Wednesday, June 17, 2020

Antzie Origins: How to raise a child that ends up like me (or not)


Have you ever wondered what would you be like if you had been raised by different people? 
Would you be a rocket scientist? Would you be a better/worse person? Would you still be yourself?

I'm the way I am because I'm me (duh), but I think I'm also the way I am because of how my mom raised me.
 I've been thinking about the things that she's done that ended up shaping me and I've come up with a long list that made me realize I'm just like her in so many ways. She raised me to be this way, even if she wasn't doing it on purpose (I'll ask her and let you know). 

She taught me:

1. That you gotta fight for your rights 

Since I was a child, my mom has always taken part in protests to claim and demand better working conditions. When I was 18, she paid my boyfriend, who was a drummer at a punk rock band, so he'd come to the protest and play his snare drum. 
I don't know how it is in your country, but in my country of origin, a day is deducted from your salary if you join a protest. I remember a couple of years ago my mom made a comment about her salary that month, that she was getting less because of a protest she'd join. I have major respect for that. However, I understand that not everybody has that privilege and that, for some, every penny counts. 

2. To learn from your mistakes 

When I failed my first exam in college I was devastated. I was so used to not giving my best and studying at the last minute and still always getting good grades somehow. However, one day I failed (and I failed many times after that). I was crushed and I had to hold my tears for one hour, which was how long the bus took. 
"Some lessons are more expensive than others", she told me. That's one of my mom's signature lines. She doesn't necessarily mean expensive "money-wise", of course, though sometimes she does. 

3. To sketchnote (without knowing what it was and that it even had a name) 

My mom would help us study sometimes and when she did, she'd make little drawings and help us associate the drawing to the meaning. I can still remember the name of an Inca priest and the drawing that represented him. I saw that drawing at least 25 years ago and it wasn't even me who was learning about it, it was my brother. 

4. To surround yourself with peers and learn constantly

My brother and I practically grew up at the Dental Association of our city. My mom was always taking endodontics courses. My mother raised us alone, and sometimes she didn't have anybody to take care of me so she'd bring me to her endodontics courses with her and they'd made me run back and forth carrying dental instruments from station to station. I was 6 years old when I learned what sodium hypochlorite was (it was the 90s...parents were fierce) and I could barely pronounce it.

5. To get involved in your community 

She was the treasurer of the Endodontics Society of the Dental Association of our city. She was an active member of the Dental Association and she'd organize courses and workshops. 
I remember falling asleep more than once on the brown leather couches of the large waiting room of the Dental Association since their monthly assembly had gone a little off the schedule and it was late at night. I remember hearing my mom's voice, passionately defending her beliefs. 

6. To share knowledge 

My mom has always mentored students who have just graduated from dentistry. She'd also give talks, usually encouraging her colleagues to rebel against the system and improve their working conditions (Argentinian dentists aren't rich haha). 
She used to pay me to do her presentations in PowerPoint. I'm sorry mom, I shouldn't have charged you. 

7. To not be
 afraid of your creativity 

My mom has always believed that the specialization she chose is a bit unfair. It's such a detailed, complex specialization, but they don't get paid very well, so lots of dentistry students prefer specializing in cosmetic dentistry or orthodontics instead. She was convinced that Endodontics was dying in our city and she refused to let it die, so she asked me to draw a root canal file inside a coffin. SO.WEIRD. 
I remember I did it in Paint. It was pixelated and ugly, but my mom loved it. She printed huge posters with my drawing in them and I remember her colleagues telling her how much the drawing had impacted them and even congratulating me for it. It was ugly but it made a point. 

No wonder I turned out like this.

Saturday, June 13, 2020

"Testing is the responsibility of the whole team"

I made this tag with https://fontmeme.com/name-tags/
                                                                                                                 
Hello, my name is Antzie and I'm a bottleneck. I don't want to be one and I know I shouldn't feel like one, but I do. 

For years I've been hearing and reading that "testing is the responsibility of the whole team" and that "testing needs to be done, but that doesn't necessarily mean that it has to be done by the tester of the team", and I completely agree with those statements. I wish I could benefit from those statements 40 hours a week. I've been trying to pitch them to my team, but perhaps I need to improve my sales pitch in the first place because I'm clearly not good at it.

