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Hello everybody and welcome back to the
Vernon Richards show.

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I am one of your hosts, Richard, a
supporter of an FA Cup winning team.

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And I am joined by my esteemed co -host
who is called...

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Vernon Richards, the supporter of a team
that is at least 20 points superior to the

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FA winning team that Richard just.

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absolutely nothing this year.

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Did you win this year?

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League Cup The trophy that doesn't count?

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Is that the one that, you know?

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Yeah.

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Absolutely counts

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There you go, that's the football banter
over.

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So Vernon, how you doing mate?

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How are you?

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I am I am all right, man.

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I am I am glad to be doing this podcast,
but that's put it that way.

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It's definitely given me an energy boost
that is required for me right now.

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So, yeah, good to see you, man.

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You too.

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So firstly, before we dig in today's
topics of conversation, thank you for

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everyone who's been sharing, subscribing,
all that fun stuff.

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We've made a few tweaks to a few episodes.

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We've added chapters in there.

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So if you like some of those things, do
let us know.

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And yeah, any again, feedback, we'd love
to hear it.

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or feedback because of my favorite Diary
CEO episode.

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Why don't you give us some advice about
things we could do better in the next

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episode?

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Can we have some advice, please?

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And feedback, whichever one you wish.

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You know the first one we're going to get
is the one with no action yet, which is by

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burning a new camera.

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Which we've still not done.

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Listen, this is operation get burning new
camera.

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So please like, share and subscribe
because then we can do more good stuff

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with YouTube and we can get some more
sponsors.

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And by more, I mean any sponsors of any
kind because we have none.

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We've not tried yet.

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Right, so first topic of conversation is a
question that I got asked on LinkedIn,

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which I've answered, but I think it might
trigger some interesting conversations.

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So I'm gonna just quickly switch to the
message that I got.

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So the question I got asked was, with the
huge boom in no code automation,

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I'm wondering if there is still a need for
manual test cases and manual testing in

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the future.

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I believe there is.

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What does you think?

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Cause it, that's what I got.

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I got, what got sent to me.

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So yeah.

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Is there a need for manual test cases and
manual testing in the future?

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How did you answer that?

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Do you want me to answer it or do you want
to share how you, because you answered it,

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right?

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did answer it.

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Yeah.

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Well, not to keep the podcast, you know,
and end it now.

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The answer is obviously, of course we do
end a podcast job done.

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Right.

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So I think it's, I think those two words
themselves have stigma attached to them in

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the industry.

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Right.

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So test cases.

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make a lot of people, to be honest,
literally at work today, I said, I had a

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task today to write some test cases and I
joked to one of my colleagues that the

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thought of it makes me want to vomit,
right?

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Which is not, you know, it was said at the
moment, isn't to generate a bit of

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chillness and a bit of relaxation as well,
right?

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But like they feel so alien to me
sometimes in the way that I want to test.

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But,

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What I shared with this answer was think
of them manual test cases and a lot of the

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way they're used are an artifact for a lot
of the thinking and analysis that gets

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done.

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So commonly a way of capturing that
analysis and thinking has been to document

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it in a very detailed test case.

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Me and you on the other hand might decide,
actually, that's not a good idea.

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I might use some charters.

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I might create some cheat sheets.

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I might capture that information in, I
don't know.

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Gherkin style acceptance criteria, right?

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There's loads of ways to capture the said
information, but test cases became a very

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common one.

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But really it is about documenting that
discovery, those questions that, all the

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answers to the questions that we asked.

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So yeah, I said to them that that thinking
and analysis still has to happen, but when

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you automate.

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So if you're using a low code, no code,
any automated tool, that thinking and

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analysis still has to take place, just
you're not capturing it in a test case

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anymore, you're capturing it straight in
to whatever this tool offers you.

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So therefore, maybe the test case concept.

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as we traditionally view them might go
away, but the effort and the work that

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goes into making them is still very much
relevant and needed to happen by somebody,

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not saying who, but by somebody.

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So yeah, don't know if you want me to
carry on the rest of the answer.

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That was the first paragraph of the
answer.

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Okay,

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Yeah.

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So the second part of the answer was about
manual testing, right.

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Which we both know is a huge problem and
means many different things to many

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different people.

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Right.

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But I explained it in this answer as the,
the act of uncovering information about a

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system manually, usually by following.

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test cases, as in a very traditional view
of it, or it still sometimes means a phase

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of testing that's taking place.

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So they're both very different things, but
I've heard that term used for a phase or

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for the actual act of doing some quote
manual testing.

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But whether that is, whether it's a phase
or not, the underlying thing is we're

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getting information of a system.

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We're getting information from a system
that we're then computing and

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understanding and analyzing and putting it
into context to understand whether this

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system is behaving as we expect it to or
not, or opening up new avenues for more

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exploration and more questions.

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So again, whether we call it manual
testing, if we're going to automate

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something, we still need that process of
understanding whether what this system

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does.

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is what it does desirable and accepted
behavior before we can automate it.

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If you blindly just start automating,
you're going to automate a bunch of noise

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that might, no one might care about.

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So therefore, yeah, I said these things
still happen when we automate and we need

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to make sure we're automating behaviors
and things that the business care about.

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And therefore in order to do that, we need
to apply critical thinking analysis.

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get information, which are basically in my
opinion, in this answer, underlying things

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that still happen when we create test
cases and when we execute those test cases

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manually, those things are still
happening.

