Are you the one holding you back?

I talked to my sister tonight. Like some other times I've talked to her, she was feeling frustrated at the walls that she has run into while trying to chase her dreams. What concerned me, however, was the tone in her voice that sounded like she had given up. She seemed to have decided that since she does not have a degree from a 4-year university, she was never going to be able to pursue the career she wants.

The conversation both made me sad and frustrated me. Although she has encountered some pretty big obstacles, I did not feel like they were impossible to scale. At one point, I told her, "Go get yourself some rock climbing gear, and let's get you over that wall!"

She feels like I don't understand how hard it is to not have a degree, because I have one. Maybe, she has a point. Though I know that when I am hiring, I don't even notice if my candidates have a degree. I look for skills, passion, pursuit of what they feel is right. I know that at least some others do the same.

I do, however, know what it's like to feel that the odds are stacked against you, and to feel like you might as well not try.

At age 19 I found myself single, pregnant, and a sophomore in college. The semester I found out I was pregnant, I was already struggling with a Biology curriculum. I had barely passed my first year and a half of school, and with a baby due in June, my spring semester was atrocious. I missed most of my classes that semester. By the time I asked for a medical leave, I had missed the deadline to do so by a week. That semester, I failed out of every single class and was placed on academic suspension.

After my son was born, I landed a temp job as a secretary for the Computer Engineering department at Clemson (where I had been attending classes before the baby). I worked for them for several months. When I started talking about going back to school, they were very encouraging of me. They encouraged me to go back and study Computer Science (because I "seemed to be pretty good with computers"), and they walked me through applying again. I was able to get the college to accept me back as a student, but as the summer before classes started began to fade away, my hopes for getting financial aid began to fade with it. I was told that I simply did not qualify for financial aid because I had been placed on academic suspension.

I had no money. I was a single parent, living with my parents. My parents had not saved for my college, so I had been relying fully on financial aid in order to go to school. Panicked, I thought this one barrier of money was going to stop me from going back to school.

(Edit from my original post because I realized I glossed over the most important part!)

(Let's pause here for a second. This situation looks pretty bleak at this point, right? I could very easily have stopped right there and given up. I mean, they told me, "Those are the rules, academic suspension = no financial aid when you come back until you prove you'll do better." Seems like a deal breaker to me. **That**, however, is the point of this post. I didn't let it be a deal breaker. I kept trying to go after what I wanted anyway. So, let's get back to the story....)

I really felt like the circumstances that lead to my academic suspension should be forgivable. I felt like they were pretty extreme and that I should still be able to finish my education and get the degree I wanted. I talked about it *a lot*. Apparently, the professors that I had been working with felt the same way.

All of the professors that I had been working with in the Computer Engineering department wrote letters to the financial aid department at the school. All of them made an argument to the school that the opportunity they gave me would be well worth it, that an investment in my future would pay off for the school in a shining star. I gathered several of these letters and took them to the financial aid department. I was shocked when they offered enough aid to get me back into school!!

My first semester back to school, I made Dean's List. Three and a half years later, I graduated from Clemson with a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science. I spent those three and a half years supporting myself and my son in a home of our own, working full time, and taking full-time computer science classes. My senior year of college included 7 comp sci classes and a physics class.

Me? I know barriers.

But I don't see them as showstoppers. They exist, and they are big, and at times I am really intimidated by them. At times, I don't think I can get past them. The truth is, sometimes I can't. Sometimes, "over the wall" doesn't work, but it turns out, if I scale the wall long enough, I can find a small crack that has crumbled enough for me to squeeze my body through. The point is, I just have to *keep trying*.

If I give up, the result will always be the same -- I definitely won't accomplish what I want. But if I try, and keep on trying, and look to others for ideas, something just might happen. Maybe it won't be exactly what I want, but maybe it will be better.

Building a test team ...

I told this story recently and was asked to blog about it, so here I am.

I have worked on several teams over the years, usually teams where I am starting testing departments from almost nothing, or revamping them from a place of failure to a place where they feel more valuable and are valued more. Frequently, I think back to the first major position I had out of college.

