In addition to marketing, I think the other area testers could learn a lot from is coaching and to some degree sports theory / psychology in general. Going through my recent notes, I have marked these as interesting.

On the July 23 edition of Prime Time Sports there was a discussion around how to fix Basketball Canada. Two quotes stood out.

  • Doug Smith – We need people to go out and teach the coaches how to coach
  • Jack Armstrong – On a day-to-day basis, the people who are coaching these young people around the country are Canadian high-school coaches, Canadian university coaches, Canadian grade-school coaches and those are the people who have to be developed, that have to be brought along in terms of their teaching skills, their expectations, what they expect, what they demand and how they go about it. …
    What are you doing to develop the coaches at every level across the country?

If you substitute ‘coach’ with ‘instructor’ or ‘teacher’ or ‘professor’ and change the context to teaching testing then I think you have a fair assessment of the main challenges facing the craft right now.

The other thing I have marked is a quote from Roz Savage who is currently about 2/3 of the way through rowing from San Francisco to Hawaii and doing podcasts via satellite phone with TWiT. In Roz Rows episode 11 she talks about about how she doesn’t focus on the larger goal.

Don’t always focus on the goal because sometimes the goals can seem so far away and in fact the only way you will get tot he goal is to by focusing on what you have to do in the present moment. Just focus on the process.

Having been overwhelmed in the past by ‘insurmountable’ testing problems before, this is pretty good advice. Break the larger problem into smaller ones and then ignore the big one. Concentrate on the small things that are actually achievable. Got a day and a half to test a release? Overwhelming. Got a day and a half to test 6 bug fixes? Achievable.