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so those things, those things need to
still happen, but I think the mechanisms

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to get those things doesn't have to be
those labels.

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So I said, my answer in conclusion was
yes, I think those things are still

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needed.

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But I think it's more the underlying
reasons we do those things and what we get

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from them, as opposed to that specific way
of doing it.

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I think I get what you're getting at
there.

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I like that.

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Excuse me.

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I like that answer because it's, it felt
like you were trying to, to sidestep the,

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the noun or the label manual testing and
talk about the value that manual testing

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provides or the purpose that would, you
know, that you use manual testing for.

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And it's like, well,

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Do we still need to do those things?

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Yes.

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So if those things are what you call
manual testing, then yes, we will stay in

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reading them.

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The obvious question though is, this is
kind of predictable.

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So sorry, but how does AI change your
answer, Mr.

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Bradshaw?

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So how does that change your answer?

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Does it change it?

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Sorry, sorry.

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I can hear.

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I can hear people yelling at me.

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So if let me just change that generative
AI so large language models is what I'm

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actually talking about.

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Trying to channel my inner Dr.

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Tariq King and I can hear my other friend,
Mr.

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Eden yelling at me.

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It's

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at me in my ear.

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that change the answer though?

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I don't think so, no.

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My current view of those, are you talking
about using them to help me or are you

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talking about testing an AI?

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I'm talking about both.

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I think the gen AI usage to help me is
still very apt.

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So that gathering of said information and
that analysis and thinking still needs to

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take place.

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So if an AI tool can help me, happy days.

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That's how I still view that.

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Maybe I can probably do more analysis
quickly because I could send it all off to

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said AI and get a load of stuff back.

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I could ask it to generate it into formats
that I help.

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I could ask it to summarize things.

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I can basically still doing the same task,
but I'm getting the tools to make me more

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efficient.

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And that's what I've always viewed these
tools as any tool, to be honest with you,

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not even just the AI tools, like anything
that gives me more super tester abilities.

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I want them in my tool belt.

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testing AI though, again, I've not, I've
done very little of it, right.

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But.

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You know, you're testing something that's
non -deterministic.

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So that's always going to be the
challenge, right?

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Our systems usually are deterministic.

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They, given the same inputs, they would do
the same thing over and over again.

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Whereas with these systems, they're not.

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So, you know, the, the idea of automating
it, I know there's lots of things you can

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do.

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I've read lots of chapters of Mark's book.

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Don't tell him cause he thinks I don't
read, but I've read some chapters.

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of the book, right?

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And I know there's lots of things you can
do in these days to test these LLMs, like,

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you know, from that perspective.

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But I think again here, I don't know what,
I don't have the right words.

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I've been thinking about this all week and
I've been trying to think of my own model

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for the underlying core activities that
always take place no matter what we call

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the thing above it.

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And I think if I had time and I sat down,
I would come up with kind of five or six

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core activities that are very related to
testing.

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And it doesn't matter what the label above
it is.

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It doesn't matter the tools that you're
using.

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You're still doing the same.

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You're still doing the same core actions
for this, usually for the same goal, which

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is to get information that you can present
to the team to help them make informed

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decisions.

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I wonder if this might be related to
knowledge work.

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I wonder if the topic of knowledge work
would help give you your answer to those,

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you know, it almost sounds like you're
looking for some, what are some

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foundational attributes or things that are
always present when we're doing testing,

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regardless of the tool.

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or the approach or the technique.

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Like, I think the, like what I'm trying to
get to, I think is like some of these

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techniques would yield more of one of the
characteristics than the other or one of

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the foundational, you know, stones than
the other.

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I think like, and I can't, I don't know
what they are.

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I'm just going to make some up now, but
anyone listening and you've done this

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work, share it.

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But you know, I'm thinking like, you know,
curiosity, you know, analysis, critical

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thinking it's.

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communication, right?

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It's these kind of core things, but I want
to get, I don't want them to be so

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generalized.

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You know, communication is very, a very
broad topic, but I also, you know, I want

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to start thinking like, you know, like
critical thinking, right?

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If you had critical thinking on there, if
you're doing exploratory testing, you're

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probably using a lot more of that skill
than you would be if you were executing

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manual test cases.

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Right.

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You're still testing the system to get
information out of it.

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But I would say your level of critical
thinking is probably a lot less in one

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than it is in the other.

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not go all the time.

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I know there's exceptions where testers,
it depends, blah, blah, blah.

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Right.

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But generally we're applying, you know,
with testing, creating, executing and

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analyzing in real time.

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Right.

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Whereas with the test following a test
case, we usually don't have to do so much

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of the analysis because it's been done.

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prior.

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So I think generating the test case, we do
a lot more critical thinking, traditional

238
00:13:37,540 --> 00:13:38,270
way of doing it.

239
00:13:38,270 --> 00:13:42,980
But once it's been written and codified
and my job is just to execute it, I would

240
00:13:42,980 --> 00:13:46,230
say there's less of that skill taking
place.

241
00:13:46,230 --> 00:13:48,050
So that's what I'm trying to, that's
what's in my head.

242
00:13:48,050 --> 00:13:49,820
It's like, what's that foundation layer?

243
00:13:49,820 --> 00:13:55,360
And then these activities kind of dip into
those things, increasing the percentage,

244
00:13:55,360 --> 00:13:58,948
depending on the type of testing you're
doing.

