inference, confirmation bias and many more factors that result in ill-informed conclusions. Combine qualitative and quantitative measures and triangulate to get a better handle on reality.

Managers need to think carefully about the potential side effects of measures. People tailor their behaviour to things that they are measured against and behaviours change in predictable ways to provide the answers management is looking for. Beware of these effects. Better yet…stop measuring testers in terms of test case production and bug counts!

It is imperative that metrics and measurement are used for inquiry vs control. Remember to use numbers to illustrate stories; watch out for numbers becoming placeholders for stories. Stop providing metrics and measurements solely in the written form, delivered by email, with the hope your stakeholders are drawing meaningful conclusions from them. Establish regular opportunities to have conversations with your stakeholders about your testing efforts and the value of your team within the organization. Educate your stakeholders on the importance of discussion to provide the rich descriptive detail that sets quantitative results into their human context.

I am hopeful you will check out my presentation Deception Dangers of the Numbers Game. I encourage you to research these dangers and strengthen your understanding of how we deceive ourselves. At the end of my presentation you will find three pages of great references to use as a starting point. I also welcome the chance to chat on Skype @lmmckee or Twitter @lynn_mckee.

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By Lynn McKee, March 14, 2011 11:26 am

The 2nd annual POST Workshop wrapped up this past weekend and it was another great success!

Last year Nancy Kelln and I hosted our first ever POST Workshop on the theme “Perspectives on Your Most Powerful Testing Skill”. The workshop was a great success with fantastic feedback from our attendees who came from across Canada. In the months leading up to and including the weekend we learned a great deal about hosting such a workshop. As this year’s event neared we were excited but thankfully much less apprehensive about how the event would unfold.

Nancy and I are very thankful to all of this year’s attendees who shared their time, energy, and valuable perspectives on our theme “Test Estimation: The Facts and Fictions”. Each presentation was insightful and there was excellent discussion throughout the workshop. We kept our amazing facilitator Sherry Heinze very busy tracking the flurry of colored facilitation cards! A special thank you to Malini Mohan Kumar who traveled all the way from India to attend the workshop.

I will be updating the POST Workshop website, www.postworkshop.ca, very shortly with a recap from the workshop including a collection of photos from this year’s event.