Location Irrelevance

Warning: this is a bit more political than my usual tech-heavy posts.

I was leafing through James Bach's blog the other day; James is one of today's leading writers about software testing and always well worth a read. He referred to an excellent post by Pradeep Soundararajan, one of my other favourite testing thinkers and writers, which really nailed some important test patterns that I've come across the need for frequently, but never figured out how to summarize. I highly recommend that you read Pradeep's post before you carry on.

At the end of his post, James referred to Pradeep as "one of the leading Indian testers". This made me feel a bit uncomfortable, enough so to comment on the post, and James commented back:

"I think culture is relevant, and nationality often associates to culture. There is a distinctive Indian testing sub-culture. I also think there is an American testing culture, too. I wouldn't mind being called an American tester."

I can't agree with that at all. Software testing expertise shouldn't be about culture, location or nationality at all, unless you're in the really specialized test areas of localization or internationalization. Given the frequently negative connotation that badly-handled outsourcing projects have given to software professionals outside of North America and Western Europe, I think it does no good at all to classify anyone by nationality or location - or sex, musical taste, number of prehensile toes, or anything else other than ability - when discussing their professional achievements.

One of the great things about the internet is that it's levelled the global playing field for writing, testing and using computer software to a massive extent. Let's keep it that way, recognize the achievements of software professionals all over the world for what they are, and call a leading tester a leading tester, without confining them to some largely meaningless subcategory.

The Tech Ops Nazi

I attended the excellent Atlassian Starter Day on Wednesday; it was a great session with many highlights (including a surprise appearance by Tom Cruise !) and worthy of multiple posts.

With DevOps Days USA fast approaching (I'm on one of the panels), it was interesting to hear multiple speakers at Starter Day talk about devops concepts. One of the highlights for me was Jochen Frey, Scout Labs' CTO, talking about how to run an effective startup engineering team (and how to mess it up). He seemed pretty sleep-deprived, citing Scout Labs' recent acquisition by Lithium Technologies as the reason, but got one of the biggest rounds of applause of the day for soldiering through to the end.

Jochen especially got my attention when he described the importance of having a "tech ops nazi" on your team. This is a kind of QA / program manager / IT ops hybrid person who essentially acts (alone or with their team) as a buffer between the developers and the deployed code, checking multiple criteria before new code is deployed:

• the code builds successfully
• all the expected changes are included in each build
  
• all the tests pass on the deployment platform
  
• the deployment configuration is standardized

A lot of this can and should be automated - see Eric Ries' excellent "Continuous Deployment in 5 Easy Steps" for some ideas here - but there's no substitute for a human with one foot in development and the other in deployment to deal with the edge cases that always come up.

I've been doing this kind of role myself for the last few years and really enjoy it, so it was nice to get some validation. That said, I'd rather think of myself as a devops enabler than a tech ops nazi !