245
00:13:59,351 --> 00:14:01,931
How much less do you think it is though?

246
00:14:01,931 --> 00:14:04,911
Because those results still need to be
interpreted.

247
00:14:04,911 --> 00:14:09,871
And there are stories and experiences that
we've all had and some of them are more

248
00:14:09,871 --> 00:14:17,571
public than others where the results said
one thing, they were green, everything was

249
00:14:17,571 --> 00:14:23,191
wonderful, but doom and disaster were just
around the corner, even though things were

250
00:14:23,191 --> 00:14:23,991
green.

251
00:14:23,991 --> 00:14:28,695
So that kind of, what that says to me is
there's still a level of...

252
00:14:28,695 --> 00:14:38,655
cognitive work required sometimes even
when we have some outputs that have been

253
00:14:38,655 --> 00:14:41,415
passed that they're green.

254
00:14:41,832 --> 00:14:42,512
Yeah, yeah.

255
00:14:42,512 --> 00:14:43,782
No, I don't disagree on that.

256
00:14:43,782 --> 00:14:44,391
Yeah.

257
00:14:44,391 --> 00:14:47,630
want to keep double checking the bloody,
do you know what I mean?

258
00:14:47,630 --> 00:14:50,991
Like, all the units has passed, so
everything's, you don't want to keep

259
00:14:50,991 --> 00:14:54,051
doubting those tools.

260
00:14:54,251 --> 00:14:55,272
It's kind of

261
00:14:55,502 --> 00:15:00,502
So some years ago, I did a workshop which
you were at, at the European testing

262
00:15:00,502 --> 00:15:06,842
conference 2018, I wanna say, and it was
about scripting versus exploring.

263
00:15:07,802 --> 00:15:14,562
these, at the end of the workshop, I had
all these different characteristics of

264
00:15:14,562 --> 00:15:18,418
scripting, which I, you know,

265
00:15:18,418 --> 00:15:27,858
I would put as manual test cases
automation that would be over there.

266
00:15:27,858 --> 00:15:33,698
And then you've got the exploratory side
of things, which is using charters and

267
00:15:33,698 --> 00:15:39,458
using session based test management and
you know, playing around with the computer

268
00:15:39,458 --> 00:15:41,598
as people say, or the app.

269
00:15:41,598 --> 00:15:44,678
And I put that over on the exploring side
and it was.

270
00:15:44,946 --> 00:15:47,866
The point I was trying to get at with that
is that these things have different

271
00:15:47,866 --> 00:15:52,366
characteristics and depending on the
situation you're in will determine which

272
00:15:52,366 --> 00:15:56,186
approach is more appropriate, let's say.

273
00:15:56,586 --> 00:16:01,526
It's rather, it's less, the reason I came
with a workshop is because I had this bias

274
00:16:01,526 --> 00:16:09,431
where I realised I was thinking and
behaving as if test cases were bad.

275
00:16:09,431 --> 00:16:11,346
Yeah.

276
00:16:11,346 --> 00:16:13,506
test cases, if you're using test cases,
that's wrong.

277
00:16:13,506 --> 00:16:15,166
That's just, that's just stupid.

278
00:16:15,646 --> 00:16:19,606
Instead, I should have been thinking
actually, when is it appropriate to use

279
00:16:19,606 --> 00:16:20,006
these things?

280
00:16:20,006 --> 00:16:24,946
So the workshop was almost a challenge to
me.

281
00:16:27,126 --> 00:16:27,816
So that's pretty cool.

282
00:16:27,816 --> 00:16:28,286
I'll share that.

283
00:16:28,286 --> 00:16:31,186
I'll share the slice of that in the show
notes so people can let me know what they

284
00:16:31,186 --> 00:16:32,003
think.

285
00:16:32,003 --> 00:16:36,923
I think that's kind of what I'm hinting at
is that, like I said, I don't know what to

286
00:16:36,923 --> 00:16:41,553
call this bottom layer of skills or hats
or whatever it is, right?

287
00:16:41,553 --> 00:16:45,463
But you know, there's, yeah, yeah, nice
hat.

288
00:16:45,463 --> 00:16:52,003
There's definitely, you know, there's not
an infinite, I know there's a, there's a

289
00:16:52,003 --> 00:16:54,113
course, let's use the hats for now, right?

290
00:16:54,113 --> 00:17:00,731
So there's, I think if you took a thousand
QAs, QEs, testers, right?

291
00:17:00,963 --> 00:17:05,423
And got them to fill in some very well
smartly designed survey, right.

292
00:17:05,423 --> 00:17:06,883
And mapped it out.

293
00:17:06,883 --> 00:17:10,123
You would see certain hats, right.

294
00:17:10,123 --> 00:17:12,933
That is common throughout all those roles.

295
00:17:12,933 --> 00:17:15,643
And then there'll be a couple of
specialized hats, right.

296
00:17:15,643 --> 00:17:20,663
That's kind of what I'm wanting to do with
this bottom layer and to show people that

297
00:17:20,663 --> 00:17:24,703
you kind of dip in and out of them,
depending on that testing activity, like

298
00:17:24,703 --> 00:17:27,322
you say.

299
00:17:27,343 --> 00:17:30,431
but I think in this example of the
question.

