This morning when I left for work I was pretty excited about Jon Bach coming to speak at Adobe! I'd seen him speak before and I like both his message and presentation style. I'd also had to miss this talk at PNSQC because of a conflict when I was moderating. Also on my mind was the performance tests I'd run overnight. My scripts have been back and forth and they just aren't ideal for exactly what I want to do, so I'm in a sort of half automated stupor with way too much human interaction on the part of collecting results. The problem is, to improve it I need time to improve the script which interrupts me doing the test and getting results so I continue to do this lame half-automated jig of woe.

I got to work despite an accident pretty reasonably early and was able to start compiling all that had happened to my tests overnight. This time I'd overshot the 8 hour target by a mere 2.75 hours, so not as bad as being 50% short on the estimated amount to send the night before. I mind numbingly entered data into an email categorizing crap for about 40 minutes. In fact, I was so intent in my focus that I missed Jon's call and didn't know he was there yet until the work phone rang louder and he was in the lobby. I save my accounting woe and get all jazzed to do what I really love to do! I really like to do things that I think will help other testers think about their testing in a different way. Jon's talk had about 70 people total, which considering the time zone difference from many of the testers was great! That reminds me, I'll send out the recording.

Lunch was great fun for me to get to talk to Jon about his experience with wanting to end well. I've gotten so much flack from people for staying in a job when I have an end date and I don't really understand why. This has been a huge part of my life for 10 years and I still care. Also, I haven't figured out my next right step. I'm actually working on my next right step all of the time. Jon is the first person who really "gets" why I want to end well. You don't work 10 years at a place you love and poison the well on your way out. It just isn't in me. The company has simply been too good to me for too many years.

So what is it about Jon that makes him great? He doesn't lead with just being smart. He's a good person first. He understands these concepts and forces that drive people like loyalty, teams, human interactions. Ok, this is going to get me so flamed, but here it goes. Lots of straight guys in testing have this emotional void that makes them kind of blind to everything that isn't logical. It isn't that they don't have feelings about their work, it's that it doesn't occur to them that other people do and it isn't mental. Hearing Jon talk about ending well in a situation where he KNEW his job was ending and being proud of ending well made me feel far more ok about whatever is next for me.

So, here I am talking about checkpoint 5 on my search, and 4 and 6 already happened. This week was huge, and I'll share this. The script I fought with this entire sprint? Well it was my first code reviewed python script and all the feedback I got was constructive. I'll admit, I read half of the suggestion excitedly nodding and the other half with a bewildered expression. You put what WHERE and how does THAT work? It's simply beyond my current knowledge. So I did what any good context driven tester would do and I asked if I can stop by and ask about how that is done in person. I'll do some research this weekend so I'm informed, and the pairing could make my script run much faster. Instead of 78 external calls to delete metadata to my build database I'll only need 3 per build. Imagine the time savings with nights I run 160+ builds through my test? So, on the topic of a normal test day and ending well, with very hard work our sprint ended today. We went from my test passing only 60% to 100% in the course of a week and I'm more confident in the stability under pressure of this release than the last sprint as a result.

This test sprint involved me flaking on lunch, eating 4 day old pad thai cold at my desk for dinner one night, making Craig so mad that I'm going to take him to dinner to avoid being dumped, not seeing friends for a week, and limited sleep sometimes. I tweeted today that agile is making the same mistakes faster so you can have the same end of milestone crap more often, but that was just this sprint. The best thing it offers is the chance to try again. I am not sure how other people handle the overhead of running tests, finding bugs, and verifying bugs in a product backlog but these were just not estimated out in a reasonable way.

I have more to say about Jon Bach but not mixed in with the ramblings of what I really do at work.