Quality through Innovation
I think this is my 3rd post in as many weeks on Innovation which means it needs to start being capitalized in the same manner as Quality often is. The more I think about the word Innovation and Quality, the more I realize that it (along with most other things it seems) is dependent entirely on the Context.
A fully agiled organization is not going to consider CI as innovative. It would be dismissed as so early 00s. But in an organization which is using shell scripts to run ant, which then in turn runs a perl script, CI is ground-breakingly Innovative. And perhaps in the organization that is already using CI would see delivering build results via RSS (which is designed for this sort of asynchronous communication) as Innovative.
I’ve also come to realize that the tasks which I have done in the name of Testing and Quality over the last 9 years which could be called Innovative were the ones I got the most satisfaction from. For instance, figuring out how to put our department knowledge in a wiki (including test plans, test cases, accounts, etc) while at Points or building a metaframework at Jonah and then teaching it how to use hibernate (well, mostly at any rate).
Which brings me to renaming of the blog from It’s the Quality, stoopid to Quality through Innovation. This should largely be transparent as you should be reading this through RSS (if not, why not?) and the content will likely remain the same but I think the phrase best sums up my thoughts these days. It also gives clarity to how I think I want to start refocusing my career; Helping companies improve their products though the identification and application of innovative techniques, tools and processes. Or, Quality through Innovation.