I started out during my senior year in college working as a part-time software tester at a bioinformatics company (software for genetics researchers). About 6 months in, I was given the opportunity to lead the testing effort (we had 2.5 testers) for a small turnkey project we had for a government agency. It was difficult, but I enjoyed it. When I graduated from college (about 11 months in), I was given the opportunity to hire 2 full-time testers and lead the QA team for the company.

My first 2 hires spent the first week or two in training (that I instructed) about the domain -- I taught them about bioinformatics and the algorithms that the software used (I did it because I loved it, but it was good for them to learn). There were maybe a dozen different genetic matching algorithms. At one point, my team was able to run the major genetics algorithms *by hand*, and knew *immediately* when some result set was incorrect.

Within about a year, I encouraged each of them to specialized in some aspect that interested them: the software itself, testing, the domain, etc. One of them enjoyed unit testing, so she did that. Another was interested in the back-end processing so he focused on that. Each of them also focused on specific types of algorithms.

We met regularly to teach each other what we were learning. Each "specialist" would give some sort of presentation to teach all of the other team members what we all needed to know to be able to effectively test. As new developers came on, they lacked the domain knowledge to understand *why* something was wrong. I was proud to see my test team able to understand the problem deeply and be able to explain it to the development team.

Before long (about a year), it became time to hire 2 more testers. Once the new hires came on, my existing team members helped to teach the new hires about the domain and the algorithms. The company had expanded the systems that it supported to 5 platforms for the client and 3 for the server. We maintained large whiteboards across the QA "hallway" to coordinate with each other on configuration management and testing efforts (in the days before I spoke words like "big visible charts").

At one point during this time, my software development lead conducted an experiment on us -- he purposely inserted 5 issues into a build and we had 2 days to knock away at it. We found 4 of those 5 issues in just 2 days.

In general, we struggled with test automation and never quite got it to work (though I became intimately familiar with WinRunner and TestDirector). We got offended when we were reprimanded for talking to each other too much (I valued that then, just as I do now). We communicated with each other via big whiteboards that let us know what everyone was doing at any given time and how it was progressing. We talked through test techniques with our dev leads, who were incredibly skilled people.

Looking back, at the time, I thought we were doing so many things wrong. In hindsight, however, we really were doing a *lot* of things right, and I am proud of that team.

Hiring misses: When we turn someone down for the wrong reasons

Filtering through hundreds of resumes can be a daunting task. Some people use recruiting agencies to help them filter the obvious misses, some go through all of them manually (I tend to fall into the latter group). Since I've recently been filtering through resumes again, I am reminded of a time when I learned first-hand just how much I missed out on when I didn't hire someone for something that today, I would find fairly minor.

It was 2007, and I had just gotten a job with a local nonprofit, starting their QA department from scratch (they had *zero* testers before me!). I sat across the cubicle aisle from a guy, let's call him Steve. Steve was a DBA, somewhat systems guy, overall smart guy. On my third day, we were all across the street at the pool hall playing pool at lunch time, when Steve finally decided to out me. He looked at me and said something like, "Okay, I waited until your third day. You don't recognize me, do you?"

Panicked, I am sure that I spent a few seconds (felt like minutes), trying to figure out who the heck he was. Why should I recognize him? ("Oh jeez, did I go on a *date* with him?!?!")

Finally (out of sympathy for my obvious flailing around a bunch of people I'd only known for 2.5 days), he said, "You interviewed me at (company x). Obviously, you didn't hire me."

WHAT?!?!?! I interviewed this guy and didn't remember him.

I said, "Oh, God, please tell me I was at least courteous and professional with you about it." (Not that I would be anything but....)

He laughed and said that I had been (Thank *goodness* for that!), and that he had been lacking in scripting skills. There was much joking about the incident for a while (I told him he was lucky, that I had done him a favor, that the company had since gone under.)

Over the next year and a half, I had the opportunity to work closely with Steve. I got to know the way he thought about the world, the way he approached problem solving, the way he thought through everything that he did, and the pride he took in his work. We spent many long hours and late nights working on problems together. We had a blast doing that, of course -- calling in pizza, having fun, coming up with private memes ("red is bad, makes angry grr"). It wasn't long before I realized just how dumb I had been for not hiring him when I had the chance. To this day, I'd sacrifice a lot to convince him to come into testing (he likes this DBA thing), and I'd hire him in heartbeat, without hesitation, any where, any time.

