Testing software can be thought of as a highly organized experimental method. Those of us who work in software development, are generally interested in maximizing the possibility that a software product or service is fit for purpose and meets the expectations of the customer.
We use a range of testing techniques that are appropriate to the technology and business context: from risk assessment to formal reviews, static and dynamic testing, manual and automated, progression and regression, functional and non-functional, requirements-based as well as exploratory testing techniques. Testing should provide valuable feedback about whether the design after a particular iteration meets the various stakeholders’ expectations.
But what about the psychology of managing teams when testing reveals a quantity of problems and incidents that were not anticipated? How can you cultivate an atmosphere, which encourages looking for errors, mistakes and defects as a means to learning and improving the whole development process?
The problem is that frequently people do not want to confront errors or feel threatened by them. They may feel affronted or offended. However this is missing an understanding of the fundamental reason why errors and mistakes are necessary to learn from, not only in software development, but indeed any process of design and innovation.
I like to get inspiration from a range of sources and different modes of design. For example, one of the most famous architects in the last 50 years, Frank Gehry says this about mistakes in the design process of large commercial buildings:
“So as you are working in real life and in real time you are constantly having small victories and small mistakes….the important thing is to keep moving ahead and learning from the mistakes and building on it, building positive momentum from that. Because it is a very complex endeavor.”
Large-scale enterprise software project transformations can be of comparable in terms of scale and complexity of commercial building projects so I think there is a parallel.
In the book Fail Fast, Fail Often, Michael Bloomberg, the billionaire who developed the financial software tools including analytics and an equity trading platform, is quoted on the process of developing software for his financial software:
“We made mistakes, of course. Most of them were omissions we didn’t think of when we initially wrote the software. We fixed them by doing them over and over, again and again. We do the same today. While our competitors are still sucking their thumbs trying to make the design perfect, we’re already on prototype version #5….It gets back to planning versus acting: We act from day one; others plan how to plan – for months.”
Bias Towards Action And Agile Iterations
Bloomberg’s quote reveals a keen insight about the bias towards action versus being paralyzed by excessive planning. The agile movement is a response to limitations of traditional project management in part where according to Mike Cohn in his book Agile Estimating and Planning:
“At the start of each new iteration, an agile team incorporates all new knowledge gained in the preceding iteration and adapts accordingly.” (Cohn, 2006, 26)
The process of testing software is one of the main methods in which new knowledge is acquired and unexpected behavior of the design is observed during each iteration. Therefore finding errors is a necessary way to obtain information which assists the development team to adapt to this new knowledge. As Frank Gehry suggested “the important thing is to keep moving ahead and learning from the mistakes and building on it …”
So to inspire and uplift a team from uncomfortable feelings of perfectionism or threatened by mistakes, errors or omissions or even misjudgments in the software design and development process, a manager can do a number of things to cultivate a positive environment for creativity and productivity:
- Build an atmosphere of safety, where it is OK to make mistakes, ask crazy questions, find errors and this is, in fact, a necessary part of the evolutionary nature of the development process;
- Facilitate discussions around shared risks which promote trusting cooperation;
- Tell a narrative which creates a sense of shared goals, values and purpose and in doing so builds a coherent working environment.
robjauer 