Tuesday, June 26, 2012
Job Satisfaction!
"Three things – autonomy, complexity, and a connection between effort and reward – are, most people agree, the three qualities that work has to have if it is to be satisfying. It is not how much money we make that ultimately makes us happy between nine and five. It is whether our work fulfills us."
"Work that fulfills those three criteria is meaningful. Being a teacher is meaningful. Being a physician is meaningful. So is being an entrepreneur…"
-Malcolm Gladwell “Outliers: The Story of Success”
Sunday, June 10, 2012
An evening with Martin Fowler!
Thanks to the Agile Singapore meetup, I became aware of the wonderful session organised by ThoughtWorks and NUS.
The first session by Vivek Prahlad was very well organised and gave a beautiful quick overview about the Agile way of working on software projects. For me most of the content of this session was Agile as usual except the below picture:
The above picture lists most of the practices followed by Agile projects and the relationships amongst them. If any one of the nodes is missing it impact on all the related practices. Just imagine the impact if you remove the Testing node or make it less effective or inefficient. It impacts the following:
- Refactoring
- Pair programming
- Simple design
- Small releases
- Continuous integration
- Sustainable pace
- Planning
- Whole team
Next session was by Martin Fowler. He spoke about three intriguing topics, 20 minutes each.
Martin Fowler is a very well know Agilist in the software world and has written many books and influencing blogs. I was really looking forward to be in his talk and I can say that I found him more than I had expected. His talks were all very engaging. The format of three short 20 minute talks was also really cool and really helped the audience (me) not to start wandering.
Out of all the three sessions I loved the concept about the strategic and utility software. The analogy of the utility software with sewage pipe from business perspective was quite surreal. Both utility and strategic software delivery teams follow different patterns of agile and have different benefits from it. I also realised that the project I am part of used to be stragic at some point in time, right now it is pure utility only.
I also learnt that there is a very small percentage of IT projects are of strategic type, in the industry and ThoughtWorks primarily focuses on tapping them.
Overall it was another superb experience with lots of learning and meeting Agile friends.
Tuesday, April 24, 2012
CITCON - Cool Great Experience!
I was lucky enough to be at CITCON 2012 at Singapore (pronounced KITCON, because it is Kontinuous Integration and not Sontinuous Integration, nice one :)). When I came to know about it initially thru the Agile Singapore mailing list, it was already late, the registration website was showing a house full message. But luckily I knew a person belonging to one of the sponsoring company and he thankfully helped me secure a seat in.
The conference spanned across two days, a Friday evening and a full Saturday. Friday evening we got together and introduced ourselves and decided on the topics to be presented on the next day. The introduction included each individual talking a few words about why were they present and what was their intention to take out of the conference. Additional to that Paul and Jeffery introduced the Open Space concept and the process it will progress rest of the conference.
The list of topics was posted on a grid on a board.
I was able to attend the following sessions:
1. CI 101 - By Andy Marks from ThoughtWorks
2. Strategies for Scaling and Speeding Tests - Vivek from ThoughtWorks
3. TDD vs BDD - Abhay from New Context
4. CI in a lean startup - By Andy Marks from ThoughtWorks
5. Pair Programming Done Right - Paul Julius from Co-founder CITCON
6. Selling Change - Jeffrey Fredrick from Co-founder CITCON
Each session was amazing in itself and always ended up in high spirits. As the open space format defines the sessions are driven by the people attending it. So every session started with a speaker initiating it, followed by people sitting in circles or randomly and converting it into a discussion mode with lots of inputs from attendees.
The conference was well sufficed with food and snacks at regular intervals. I enjoyed a lot talking to new people from different companies and learning a lot about their work and processes.
Both the sessions by co-founders PJ and JF were really awesome. While PJ described beautiful ways to start doing pair programming and its benefits, JF led the groups thru wonderful walkthru's of ways to sell change to a group of people around you.
They also had a wonderful unique way of leading the introduction talk on day 1 by dropping the post it chits on the floor leaving us to imagine like a 3D slide show with slides falling on the floor and Zero text display.
The overall experience was super nice and I kept recollecting it all thru out my next day during my idle mind times and ofcourse images will last much longer. I'd love to join it again and next definitely contribute more than this time!!
 |
| Look in the center on this picture to find me! |
The conference spanned across two days, a Friday evening and a full Saturday. Friday evening we got together and introduced ourselves and decided on the topics to be presented on the next day. The introduction included each individual talking a few words about why were they present and what was their intention to take out of the conference. Additional to that Paul and Jeffery introduced the Open Space concept and the process it will progress rest of the conference.
The list of topics was posted on a grid on a board.
I was able to attend the following sessions:
1. CI 101 - By Andy Marks from ThoughtWorks
2. Strategies for Scaling and Speeding Tests - Vivek from ThoughtWorks
3. TDD vs BDD - Abhay from New Context
4. CI in a lean startup - By Andy Marks from ThoughtWorks
5. Pair Programming Done Right - Paul Julius from Co-founder CITCON
6. Selling Change - Jeffrey Fredrick from Co-founder CITCON
Each session was amazing in itself and always ended up in high spirits. As the open space format defines the sessions are driven by the people attending it. So every session started with a speaker initiating it, followed by people sitting in circles or randomly and converting it into a discussion mode with lots of inputs from attendees.
The conference was well sufficed with food and snacks at regular intervals. I enjoyed a lot talking to new people from different companies and learning a lot about their work and processes.
 |
| Yummy!! |
They also had a wonderful unique way of leading the introduction talk on day 1 by dropping the post it chits on the floor leaving us to imagine like a 3D slide show with slides falling on the floor and Zero text display.
The overall experience was super nice and I kept recollecting it all thru out my next day during my idle mind times and ofcourse images will last much longer. I'd love to join it again and next definitely contribute more than this time!!
Tuesday, February 7, 2012
Thursday, November 17, 2011
Wednesday, March 2, 2011
Go for Just Enough
Is being really successful inevitably a matter of being the best,highest,youngest,richest,smartest and prettiest on every scale you know that is,celebrity winner-take-all Such standards are maximised forms of accomplishment.Simply put,maximisation is any form of going for the extreme: genius intelligence,superhuman effort,the best house,the unique lifestyle,and the most profit possible But even if you are drawn to the positive aspects of maximisation as your standard,most peoples sense of success demands high scores in many differing categories.Sometimes,these goals contradict each other: wealth and best friends who love you for yourself,not your money.A generous nature and being in the top position.Leading a team and being able to do everything your way.Before you anchor your ambitions on the outer limits,think of the Roman and British empires.Rome continually pushed its borders in a political philosophy of limitless power only to discover it had to build a wall to keep the invaders out before it could really build and protect its roads.The British set up a legal and bureaucratic system in each of its colonial territories,but the idea of limitless exploitation became the empires undoing.If you wish to live with a continually-renewing sense of success you have to give up the standards of maximization.
By LAURA NASH
Wednesday, December 1, 2010
Essential guiding principles - QA Automation Framework
- Test automation is a fulltime effort, not a sideline.
- The test design and the test framework are totally separate entities.
- The test framework should be application-independent.
- The test framework must be easy to expand, maintain, and perpetuate.
- The test strategy/design vocabulary should be framework independent.
- The test strategy/design should remove most testers from the complexities of the test framework.
Wonderful points above. More details @ link below
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