And I didn't hire him because he didn't have enough experience with scripting (something I could have taught him in a few days, likely....).

I realize that it's probably rare that people end up later working with someone they chose not to hire after an interview. Even rarer, I think, is compounding that with learning that they would have been a *fantastic* hire.

To this day, I think very carefully about what skills I choose not to hire over. I talk a lot about looking for the "testing mindset", and I feel that there are very few skills I cannot teach someone in a reasonable period of time. In fact, when I think of the kind of people I look to hire, their inquisitiveness and desire to learn usually mean that they can learn technical skills in a fairly short time (certainly a lot shorter than trying to teach someone with all of the technical skills I need to be inquisitive and have a desire to learn!).

Executable Specifications using FitNesse and Selenium -- STAREast 2010

At STAREast 2010, I presented a session called "Executable Specifications using FitNesse and Selenium". To set up the system I was using, you will need 3 pieces:

• The sample blog engine as the application under test
• The FitNesse files (here, these contain SeleNesse for convenience)
• Selenium RC server

Optionally, you can find my slides here

In that talk, I used a sample set of english-readable tests against a locally installed Microsoft blog engine, available via the Web Platform Installer. This was the application under test.

Blog Engine .NET Web Platform Installer

Below please find a link with a zip file that contains the directory structure with all of the FitNesse and SeleNesse files needed. To begin investigating, download the zip file and extract it somewhere that you can find it.

Executable Specifications using FitNesse and Selenium

Then, open that folder and execute the "runFitnesse.bat". In the resulting command prompt window, you should see the following:

FitNesse (v20091210) Started...
port: 8080
root page: fitnesse.wiki.FileSystemPage at ./FitNesseRoot
logger: none
authenticator: fitnesse.authentication.PromiscuousAuthenticator
html page factory: fitnesse.html.HtmlPageFactory
page version expiration set to 0 days.

That will tell you that the FitNesse server is up and running. The most common causes of trouble are the JRE version on your machine (make sure you have 1.6+), or the port that FitNesse is starting on. If that appears to be the case, edit the runFitnesse.bat file and change that port number (8081 might work, for example).

As soon as the FitNesse server is up, open up a browser window and enter the following URL: http://localhost:8080/.

That "front page" will also direct you to download the Selenium server -- my favorite way to take care of this is Sauce RC, found here: http://saucelabs.com/downloads. It makes running the Selenium server dirt simple.

The FitNesse front page has a brief description of the system and how it runs. The "TestBlogEngine" link will take you to the tests themselves.

For further exploring, the FitNesse and Selenium systems have established communities for support and learning. You can also follow the SeleNesse project, and join the user group to learn more.

I am more than happy to help with any questions or trouble setting this system up. It can be confusing or overwhelming at first. I would suggest starting off on the examples that exist and making small modifications to learn how the system works.

Selenesse dotnet is GO

Selenium + FitNesse = Selenesse

Chris McMahon and Marisa Seal took on a new project late last year, maintaining and extending some work that Gojko Adjic had done for FitNesse, called WebTest. They named it Selenesse. Selenesse combines the FitNesse wiki format and framework for defining and executing tests, with the UI browser driver, Selenium.

When I first found out they were doing this I thought it was neat and could use it myself. Since they work in the Java space and I work in the dotnet space, I decided that I could contribute to their project by doing a dotnet version, so that myself and others in the dotnet space could use it and extend it as they needed.

It was particularly interesting to me for a few reasons. I am a big fan of the wiki format for test writing and execution, first and foremost. I usually write my Selenium tests in a C# Nunit class, meaning that what the test is *doing* can be somewhat difficult to shake out (even with DSLs, we're still talking about code). Certainly, my developers can get through that, but nobody outside of this team can.

I am looking forward to involving my current team's business-facing people more in our software creation process. I believe that one step toward that is to work closely with them on defining what they want and at what point we can feel like those things are "done-done". I hope that by writing tests in a format that they can read, I can quickly walk through as many of the things that will represent "done-done" as we can -- and do that early and frequently.

So I took to writing the dotnet version of Selenesse. I struggled for a while and nearly gave up on it. The structure of what is being done basically looks like this:

Selenium RC dotnet client driver <-> SlimSeleniumDriver <-> FitNesse

I was able to call any method that existed in SlimSeleniumDriver, but not the native functions in the Selenium RC dotnet client driver. It was weird and frustrating, and no matter what I did or how I wrote it, I just couldn't get it to work.