For a couple of months, every single sprint we close, we have bugs and tasks in "Ready to test". I know I shouldn't feel like a lousy tester because of it, but I do. I'm a person who enjoys finishing a sprint with zero things in my to-do list. It gives me peace of mind. It allows me to enjoy my Friday afternoon feeling that I managed to complete something...that I managed to close a chapter on Friday and I get to start a new one on Monday. 

I understand that cultural changes take time. I also understand that testing takes time and that if by the first half of the sprint all the tickets estimated are waiting for me on the "Ready to test" column, then new tickets are grabbed from the "groomed" backlog, and so new tickets will be added to my pile. Do they equal the 20% of buffer time and capacity? I'm not sure, but it overwhelms me.

Perhaps that means I should dedicate less time to each ticket, but if I've estimated x amount of time for each, then why should I reduce it only because I have more stuff to do now? It doesn't feel right to ditch my own estimation only because I want to "finish on time".

Should I just learn to be okay with finishing all sprints with stuff stuck in the "Ready to test" swimlane? It doesn't feel like it's the solution to my problem.

I know what you're thinking, but I'm very vocal and I struggle to shut up about the things that matter to me, so I've brought this up multiple times in our retros. My team knows I'm frustrated and they've suggested leaving their finished tickets in "Code review" so I'm not overwhelmed. However, that looks, smells, tastes and feels like a placebo to me. 

I know what you're thinking and no, I don't want to quit, I happen to love this team, I want to stay and I want them to help me. I think this is a growing opportunity for all of us.

What I want is to do pair testing. I want to do mob testing. I want to do all the things suggested by Explore It! and Agile Testing Condensed. I want to be a Modern Tester. I want my team to understand that this is not only on me and the other tester of the team (we're actually one big mobile team but split in two mini teams). 

Some people might say: "If I do your job, then that means you need to code too then" and whereas I disagree with it, I know I would if I could, if I had the skills to do it...I so would, especially if a team member was drowning and they kept asking for help during every single retro. 

So dear team buddies, if you're reading this, please help me. Please jump on the evolution bandwagon with me because sometimes I feel like I'm the only one seeing this Thestral. 

*Note: I don't know how on Earth I forgot to mention The Modern Testing Principles but I've mended my post. In my defence, I was frustrated with the mobile app of Blogger because I had written a draft there but it was never saved, so I had to re-write this post. Of course I uninstalled the app afterwards.

Sunday, June 7, 2020

The retro that made everyone warm and fuzzy inside


As I have mentioned before, although I'm not the scrum master of our team, I have volunteered to facilitate our retros...and I've done it for almost 6 months, but then I felt a bit drained and I asked my teammates for help. I thought I needed a couple of sprints to recharge my creative batteries, but honestly, I feel like I still need some more time. 

Anyway, my dear friend Korcholis (probably my best friend at work, but don't tell him) volunteered to facilitate some retros and they were good. They made everyone in the team sigh and be all "aww I love you all", which was beautiful and felt great, but being the flawed person I am, I felt a bit jealous (and feeling jealous made me feel small). 

Jealous? Why? Well, because I've been trying to get the team to reach that climax for almost 6 months and I felt weird that someone else achieved it. Since Korcholis and I are the kinds of friends who can be honest with each other, I confessed my jealousy to him, and guess what he said? 

"First of all, all processes are long and sometimes they take time. The fact that they said that when I was facilitating it might only because I was "a new person" facilitating the retros, but the whole effect came from before.
Second, if you hadn't brought games and 'emotional things', I wouldn't have brought games and emotional things. To be honest, when I was officially responsible of facilitating the retro, every day before starting work I'd look for metaphors about how to split tasks in "good" and "bad" and that's it, but afterward, once I started looking for games, I realized that splitting positive and negative things of the sprint into two columns was not the most important part...the most important part was to see how we work as a team.
Third, I know you don't like to hear this, but you can't allow someone's words to affect you. [...] Fourth, don't say you feel small, imagine you teach someone how to ride a bike. Will you feel small because that person knows how to ride a bike now? Will you feel small when someone tells them "Wow! Well done! You ride your bike so well!"...of course not. You should feel proud of being such a good teacher."

I must admit that, after those words, I felt a bit emotionally manipulated to feel proud of my work and happy about what had happened... After all, he's really smart and he'd know how to cheer me up, but he made a good case.

We're finally riding the bike together (sometimes).