300
00:17:31,235 --> 00:17:36,795
And I've done this in the workshops myself
is detaching the activities of automating

301
00:17:36,795 --> 00:17:38,135
and breaking them down.

302
00:17:38,135 --> 00:17:38,455
Right.

303
00:17:38,455 --> 00:17:41,295
So it's not just about writing the code,
right?

304
00:17:41,295 --> 00:17:44,575
There's the bit before it where you need
to think about the state that you need.

305
00:17:44,575 --> 00:17:47,065
You need to think about your assertion
that you're going to do.

306
00:17:47,065 --> 00:17:51,895
Does it actually mitigate the risk that
you think you're mitigating?

307
00:17:51,895 --> 00:17:52,365
Right.

308
00:17:52,365 --> 00:17:55,395
And then you've got kind of what
environment and you've got the design of

309
00:17:55,395 --> 00:17:58,617
the code before you even sit down and
start implementing it.

310
00:17:58,691 --> 00:18:02,971
So that thing on the left is very much
again, a critical thinking analysis

311
00:18:02,971 --> 00:18:07,941
system, system thinking, understanding
oracles, heuristics, right?

312
00:18:07,941 --> 00:18:13,371
There's lots of like what some people
would class as, you know, testing manual

313
00:18:13,371 --> 00:18:15,431
exploratory testing skills.

314
00:18:15,431 --> 00:18:18,871
But obviously that same person then is
also going to use their tool knowledge and

315
00:18:18,871 --> 00:18:23,571
their coding knowledge to then implement
said, you know, test in whatever tool it

316
00:18:23,571 --> 00:18:24,131
is.

317
00:18:24,131 --> 00:18:27,531
And that's what I was trying to answer
with that question that we got asked is

318
00:18:27,531 --> 00:18:28,831
like.

319
00:18:29,059 --> 00:18:33,459
having that low code, no code tool in
front of you is great, but you need to

320
00:18:33,459 --> 00:18:38,099
tell it what to do and you need to tell it
what to do that will result in stuff that

321
00:18:38,099 --> 00:18:40,839
matters and that's valuable to the other
person.

322
00:18:40,839 --> 00:18:45,899
And I think that side of it is often
under, undervalued.

323
00:18:45,899 --> 00:18:50,279
And I also believe that just to go on a
separate topic, but I've seen the trend in

324
00:18:50,279 --> 00:18:57,619
the community that we went very heavy on
the technical implementation side of this,

325
00:18:57,619 --> 00:18:59,122
these hats, right?

326
00:18:59,122 --> 00:18:59,923
Mm -hmm.

327
00:18:59,923 --> 00:19:07,303
up with a lot of S -DETs, automators whose
other hats were severely lacking.

328
00:19:07,543 --> 00:19:10,803
Like they didn't have hats, they had
visors for those other skills, right?

329
00:19:10,803 --> 00:19:14,703
They were missing 90 % of the hat.

330
00:19:14,703 --> 00:19:15,163
Right?

331
00:19:15,163 --> 00:19:19,433
So, and that resulted in a lot of
automating for the sake of automating,

332
00:19:19,433 --> 00:19:19,763
right?

333
00:19:19,763 --> 00:19:23,643
Because they didn't have the skills on the
left, on the, let's say the left, the

334
00:19:23,643 --> 00:19:28,803
other side, the other hats to decide what
should be automated and what shouldn't.

335
00:19:28,803 --> 00:19:30,223
What layer it should be done on.

336
00:19:30,223 --> 00:19:31,663
Does the business care about this?

337
00:19:31,663 --> 00:19:33,133
It became a case of I can do it.

338
00:19:33,133 --> 00:19:34,583
So I'm going to do it.

339
00:19:34,583 --> 00:19:35,803
And computers are cheap.

340
00:19:35,803 --> 00:19:39,163
And it doesn't matter if I've got 10 ,000
tests that can run, still run them in 10

341
00:19:39,163 --> 00:19:40,283
minutes.

342
00:19:40,283 --> 00:19:44,973
And now we've started to see a lot more
talks at the conferences about, you know,

343
00:19:44,973 --> 00:19:46,503
how do I deal with 10 ,000 tests?

344
00:19:46,503 --> 00:19:48,003
How do I delete tests?

345
00:19:48,003 --> 00:19:49,843
How do I decide what test is valuable?

346
00:19:49,843 --> 00:19:54,203
And I think it's because we got ourselves
into that trap of automating because we

347
00:19:54,203 --> 00:19:57,431
can and not using these other hats.

348
00:19:58,002 --> 00:20:05,542
I think it's at best it's an uninteresting
question.

349
00:20:06,142 --> 00:20:11,202
Should we or should we not have automated
tests or should we or should we not have

350
00:20:11,202 --> 00:20:12,822
manual tests?

351
00:20:14,022 --> 00:20:17,102
And in the worst cases, it's almost like
the wrong question.

352
00:20:17,102 --> 00:20:19,352
That's how I position with people I talk
about.

353
00:20:19,352 --> 00:20:22,602
So, well, I don't know if it's the right
question or not.

354
00:20:23,314 --> 00:20:26,234
because we should be talking about what
problem we'll be trying to solve and

355
00:20:26,234 --> 00:20:27,654
trying to understand that.

356
00:20:27,654 --> 00:20:33,534
And then as we explore the answer to that
question, we'll start to answer the

357
00:20:33,534 --> 00:20:35,324
question of should we automate it or not?

