• From 90 Days of BzzAgent: “A small company can operate with organic and loosely-defined processes, a larger company has to bring more form and consistency to them”. The context of this was in regards to HR processes, but this is also very (if not too much so) true for Quality initiatives. Often these are started too late or not given enough resources to achieve their potential. Especially if a company is the first one started by a group of developers (vs pure business people).
  • SourceForge now offers Subversion access on all project (well, if the project admin has enabled it that is). More on this Version Control Systems in a later post, but for now, here is the instructions for using it.
  • Let me say it again. The most effective way to shoot yourself in the foot when doing a process assessment is to not communicating the results within a short time span to all those who were involved. Not communicating results will be interpreted by people as that either management (who have the results) either does not care about the issues raised or is incompetent. Which of course may or may not be true. As soon as you have the results, publish them. Waiting 4 months after the assessment to let people know what the findings were means that momentum has been lost and next time an assessment takes place people are going to be less enthusiastic with their participation.
  • Often you see in the various QA/Test forums requests for questions to use in an interview. And usually someone posts a couple. Were I devious and looking to hit the QA interviewing circuit, that would be a great way to get “inside” information on how people interview for QA positions. That aside, I want to start a list of bad questions, and perhaps a better way to get similar, but better, insight on how the candidate thinks. Remember, you are hiring them for how they think; not how they look in a suit. I don’t even wear one to interviews for this reason. If they won’t hire me because I didn’t wear a suit, I don’t want to work for them.
    1. Bad: Why did you choose QA/Test
      Better: What about QA/Test makes you want to come to work everyday
      Why: Why did you choose X, be it QA/Test or Programming or Marketing etc are all canned answers and will get canned responses. The better varient will hopefully allow you detect whether someone is passionate about their chosen field or just doing it for the mortgage payment.
    2. Bad: Our code is written in X, can you you program X?
      Better: Do you have any programming experience? And if so, is it X? As I mentioned when I gave you the company overview, our product is in X.
      Why: Generally, the first programming language is the hardest to learn and a lot of the skills are transferable. Having exposure to programming concepts is far more important than knowing the language the product is written for. It is not as if the test group is going to be writing unit tests — that is of course the domain of the programmers.
    3. Bad: What are 3 strengths and weaknesses? (you get double the Badness points if you then make a little T-chart labelled “Good” and “Bad”.
      Better: What would you say are your strong and weak points?
      Why: First off, this is another canned question, so candidates can be tricky and have a canned response to it. If they are really smart they will know how to spin all the negatives into a positive. But if you must ask it, not forcing them to come up with a specific number of responses for each should (hopefully) elicit a better response. You should of course get at least one weak point.