What I've been up to lately

Things have been busy in the last month or so and I felt like sharing what I've been up to. Most of it revolves around software testing:

April saw the start of Dan Ariely’s A Beginners Guide to Irrational Behavior class on coursera. I knew I had the BBST course coming up so I didn't commit much time to the class other than watching the video lectures and doing the video quizzes. There are many aspects of irrational behavior that affect what we do in software development and testing – I’d like to write a more in-depth article about that in the future.

On the 14th of April I started the BBST Test Design course and completed it on May 8th. For those who have never taken a BBST class before they are incredibly intense month long courses. The course breaks a single calendar week into 2 class weeks – one week with 4 days, and a shorter week with 3 days and each week requires about 10-15 hours of work in order to do the readings, labs and work on the exam. The class is done but I still don’t know if I've passed; regardless I learned a lot.

On April 19th I joined the NRG Global Online test competition. My last post was a reflection on how well I thought I did and despite my low perception of how I did my team ended up winning part of the competition.

I went to STPcon 2013 at the end of April in San Diego where I met up with a few Miagi-Do’ers, met some other testers I’d heard from in the twitter-verse or blog-o-sphere and learned a few things. I’m planning to write an experience report and post it either here or on the newly formed Miagi-Do blog. I think it might apply a little more here but I don’t know how it will turn out because I haven’t written it.

NRG Global Test Competition Retrospective

Roughly two and a half weeks ago I competed in the first NRG Global Test Competition. The idea behind the competition was simple: get a bunch of people/ teams together to test a few products, split the competition into two days, one with functional testing and another with performance testing, and based on the reports submitted judges would award points and announce winners. The full details are available here and here.

This was the first online testing competition I'd tried but thanks to my experiences with testing challenges and rapid testing online I knew I'd have fun once I got past the quirks. By quirks I mean it can take time to get comfortable with the discussion format, figure out how to ask questions, how best to communicate with my fellow team members, etc. The competition took place at 10 am Eastern which sucks if you live on the west coast and have to wake up before 7 am like I did. It was all for fun anyways.

For as early in the morning and as new as the competition was I think I did reasonable. Not great, not even good, but reasonable. I think the best way to phrase it is: I'm not happy with my work. (I might be overly critical here but still.) Now we only had 3 hours from introduction of the products under test, to learn the product, ask questions of the "owner", test it, ask more questions, file bugs and write a report. Yet when I think back at what we turned in I'm not happy with it. Let me explain.

My team member and I barely communicated with one another. We were using Skype but we didn't do much planning ahead of time (not like we could have because nothing was public) so when it came time for the competition it was a simple "hi", "what are you working on" and "I'll look at x". That was it. We each went to different applications. Thinking back on it now I think we would have done much better if we were on the same application, talking to one other about what we were seeing. My experience has been any collaboration no matter how small results in finding and learning amazing things.

First principle reasoning

When I was young I remember wanting to be an awesome football player like Joe Montana, or an FBI agent working on the X-Files like Fox Mulder. These days I want to have the skills to identify and solve problems like Elon Musk.

Musk is an interesting person. He’s created and sold numerous companies and with the profits he’s created a rocket building / space exploration company that is now the first (private) company to make it to space. He’s also built an American electric car company. While all these things make Musk an interesting person on the surface, its his approach that makes him enviable.

In his TED talk Musk credits his training in physics with his ability to see and understand difficult problems. He says physics is about how to discover new things that might seem counterintuitive and physics first principle provides a good framework for thinking. The video is a good conversation between Elon Musk and TED curator Chris Anderson, I recommend watching it. Musk mentions first principle reasoning at about 19:37:

Low and High Intensity Learning

Paul Graham in his essay Wealth says startups are a way of compressing a whole working life into a few years. You work at a very high intensity for a short period of time (say four years) instead of the normal low intensity for a long period of time (say forty years), in other words startups are a way of increasing your productivity exponentially. In my experience there is a correlation between high intensity working and high intensity learning.

The potential relationships between high-intensity work and learning have a lot of appeal because it provides a chance to leapfrog our understanding of several domains in a short period of time.

In his essay Startup = Growth Graham defines a startup as “… a company designed to grow fast". My last company was small, we considered ourselves a startup (although according to Graham’s definition we were not) but we worked considerably faster (higher intensity) than a larger company would have. I can say that with some certainty now because a 15,000-person company acquired our small (maybe 10-person) company and the differences are pretty dramatic.

To be fair there is a difference between the learning that occurs when a person is working for a high intensity company as opposed to doing their own high intensity work. With a high intensity company people learn whatever they have to in order to solve the problems in front of them, then they move on. A person working intensely on their own has the freedom to focus on what they want but they run the risk of never finding focus.

I’m struggling with the second part. I’m back to a low-intensity company but I don’t want to be pulled into a low-intensity learning situation. Part of me says that won’t happen because of my own internal drive but another part of me is worried the low-intensity rhythm of the company will make it hard to find focus. (I’m not saying my small company was a good example of a high intensity work / learning environment but as of right now it seems better than the corporate world.)

One solution is to create my own startup – something designed to grow fast which would force fast learning. It would be amazing for many reasons including getting back to a higher-intensity learning situation but I don’t know where to start. Another solution is to find a person or person(s) with the same interests or goals as I have and work together to learn. Maybe the small team size would have the effect of pushing each other into a higher intensity work and learning environment? Now where do I begin? 

Export iBooks to your PC for reading

As I consider switching from an iPad to a Nexus 7, one of the main things I do on my iPad is read books. I try not to purchase media, like Books and Music, through iTunes because Apple is overly restrictive in terms of DRM and accessibility - why isn't there an iBooks Windows or Mac app? Naturally I want to migrate the books I've purchased to a format I can read on another device. (It's a shame this option isn't provided).

So how do you export iBooks purchases to your PC? It's quite simple:

1. In iTunes, go to your purchased items
2. Click Books
3. Download the books you'd like

The downloaded content will be dropped into the default iTunes folder which for me was Music\iTunes\iTunes Media\Books; you can then browse your downloaded book(s) and grab the .epub file. If, like me, you are considering moving to a new device you can then use Calibre to change the format from a .epub to a .mobile or PDF. 

Naturally some of the books I've purchased have DRM on them so you'll have to work around that. Personally I find it quite frustrating to spend more than $10 on an ebook only to have it locked into one format so I scoured the net and found a way to remove the DRM from the books I've purchased. If you are interested in doing the same this worked for me.

With my iBooks purchases transferred into .mobi formats I can read them on my desktop, laptop and other mobile devices.