358
00:20:35,324 --> 00:20:37,494
Or should we, you know, mainly test this
or not?

359
00:20:37,494 --> 00:20:41,394
Because it will become clear what problem
we're trying to solve on what the

360
00:20:41,394 --> 00:20:43,074
appropriate solution would look like.

361
00:20:43,074 --> 00:20:49,974
You know, I might've said this before, but
if I said to you, I use a helicopter to

362
00:20:49,974 --> 00:20:51,042
get to work,

363
00:20:53,170 --> 00:20:55,110
you instantly have an opinion about that.

364
00:20:55,110 --> 00:20:57,170
I didn't have to say anything else.

365
00:20:57,170 --> 00:20:59,510
Everybody had an opinion about that.

366
00:20:59,510 --> 00:21:02,150
Some of them probably said, I know what
Vernon works from home.

367
00:21:02,150 --> 00:21:03,847
What the hell is he talking about?

368
00:21:05,116 --> 00:21:07,576
But other people might be thinking, well,
where does he work?

369
00:21:07,576 --> 00:21:09,126
Why has he taken a helicopter to work?

370
00:21:09,126 --> 00:21:10,036
And what does he do for a living?

371
00:21:10,036 --> 00:21:10,746
And how rich is he?

372
00:21:10,746 --> 00:21:11,936
And this, that, and the other.

373
00:21:11,936 --> 00:21:17,946
So maybe I work in Paris and a quick
helicopter flight.

374
00:21:17,946 --> 00:21:19,326
There's a little airfield near my home.

375
00:21:19,326 --> 00:21:20,876
So I can just take a little quick.

376
00:21:20,876 --> 00:21:21,966
I don't know how long it would take.

377
00:21:21,966 --> 00:21:22,696
Couple of hours?

378
00:21:22,696 --> 00:21:23,856
I don't know.

379
00:21:23,856 --> 00:21:28,696
To fly over the channel in a helicopter to
work and land on the top of a skyscraper

380
00:21:28,696 --> 00:21:29,736
and everything's awesome.

381
00:21:29,736 --> 00:21:32,546
Or maybe I work downstairs in my house.

382
00:21:32,546 --> 00:21:34,716
So why am I going to the airfield?

383
00:21:34,716 --> 00:21:39,096
helicopter pad to get a helicopter to go
up and down and land back in my back.

384
00:21:39,096 --> 00:21:40,236
God, that's just crazy.

385
00:21:40,236 --> 00:21:41,696
It won't make any sense.

386
00:21:41,816 --> 00:21:47,696
You know, so understanding the context of
what problem I'm trying to solve probably

387
00:21:47,696 --> 00:21:50,776
would help avoid getting into that
situation.

388
00:21:51,256 --> 00:21:55,315
But I tell you what else it thinks it
makes me think about man.

389
00:21:55,316 --> 00:21:58,326
This is so random.

390
00:21:58,326 --> 00:22:02,376
So there's this really cool short story
that I read years ago.

391
00:22:02,396 --> 00:22:04,344
I was I was sick.

392
00:22:04,604 --> 00:22:09,264
and I was in the hospital and then I was
home and I was and I had to be home for a

393
00:22:09,264 --> 00:22:09,904
long time.

394
00:22:09,904 --> 00:22:15,484
So a friend of mine got me a collection of
short stories by Isaac Asimov.

395
00:22:15,484 --> 00:22:16,554
Epic story.

396
00:22:16,554 --> 00:22:19,234
If you haven't read any Isaac Asimov, fix
that.

397
00:22:19,234 --> 00:22:24,804
Now, if you like science fiction and you
haven't read Isaac Asimov, you get on it

398
00:22:24,804 --> 00:22:25,364
ASAP.

399
00:22:25,364 --> 00:22:31,124
So this one story in the book, I'm
reluctant to say this.

400
00:22:31,124 --> 00:22:34,004
Okay, first spoiler alert warning of.

401
00:22:34,268 --> 00:22:35,958
the Vernon Richard Show podcast, right?

402
00:22:35,958 --> 00:22:39,928
So I'm gonna talk about this now and we'll
figure it out in the chapters.

403
00:22:39,928 --> 00:22:42,247
So to make sure you don't avoid any
spoilers.

404
00:22:42,247 --> 00:22:46,048
All I will say at this point is if you
don't want any spoilers, but you wanna

405
00:22:46,048 --> 00:22:51,928
know what I'm talking about, find the
story, the short story by Isaac Asimov

406
00:22:51,928 --> 00:22:54,188
called Profession.

407
00:22:54,608 --> 00:22:58,368
And this speaks to what Rich has been
talking about and what I'm trying to talk

408
00:22:58,368 --> 00:22:59,568
about now.

409
00:22:59,568 --> 00:23:00,252
So.

410
00:23:00,252 --> 00:23:02,922
in three, two, one, spoilers incoming.

411
00:23:02,922 --> 00:23:03,672
Are you still here?

412
00:23:03,672 --> 00:23:05,352
If you're still here, it's spoiler time.

413
00:23:05,352 --> 00:23:11,602
Okay, so the book is called Profession and
it's about a dude, so it's set, you know,

414
00:23:11,602 --> 00:23:13,652
thousands of years in the future.

