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Författare: Anders Sandström

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Since many of my colleagues are non-swedish speakers I have decided to write in English from now on.  Last week I went to Tallinn to give a class in Test design. I was invited by KnowIT, one of my business partners in Sweden as well. They arranged a class together with Webmedia - the largest IT-company in Estonia. In spite of business beeing somewhat slow there were nine people in the class.

Class

All of them were young men with good experience and eagerness to learn so the class was really fun to teach. I think that Estonia is a good choice for outsourcing, they speak good English and Tallinn is only 45 minutes from Stockholm by plane. If you are interested in outsourcing to Estonia contact Kaspar.Loog at knowit.ee

Kaspar and Per took me to a nice Russian restaurant in the old town were we had blini and vodka for starter and a stew for main course. The stew was made in a clay pot with dough in top as a lid. It looked like a giant mushroom and was very tasty.

A colleague of mine, David Barnholdt, who is boiling with creativity, created an exercise the other day. The goal was to explain the effects of having to much detail in requirements. I follow along the same lines and think the same applies to test cases. For SOME tests there may be a reason to have a lot of detail in the test specification but for MANY other tests detail can be counter productive. The main reason for this is that lots of details means that the creatvity of the tester will be choked and the performance of tha testers executing tests will be inefficient. Following a detailed script will often result in a worse performance than having a more open ended description. This is exactly what James Bach and Michael Bolton and many others have tried to explain for many years.

I found David´s exercise very interesting and decided to copy it. This means that we can also compare results.

I divided the class in two groups (consisting of  4 people each) and told them that they in this exercise would do a drawing , following a requirement I would hand out.  The would only have one minute to complete the drawing. I provided them with a number pencils in red, green and blue and one big piece of paper each.  Then I handed out one paper with the requirements to each group and started a visible timer counting down 60 seconds. (I searched for timer on the web and shoed it via the projector)

One of the groups got the following requirement:

Draw a beutiful summer meadow with blue and red flowers in green grass, some cows and birds under a shining sun.

The other group got the following requirement:

Draw a beutiful summer meadow with

  • 10 blue flowers with 5 petals each
  • 5 blue flowers with 6 petals each
  • 13 red flowers with 6 petals each
  • 2 cows with 3 black spots
  • 1 cow with 5 black spots
  • 2 cows with 4 black spots
  • 2 birds to reside in the upper left corner
  • 3 birds in the middle
  • one sun to the right with 5 sun beams

Here are the results from the exercise.

Meadow

So the leftmost drawing, made by the group given the detailed requrement, had a lot of details but lacked the coherence of the right drawing - made by the group given a more open ended requirement. I feel the exact same thing happens when testers get too detailed test cases. They follow them in detail but miss the big picture. We had a discussion in class on how detailed requirements and test cases should be and I think that all participants will think twice befire creating highly detailed scripts in the future. We of course agreed that there MAY be situations where we want to have a lot of detail but that is OK as long as we realise the consequences. So thanks again David for creating this great exercise!

Well , it is Saturday night so I am going to be a bit social...

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Jag håller på att ta fram en kurs för beställare. Ämnet är att beställa och ta emot IT-system.

Jag har studerat PENG-modellen som handlar om ekonomin i investeringen. Verksamhetsspecialisterna sitter tillsammans under 3-4 halvdagar under ledning av en PENG-coach och tar fram vilka effelter/nyttor de vill ha och vad priset och vinsten blir. Både hårda - direkta faktorer och mjuka faktorer som mindre stress beaktas. En intressant reflektion är att det ofta visar sig att de 20 procenten viktigaste nyttorna står för 80% av nyttan. Pareto-principen igen. Värt at notera är att PENG helst inte vill kalla det IT-projket utan verksamhetsprojekt där IT ofta spelar en viktig roll.

Nästa steg är effektstyrning där vi identifierar målgrupper och effekter på ett mer detaljerat sätt. Jag frågade en  specialist på effektstyrning om PENG och fick följande svar:

PENG är en metod för att göra en investeringsbedömning. Den ge inget (eller nästan inget) stöd för att styra projektet i analys, genomförande eller förvaltning. Effektsyrning syftar till att _styra- mot förväntade effekter. PENG syftar till att ta investeringsbeslutet. Vi har utvecklat PENG så att man kan använda det i samband med att man definierar effektmål.

