change of pace

As I've previously mentioned, I've been working on testing our latest software release for the past couple months. It was a long, drawn out battle. In the end we accomplished something though. A newer, better product than before! The most gratifying part of my job right now is feeling like I have a large part in contributing to the direction of the look and feel to our product. I can imagine it would be comparable to building a new city. Depending on how the flow of the roads, the placement of essential business's and the culture of the people that live there, the city could be very successful...or it could become a ghost town with no use.

This week is an off week for me. As a QA engineer, we have very busy weeks and sometimes down weeks where we get to catch up on missed or thrown away work that needs to be done such as, ugh, INVENTORY. Probably as bad as TPS reports(office space). At the same time we are planning a few features that I am somewhat involved in. Now that our product is getting a bit more complicated and there are several key features that we need to continue to grow our business, management decided on a different approach to our development process. It should be interesting how this process evolves.

Process's have really started to intrigue me in the past couple years. In business there are 3 approaches to process's. There is the road of a million process's, where there is structure, reasoning and tracking for absolutely everything possible. That is more of an old school approach which you would see mainly in a company such as IBM or Apple. On the flip side, as of the past 10 years, the software business has been trying to develop a process known as Agile development method. Lean Agile is probably the most extreme version of Agile. Lean basically elimates any waste in effort and overhead in order to allow the developers and testers more time actually doing work instead of paperwork. Neither process is really the best way to do it. From my experience in work and life, moderation is key. Don't eat to many salty foods cause your arteries will get blocked, but eat some to absorb liquids. Don't drink too much wine or you'll become an alchoholic, but drink a glass to increase your hearts health. Run to increase your cardio, but don't be a triathlete freak that will most likely cause knee problems early in your life. Jump off cliffs with your snowmobile or motorbike, but make sure you know what's on the other side....wait, that doesn't go with this comparison...anyways, you get the point. Here, we're working on creating a process that is semi-lean-agile by creating MMF's(Minimal Marketing Features). This basically creates several mini projects for everyone. After initially meeting to discuss why this feature is needed and what the user should expect from the feature, investigation is done in order to produce an estimate of how much time and resources are needed to complete the MMF. Then, a decision is made to whether we as a company really want to spend the resources. The meetings are documented for the most part, and tasks are doled out along the way. As a QA, I will likely be less involved in the Elaboration stage of the MMF, depending on the feature. Of course, after the elaboration stage, the next step is development. This picture may not show any kind of thought taken before jumping.

From 11 winter