Enter Mike Stockdale (@jediwhale) to the rescue! Mike has written fitSharp, another dotnet version of some FitNesse functionality. Selenesse dotnet uses fitSharp. It turned out, my code was just fine, but there was apparently some weirdness in file locations -- I placed the Runner.exe file in the same folder as my dlls and suddenly, it worked!

So, I introduce Selenesse dotnet. Click here to download all of the source (this will change as we get more organized). Go into the dotnet-selenesse folder and you will find the FitNesse wiki root and the src folders.

Not included in that package is the Selenium RC Server. I use Sauce RC (highly recommend it!!). To execute tests, the Selenium RC Server must be running.

I'll not get into more detailed instructions here -- look out for them in the download itself. There are instructions from Marisa and Chris's initial implementation in the wiki already. These will evolve over time. In the mean time, please feel free to contact me for help if you want to get set up and are confused or are having issues (setting up seems to always be difficult for me).

What? A 12-year-old at Agile Coach Camp?

Yep.

And it was amazing.

Why would I do such a thing as bring my 12-year-old to Agile Coach Camp?

Well, in all honesty, it was part laziness on my part at first. But it turned into so much more!

A colleague and friend, Catherine Louis, suggested to me 2 hours before registration started the first day (registration was 4pm on a Friday), that I go ahead and bring my 12-year-old to this first night of Agile Coach Camp. It was much more informal and social, she pointed out, and it would be easier for me. So I did.

He was a hit! He adds (usually, and here as well) a bit of humor to many things that I do. We went through a series of lightning talks on Friday evening that largely turned into individuals talking about their position papers and what they had hoped to get out of the weekend. I was triggered to get up and talk after a "development manager" spoke, since it was exactly that role I had come hoping to learn better techniques for dealing with. As I stood up talking, I said something along the lines of "If you know me, then you know I have a habit of being blunt and sometimes pissing people off." It became quickly apparent to me that my 12-year-old had done something funny, as the room erupted in laughter. (Yes, he had: he raised his hand in a "Yep, like me!" gesture).

As the group was breaking up for the evening, a few people approached us and asked Steven to return the next day.

My motivation for allowing him to come the second day was somewhat selfish (enabled by others asking for him to come back): I want for him to learn "how it's done" in the real world. I know that many of the topics are above his head (but what can the exposure hurt?). I want him to see the mechanics of people working together, thinking together, learning together and enjoying it, following their passions and communicating with respect and open minds.

Undoubtedly, he got all of that out of this weekend and more.

What I *wasn't* expecting was the impact *he* had on the other attendees! So many people approached me about his being present that it was almost overwhelming. He seems to have touched the hearts of a few people and inspired others. I saw someone (eek! What was his name, again?) else bring their daughter on Sunday! It was contagious ....

People *asked* for my 12-year-old to talk to the group as a whole. They encouraged him, they praised his behavior, his openness, and his "hacking" skills.

Driving home on Saturday evening, I got to listen to him describe how he felt less nervous after meeting all of those people, hearing what they said to him, and even talking in front of all of them. JACKPOT! What I was watching was a young adult gain a little bit of self-confidence.

I believe there is no greater gift.

Thank you, to all who attended Agile Coach Camp. I apologize if his presence was a negative experience for anyone.

Oh, and I am grateful to Mike Cottmeyer for walking with him down the path of "hack my iPod", a phrase I am certain to hear ad nauseam over the next few months.

You never get a second chance to make a first impression .... or do you?

I absolutely have to blog about this. For most people who attended Agile Coach Camp in Durham, NC this weekend, you are likely already somewhat familiar with this story, but I think there is a *really* valuable lesson worth sharing here.

I'm going to tell a story. When I have permission (assuming I get it), I will reveal the identity of the person in the story. I want to, if he'll let me, because I would like to be able to publicize what he's doing in the future.

At a conference last year, I had the opportunity to attend a TDD clinic. We were pairing in this clinic, and I ended up with two partners: someone I had never met or heard of -- let's call him Joe -- and someone I had really been wanting to meet -- let's call her Sarah. I found myself in a triangular-shaped pair, one of three very strong-willed people.