415
00:23:13,892 --> 00:23:16,038
And in this society,

416
00:23:17,532 --> 00:23:24,192
your profession is determined
algorithmically by the VAC system or

417
00:23:24,192 --> 00:23:24,392
whatever.

418
00:23:24,392 --> 00:23:30,412
There's some computerized system that at
18, it says, hey, Rich, you are gonna be

419
00:23:30,412 --> 00:23:31,962
an esthet.

420
00:23:31,962 --> 00:23:32,782
That's what you're gonna be.

421
00:23:32,782 --> 00:23:34,952
We've decided we've analyzed your brain.

422
00:23:34,952 --> 00:23:36,702
You are gonna be an esthet, awesome.

423
00:23:36,702 --> 00:23:41,872
And it's like, Vern, we've analyzed your
brain and you're going to be an

424
00:23:41,872 --> 00:23:42,572
astrophysicist.

425
00:23:42,572 --> 00:23:46,068
And we've analyzed your brain, Jane, and
you're gonna be.

426
00:23:46,492 --> 00:23:54,412
like an engineer who builds combine
harvesters for this planet that we're

427
00:23:54,412 --> 00:23:57,482
gonna go and terraform and all the rest of
it and so on and so on and so on.

428
00:23:57,482 --> 00:23:59,572
And it's a big day, right?

429
00:23:59,572 --> 00:24:06,612
So the main character, he basically gets
assigned as a computer programmer, I think

430
00:24:06,612 --> 00:24:08,052
fully enough.

431
00:24:08,892 --> 00:24:10,162
And he's like, what computer?

432
00:24:10,162 --> 00:24:13,232
I didn't wanna be a computer programmer.

433
00:24:13,232 --> 00:24:15,278
I wanted to be, I don't know.

434
00:24:16,141 --> 00:24:17,672
I should not.

435
00:24:17,672 --> 00:24:18,952
wanted to be a tester.

436
00:24:18,952 --> 00:24:19,472
This is crazy.

437
00:24:19,472 --> 00:24:20,172
I don't want to be.

438
00:24:20,172 --> 00:24:23,912
So the story is him trying to escape his
fate.

439
00:24:23,912 --> 00:24:28,532
Because the way that you get the
profession, think of the matrix and you

440
00:24:28,532 --> 00:24:31,512
just get the information downloaded into
your brain immediately.

441
00:24:31,912 --> 00:24:34,152
So he's trying to avoid that.

442
00:24:34,512 --> 00:24:42,232
And he ends up at this school for people
who are too dumb to take the downloading.

443
00:24:42,232 --> 00:24:43,222
And then he escapes from there.

444
00:24:43,222 --> 00:24:45,234
He's like, no, I don't want to do that.

445
00:24:45,660 --> 00:24:48,060
Anyway, long story short, which is already
too long.

446
00:24:48,060 --> 00:24:54,980
What it turns out is the school that is
apparently for the dunces is where the new

447
00:24:54,980 --> 00:24:58,700
knowledge comes from in the first place.

448
00:24:58,700 --> 00:25:05,820
So if you get that, like Jane, she's the
engineer person who's an expert in these

449
00:25:05,820 --> 00:25:09,520
particular machines, who built the goddamn
machine with these people?

450
00:25:09,520 --> 00:25:13,074
All these people who rebel from getting
constrained.

451
00:25:13,468 --> 00:25:15,948
they sit and they learn stuff like we do
now.

452
00:25:15,948 --> 00:25:17,588
They're like sitting like figure stuff out
now.

453
00:25:17,588 --> 00:25:18,598
Well, how does this work?

454
00:25:18,598 --> 00:25:19,908
And this, that and the other.

455
00:25:19,948 --> 00:25:23,658
And when you were talking, that's what
this reminded me of.

456
00:25:23,658 --> 00:25:28,828
It was this whole aspect of, we're just
gonna automate this thing and whatever it

457
00:25:28,828 --> 00:25:30,558
tells us awesome win.

458
00:25:30,558 --> 00:25:31,478
Like we're not gonna think.

459
00:25:31,478 --> 00:25:34,608
And then there's another side to it where
it's like, well, is that really correct?

460
00:25:34,608 --> 00:25:35,678
Like, what are we really doing?

461
00:25:35,678 --> 00:25:37,128
Like, why are we even doing this?

462
00:25:37,128 --> 00:25:38,168
Let's play around.

463
00:25:38,168 --> 00:25:40,468
How do I even know what to automate in the
first place?

464
00:25:40,468 --> 00:25:42,288
How do I learn about this application?

465
00:25:42,288 --> 00:25:43,684
How do I learn the tool?

466
00:25:43,740 --> 00:25:44,940
And I love that story.

467
00:25:44,940 --> 00:25:47,420
So if you haven't read it for a while,
which I haven't, go read it again, because

468
00:25:47,420 --> 00:25:48,820
that's exactly what I'm going to do.

469
00:25:48,820 --> 00:25:54,300
And now that's the end of the spoiler
about the Isaac Atomoff story.

470
00:25:54,300 --> 00:25:57,100
I don't even know if that's even going to
survive the goddamn edit because it was so

471
00:25:57,100 --> 00:25:58,800
long.

472
00:25:58,800 --> 00:25:59,779
But we shall see.

473
00:25:59,779 --> 00:26:02,160
We'll find out what Rich decides later.

474
00:26:03,245 --> 00:26:10,785
So, well, yeah, so I'd love to see how
other people would answer that question.