Så detta verkar vara ett naturligt nästa steg. Först därefter går vi in och skriver mer detaljerade krav. Jag har precis handlat boken User Stories applied av Mike Cohn. User stories används av det agila folket för att beskriva krav och planera utvecklingen. Den verkar mycket lovande. Jag har länge tyckt att användningsfall inte fungerar särskilt bra då de är för detaljerade, innehåller lösningar mer än krav etc. User stories används tillsammans med konversation mellan beställare och leverantör. det är mycket viktigt att inte missa kommunikationsdelen - då är det kört! Att skriva detaljerade användningsfall och sen hoppas på att utvecklarna levererar exakt det jag vill ha...det funkar inte!

Det fina är att User Stories och Effektkartor sen kan användas som underlag för test och PENG för att följa upp investeringsnyttan. Låter det bra eller?

Det vore kul att få återkoppling om någon känner att de vill bidra.

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Thursday was tough, the most intense day of the class. When we thought we had learned the most we got to do the hardest problem. OR actually, since there are no hard problems, the hardest solution we did. We eagerly fell into every trap that was set up ...by ourselves. We had much discussion about process, confused leadership with telling others what to do, clinging to our own ideas instead of focusing on the end result. The funniest thing of all, I think, was that we ended up after three hours with a simplification of our zero-level solution. So waht took twelve peope three hours to do could very likely have been achived by three people in twelve minutes!

The other groups solution of the prolem we created. Solved with brilliance in 59.59 of the hour allowed. Stanley S Sczorcecode is a real S-person.

Play

It was also fun to observe them solving the problem with elegance. Just as us, they solved the earlier problem the hard way and this the easy way. The result - well, the easiest way took shortest time and produced the better result! When people are having anjoyong themselves, that is when they are most effective.

The grand finale: Red Hot Party Poopers kicks ass with their first (and last) performance. On Youtube there is a video that shows how fun we had .

redhot

Some of the lyrics, adapted by myself from an old classic.

Lyrics

I rushed away in a taxi to try to get the train in time. I only missed it with a couple of minutes and watched it leave as I exited the taxi. The bonus fifty-five minutes I got were spent on re-writing next coneference talk completely.

I do hope sincerely that I will remember to apply the things I have learned and become a better leader. One of the best learnings for me as a tester was that the fact that in many cases the LESS detail we write in the requirements the BETTER the solution will be. The less we try to control, the better motivated, creative and often also organised the team will be.

There are still some places left on the coming class in USA in March.

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For two days now we have been running a simulation and then analysing it. It has been a lot of fun and very enlightening. I am surprised that it is possible to get so much out of only one game. Without revealing too much, our task was to run a company for five hours. Our goal was to organise ourself and earn money. Sheriff Hi-Ho in his office is seen below.

HiHo

Glittery Silver also played an important part.

Glittery

Henrik Kniberg was one of the observers.

Henrik

Day four has been a full day of analysis. First the observes showed us a time line filled with events, quotes, photos.

Analys

Then we started to analyse what had hapened and why. There is really a lot to learn about the organisation, leadership and flow of information. Far too much to put on the blog. Below, Jerry is analysing how Ola was in the middle of everything and thereby showing that if you do too much of a good thing it starts becoming an obstacle instead of helping. Esther tied us together with her brightly colored yarn to visualize the connections.

Tonight the rest of the class are enjoying themselves with games and hot tub while I am trying to cure my cold, which has now given me also an eye infection.

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First of all I want to show a photo of the teachers we have. Johanna Rothman to the left, Jerry Weinberg in the middle and Esther Derby with grey hair to the right. It is interesting to study the interactions of the teachers and wonder aout how many of the events are carefully planned and how many are intuitional. It is at the same time a relaxed environment filled with lots of demanding tasks. I am discussing a lot of agile principles with the specialists here and enjoy every hour so far.

How can I possibly write down all the new insights I have gotten so far? Yesterday we did a lot of team exercises and this morning started with the full group analysing ur behaviour. We noted down the five most omportant actions we had done they previous day to act as leaders. Then we were told to explain why we had done a certain thing and our cards were placed in a big matrix taped to the floor. The goal was to show us the MOIJ model. The letters standing for Motivation - what did we do to motivate the team, Organisation and Information. The inexperienced leader focuses on helping motivation by motivatong the team The more experienced leader tries also to organise the team beter or to get more information in order to increase motivation. For example it is possile to get information that if the team solved a particular problem well we would get a lot of points thereby giving the team an extra motivational kick to perform.

MOIJ

The afternoon was spent observing another team while they were performing a task. We had to focus o one thing at a time which was a challenge in itself. This led to interesting obervation regarding group dynamics, non-verbal acting, roles, structure etc. Rewarding and very exhausting. Lessons wre that you can learn a lot by observing facts and telling the observed of the facts. But it hard not to make your own interpreatations at once but wait for a while.

I skipped the vening session tonight which is scheduled to continue until 9.30.  I need to sit down and reflect for a while and of course blog about it.