The experience was not a good one, for anyone involved. I'm not a developer anymore in my day job, and I only felt like I had so much authority. Both of my partners were developers, and I quickly found that Sarah and I had very similar ideas of what pairing should be like, but that was *very* different than how Joe paired. Sarah and I felt like our opinions were not being heard, and that Joe was trying very strongly to dictate to us exactly what should be done, down to exactly what words I should type. I can say that at one point, sitting in the middle of the two of them, I literally had Joe say "Type this" and Sarah say "No! Don't type that!"

Hopefully, I have gotten across that this was not a positive experience for any of the 3 of us. During a break, Sarah and I managed to find a friend -- let's call her Kathy -- and she agreed to come into the session and work with Joe, so that Sarah and I could work together in a way that was more comfortable for us. Certainly, this felt like the cowardly way of (not) dealing with the issue, and part of me wanted to address it directly, but I didn't get there.

In all honesty, I have not thought terribly much about this situation since that conference. I told the story to a few people at the conference, but not since. I had simply marked Joe off as someone I had a personality conflict with and would not want to work with.

So, why would I tell you today that Joe is now literally in my top 10 list of my absolutely favorite people? If given the opportunity, I will work with him in a heartbeat.

I believe that this example shows the power of an open mind, and the power of not judging people based on a single experience (obviously, this applies in both directions).

I arrived at Agile Coach Camp Friday night, registered, and made my rounds. Headed over to the bar, and who do I see? Well, there is Joe. At some point, I had seen his name on the roster and thought "this should be interesting, but I should be able to just avoid him". I don't think we were a whole 5 minutes into hanging out when the topic of our experience at the conference last year got brought up- by him. He set the tone flawlessly, by indicating that he knew me through a negative experience that had been traumatic, though largely his fault.

Let me just say, I really don't care to point fingers at or lay blame on anyone, so I do actually tend to struggle with someone who has just pointed a finger at themself.

He then put the ball in my court to describe the situation. I tried, as best I could to describe what had happened in a fairly diplomatic way, saying that we were in a situation where our different styles of pairing conflicted with each other. I did take my description a step farther, however, and described for the table how he had dictated to me exactly what to type.

So, here it was, this elephant was on the table, had been exposed, laid out bare. I was *incredibly* impressed with his humility. It really contradicted the arrogance I had seen in him last year. I appreciated that we both got to laugh about the experience. I learned a side that I had not known as well. I heard about how traumatic it had been for him (which also contradicts the arrogance I had seen), and the circumstances he was in at that time. I heard the stories that others had told him of what I had said. Honestly, I had no considered that it had upset him; he had seemed pretty oblivious to it at the time.

So I spent Friday, Saturday, and Sunday with an open mind. I watched him and interacted with him as if I had met him for the first time this weekend. The more I saw, the more I not only gained respect for him, but wanted to talk to him and share and learn from him.

I saw a person who is clearly fantastically passionate about what he is doing -- coding, refactoring, or teaching. I saw someone who has a wealth of knowledge to share, so much so that at times, you can almost watch it bubbling out of his ears. I saw someone who really *does* know what he is doing, inside, outside, and around. I got a taste of just how much I could learn, and just how parallel my passion and recent path is to many of the things that he has been doing as well. I bounced ideas off him for ways I can contribute to my community, and learned through discussions with him that things I thought I knew, I don't. He is aware of and describes his own weaknesses without hesitation.

In closing circle (this was an Open Space conference), we each talked about our experience at the camp. I sat in my seat, ready to describe the transformational experience to the group (by that point, a few people had heard the story). I was proud of myself for keeping an open mind and not letting the first experience cloud my view of him through the weekend. I was grateful that he did the same with me and was open to addressing the experience directly and had also been open to not judging me. I was grateful that I had not missed out on the opportunity to connect with another person in software who is clearly passionate, smart, and has a lot to offer. As I waited for my turn, he got up to tell the group about his experience this weekend.

Whaddya know, he told this whole story, in much the same way I have now. He said, "They say you never get a chance to make a first impression. Well, maybe sometimes, you do."

Joe, I look forward to working with you in the future and contributing to this community as a team.