475
00:26:10,785 --> 00:26:13,965
Like, you know, if you've got opinions,
you want to write, I don't know, blog

476
00:26:13,965 --> 00:26:18,645
posts or comments on this, whatever, just
honestly, please share them because I'm

477
00:26:18,645 --> 00:26:20,415
not claiming to be right or wrong or
anything.

478
00:26:20,415 --> 00:26:21,545
They just shared my opinion.

479
00:26:21,545 --> 00:26:22,164
Go on then.

480
00:26:22,164 --> 00:26:26,524
have an interest in considering this.

481
00:26:26,524 --> 00:26:27,904
Get it.

482
00:26:27,904 --> 00:26:29,814
I want to consider the AI thing.

483
00:26:29,814 --> 00:26:33,684
If you've got any opinions on that, I
think that just changes the nature of a

484
00:26:33,684 --> 00:26:35,024
lot of things.

485
00:26:35,284 --> 00:26:39,404
You know, we mentioned determinism in the
audit, you know, whether a system is

486
00:26:39,404 --> 00:26:41,024
deterministic or not.

487
00:26:41,664 --> 00:26:48,264
If you're testing what we're calling AI, a
large language model, generative AI type

488
00:26:48,264 --> 00:26:50,388
application, how would you do that?

489
00:26:50,652 --> 00:26:53,172
The whole nature of right or wrong is
different there.

490
00:26:53,172 --> 00:26:54,661
So what would the tooling look like there?

491
00:26:54,661 --> 00:26:55,902
What would the approach look like there?

492
00:26:55,902 --> 00:27:00,752
And would you class that as manual testing
or not?

493
00:27:00,752 --> 00:27:05,612
I'd love to know the answers to that from
people who are far more expert than me.

494
00:27:06,029 --> 00:27:11,489
It came into a massive, just to answer
that myself, cause cause Matt as well, and

495
00:27:11,489 --> 00:27:12,869
it's our show.

496
00:27:12,869 --> 00:27:18,189
So the, I remember like me and Mark
chatting a lot when he started, Mark

497
00:27:18,189 --> 00:27:22,108
Winteringham when he started writing his
AI book and it reminded me of the

498
00:27:22,108 --> 00:27:26,069
automation and testing work that we did,
for a number of years.

499
00:27:26,069 --> 00:27:29,091
And it was always about this.

500
00:27:30,637 --> 00:27:34,397
Like you say, like, you know, you're going
like this, automated testing, but for us,

501
00:27:34,397 --> 00:27:39,637
we always made the distinction that, you
know, not that there isn't any automated

502
00:27:39,637 --> 00:27:45,117
testing, like I'm not going to go into
that kind of area, but that it's still,

503
00:27:45,117 --> 00:27:50,097
it's just offloading that effort to a set
of, I call it my robot army.

504
00:27:50,097 --> 00:27:52,077
That's how I talk about automated tests.

505
00:27:52,077 --> 00:27:57,397
It's basically a little mini Richard army
that goes off, runs all these tests for

506
00:27:57,397 --> 00:27:57,709
me.

507
00:27:57,709 --> 00:27:59,639
or not even like, probably army is not the
right word.

508
00:27:59,639 --> 00:28:01,949
Like my little detective investigators,
right?

509
00:28:01,949 --> 00:28:05,949
They go off and they've got a mission to
come back with a certain piece of

510
00:28:05,949 --> 00:28:09,129
information and tell me if it's changed or
not.

511
00:28:09,129 --> 00:28:15,369
And I think that kind of nature of how I
view tools is still the same in this AI

512
00:28:15,369 --> 00:28:16,009
space.

513
00:28:16,009 --> 00:28:19,129
It's just using it to get me information.

514
00:28:19,129 --> 00:28:24,069
So even if I'm testing it, I'm still, I
might build a tool that sends a thousand

515
00:28:24,069 --> 00:28:25,269
prompts, right?

516
00:28:25,269 --> 00:28:26,637
And outputs.

517
00:28:26,637 --> 00:28:32,147
a report with a thousand summaries, which
I might send to another tool and tell me,

518
00:28:32,147 --> 00:28:35,457
you know, how, how close are these
answers?

519
00:28:35,457 --> 00:28:39,557
You know, I don't know, based on
sentiment, right.

520
00:28:39,557 --> 00:28:44,157
And then that AI might give me, you know,
98 out of a hundred look the same, but

521
00:28:44,157 --> 00:28:45,717
these two look really odd.

522
00:28:45,717 --> 00:28:49,537
And then I'd be like, right, let's go look
at those two and go, well, actually the

523
00:28:49,537 --> 00:28:53,517
wording and those two, we included the
word, I don't know, Smith.

524
00:28:53,517 --> 00:28:53,787
Right.

525
00:28:53,787 --> 00:28:55,372
And that's thrown it off.

526
00:28:55,372 --> 00:28:55,742
Right.

527
00:28:55,742 --> 00:28:56,852
That's, that's messed it up.

528
00:28:56,852 --> 00:29:05,372
And it reminds me of the Doug Hoffman when
he, he spoke about what he called high vac

529
00:29:05,372 --> 00:29:13,492
automation, high, high volume automated
testing or something high that I think it

530
00:29:13,492 --> 00:29:14,812
was anyway.