Monday, June 1, 2020

The self-assessment time of the year

A couple of weeks ago we had to write our self-assessment reports in one of the HR platforms of the company. At first, I was very confused about it, especially because I have been working in this company for about eight months and sometimes it's hard for me to retrace things that I'd fill in in a self-assessment form. Anyway, even if I've had to assess my work every year in my previous company, each company has its own format for this type of evaluation. NOTE: If you don't care about the story behind this and just want to skip to the conclusion and tips, scroll down to the bottom. You're welcome :D

Fortunately, HR set up a training session in which they taught us how to use the platform, that we had to give examples, etc.

But what do I say? Each section of the form was mapped to our company values, and we had to provide examples of each and rate ourselves from 1-5 (each rate value has an explanation). I had lots of questions: "Have I done enough? Have I not done enough? Have I surpassed the expectations they had when they hired me? What were they expecting from me?" If I knew that, then I guess I'd know whether I've met such expectations or not. "Does my work apply to each value?" "Do I live and work and breathe the company's core values?"

It all made me think of quality since I had to assess the quality of my own work after all, and I suppose the company values and the rating 1-5 were my heuristics (or were they my oracles? I'm second-guessing myself here as usual). 

Jerry Weinberg's definition of quality says that "Quality is value to some person" and if you add Michael Bolton's and James Bach's addition to this quote "who matters", then the definition of quality is "Quality is value to some person who matters". 
Also, I remember learning that "quality is a subjective value" (I will quote the author when I remember who said it), but "how do I make it more objective so I can actually rate my work? Or should I remain subjective because this self-assessment is about me and my work?" Ugh...I know... I was getting way philosophical about it but that's how it happened.

I have impostor syndrome (maybe you have it too, dear reader) and I underestimate myself a lot, so how could I be objective about my work and not sell myself short? Or, once again, should I have remained subjective, since it was about me?

I was a bit stuck, so I googled "how to fill in a self-evaluation" and clicked on the first link I found: this link. 

I started scanning the text and this part caught my attention..."There’s no way to evaluate your performance without a clear description of your job. If you already have one, keep it handy while composing your self-evaluation."  I browsed my inbox, trying to find the job description that made me want to apply for this job and I found it. After reading it, I didn't feel that bad about myself, they were looking for someone with some experience but always willing to learn (hey! that's me!!). I was in a better place to review myself, so I sat in front of my laptop and started typing and I didn't move until I realized I was sitting in complete darkness (it's not like I typed for days though, it was probably that time of the day where it's about to be sunset but it's quite lit still). 

I read it aloud...it seemed okay and honest. I have to say that the assessment does have something I liked a lot, which is that the categories are our company values, so you provide examples of your work under each value. I detailed the things I consider an achievement, things that I've been struggling with but kind of overcame...I was ready to give myself a rating. Oh boy, here comes the overthinking part again.

"If I choose 3 for all, it'll sound like I think I do my job well, but I'm not arrogant about it. If I choose 4-5, will it look like I'm too self-confident about what I've done? What if I actually haven't done anything praise-worthy and I just have the illusion that I have?" (Dunning-Kruger effect FTW)

I thought I totally deserved a 4 in one of the values, so I gave myself only one 4, and the rest were 3s. 

Total: 3.2

"But what does it mean? Does it mean I'm OK? Do I deserve a raise or a promotion? Am I going to be the first one to get fired because I didn't get a 5 average? What does 3.2 even mean?"

I've given some feedback to HR about it already, perhaps so that people like me don't get anxious about a number whose meaning we don't even know...Also, if we knew how this will be used (maybe they did explain it but I missed it?) maybe we wouldn't be so uncomfortable with it (I know I wasn't the only one). 

Lessons learned (and tips, so if you're in this situation and don't know how to do it maybe this can help you a bit): 

1. Keep a record of your achievements and difficulties (especially if you've managed to overcome them). Not only will they come in handy for self-assessment, but also for a job interview.

2. Job description: If you're new at the job, it might help you to keep your job description near, so you can refer back to it if needed. Just remember that sometimes you might get a job because you meet the job description, but then your responsibilities can change over time.

3. Audience: Asking who will read your assessment and how it will be used will help you write it down. If you know this will be used for future promotions, maybe it'll even motivate you to come up with better examples of your achievements!

4. Ask a colleague for help: Getting a colleague (or maybe even your manager?) to proofread it or help out if you're stuck can be really helpful. Sometimes we don't see things others see, so I don't think this can hurt.

Why are we doing it anyway? Perhaps once a year is not enough.