Elizabeth Zagroba: Organizational Anarchist
To shift a recent conversation away from the negative, Maaret Pyhäjärvi asked me and Alex Schladebeck to tell her about a colleague we enjoyed working with. I recounted a story of a recent experience on my team. I'd drafted a list of team and product metrics we could start collecting, but I wasn't sure how to motivate or encourage people to care about these numbers. I presented the list and my…
I forget which one of us said it. I was talking to Maaret Pyhäjärvi and Alex Schladebeck. Maaret was describing how, of the dozens of test environments on a project, only a few were in use. The rest were useless, because no one was maintaining them. If you're a millenial, your first point of reference for "periodically perform a boring maintenance task" was keeping your Tamagotchi alive. If you're…
When people see me taking notes, or see the notes afterwards, the most common reaction is "I couldn't do that." Actually, yes. They could. Skills you practice are the ones you get better at. Note-taking is no different. Shareable notes I love to write with a fountain pen in a beautiful paper notebook for work. Writing down can help me remember something, but more often it helps me remember that I…
After a few months of consulting for a team, they asked me what my recommendations were for them. Among them was a slide with a serene fjord. I wanted the team to imagine how they would feel if they were in that boathouse, calmly sipping tea and looking out at the scenic mountains and water. I wanted their releases, and all releases at the company, to be like that. The dream I planted a dream in…
My team did a hackathon last week. The topic was to automate release notes. I'd misunderstood the assignment ahead of time, mixing up the release notes with a completely different release change log despite several attempts to identify the right thing. I'd messaged several people around the department to understand the use and value of the release change log. Seeing these messages, my product…
Occasionally I get asked "What drove you to start speaking at conferences?" There are the regular explanations: I was interested in learning from the best in the field. couldn't afford the ticket price or the travel. I was looking for a peer group who know what good testing looks like. Those things continue to be true. But what pushed this introvert who'd rather be reading a book sipping tea off…
We're in a tough spot these days. When a tester leaves the company, it can be hard to justify hiring another tester by looking at a balance sheet. The departure of even one tester, who supported a couple of teams, can impact the rest of the unit as quality declines and integration points deteriorate. A software development manager, faced with forces beyond their control, is in a tough spot.…
Ugly code can mean lots of things: code someone else wrote, code with inconsistent white space placement, code that takes up too many lines, code that requires too many command + clicks to parse, code that looks redundant. I was struggling with the last of these recently. To me, some code a colleague wrote looked redundant. And vice versa, they thought code I wrote was unnecessarily duplicated.…
Origin story I found the website No Vehicles in the Park through Mastodon. It asks you a series of questions describing a situation that you have to judge. For example: "Matthew pilots a commercial airliner over the park. Does this violate the rule?" It's a silly, fun time for dorks who like those kinds of things. What it looks like when you land on the website Testers are exactly those types of…
What is exploratory testing? There is always more that can be tested than you have time for . A tester’s mission is to best choose where and how to spend their time. wandering - purpose = lost wandering + purpose = exploring exploring + judgment = exploratory testing Exploratory testing allows the tester to balance risk (the consequences of a failure) and coverage (observing all possible…