531
00:29:15,292 --> 00:29:19,412
And then I think he, he had an example or
someone gave an example a long time ago of

532
00:29:19,412 --> 00:29:22,992
the very similar concept that I put into
these AI models, which is the way they

533
00:29:22,992 --> 00:29:24,552
tested Google maps.

534
00:29:25,101 --> 00:29:31,281
So they basically built a big algorithm
that went, go from point A to point B, and

535
00:29:31,281 --> 00:29:35,191
then let's say Manchester to Leicester,
right?

536
00:29:35,191 --> 00:29:38,781
And it tells you that it's 12 .5 miles
away or whatever.

537
00:29:38,781 --> 00:29:42,821
That's not true, but we know it's not that
close, but like it's 80 miles away, right?

538
00:29:42,821 --> 00:29:48,401
Or, and then you do Leicester to
Manchester, and then it goes, well, that's

539
00:29:48,401 --> 00:29:50,101
85 miles away.

540
00:29:50,101 --> 00:29:53,901
And it's like, is that an acceptable
deviation or not?

541
00:29:53,901 --> 00:29:58,241
going to the same two places so there
could be one -way systems there could be

542
00:29:58,241 --> 00:30:03,061
all sorts right but they basically did the
reverse and spotted when it came up with

543
00:30:03,061 --> 00:30:08,921
silly misdirections so and they randomly
did this like you could have got you know

544
00:30:08,921 --> 00:30:15,381
Seoul and South Korea to to land's end
right but it just ran them back and forth

545
00:30:15,381 --> 00:30:19,941
and then outputted ones that were
significantly different and those

546
00:30:19,941 --> 00:30:23,077
significantly different ones went to a
human's queue

547
00:30:23,149 --> 00:30:27,949
who basically looked at the, you know, the
maps, the instructions, the numbers to

548
00:30:27,949 --> 00:30:30,889
decide if there was a problem here or not.

549
00:30:30,889 --> 00:30:34,769
And I think that's how I viewed like, when
you think of these non -deterministic

550
00:30:34,769 --> 00:30:42,009
systems, my brain immediately goes to how
can I bombard it with so much information

551
00:30:42,009 --> 00:30:47,989
that I can get it back and start to see
the trends and patterns by analyzing said

552
00:30:47,989 --> 00:30:52,717
information to basically hopefully spot.

553
00:30:52,717 --> 00:30:54,277
some problems.

554
00:30:55,557 --> 00:30:58,697
so yeah, that's what, that's what, when I
start, I think of these systems, it's

555
00:30:58,697 --> 00:31:02,257
about, again, to wrap up my own thought,
and I've probably gone the wrong way with

556
00:31:02,257 --> 00:31:06,807
it, but this idea that it doesn't matter
whether I'm doing tools or not.

557
00:31:06,807 --> 00:31:12,637
My main goal is to get information of the
system, either things that are new or

558
00:31:12,637 --> 00:31:14,177
things that I already know.

559
00:31:14,177 --> 00:31:18,777
I haven't changed and it doesn't matter
how it comes my way.

560
00:31:18,777 --> 00:31:21,277
I just need to get it as soon as possible.

561
00:31:21,277 --> 00:31:22,597
And then.

562
00:31:22,893 --> 00:31:26,873
One add addition is the, like a good
metric to measure.

563
00:31:26,873 --> 00:31:33,353
And one we adapted off the back of,
accelerate was, MTTF, mean time to

564
00:31:33,353 --> 00:31:34,413
feedback.

565
00:31:34,593 --> 00:31:37,893
How can I reduce my mean time to feedback?

566
00:31:38,173 --> 00:31:41,348
So.

567
00:31:41,548 --> 00:31:43,368
time to feedback.

568
00:31:44,267 --> 00:31:48,494
I like I vib that because

569
00:31:50,460 --> 00:31:55,800
often I'll try and encourage people I'm
working with to almost forget the word

570
00:31:55,800 --> 00:32:00,960
testing and instead say, what do I need to
learn about this application?

571
00:32:00,960 --> 00:32:03,340
So I'll be happy to release it.

572
00:32:03,520 --> 00:32:05,360
I would like to know this.

573
00:32:05,360 --> 00:32:06,879
I'd like to learn about this.

574
00:32:06,879 --> 00:32:08,100
It's like, cool.

575
00:32:08,100 --> 00:32:09,210
How can we learn that?

576
00:32:09,210 --> 00:32:15,060
Like what experience do we need to, like
what do we need to do and where and how in

577
00:32:15,060 --> 00:32:16,316
order to be.

578
00:32:16,316 --> 00:32:21,696
comfortable with the information and have
faith in it and confidence and trust the

579
00:32:21,696 --> 00:32:23,236
information is, we need to do this.

580
00:32:23,236 --> 00:32:23,826
We need to go here.

581
00:32:23,826 --> 00:32:24,196
They're there.

582
00:32:24,196 --> 00:32:24,456
They're there.

583
00:32:24,456 --> 00:32:24,906
They're there.

584
00:32:24,906 --> 00:32:25,536
Okay, cool.

585
00:32:25,536 --> 00:32:27,976
And you haven't talked about, it's like
the art of testing without talking about

586
00:32:27,976 --> 00:32:29,156
testing.

587
00:32:29,236 --> 00:32:30,056
Do you know what mean?

588
00:32:30,056 --> 00:32:31,336
Number one rule of fight club.

589
00:32:31,336 --> 00:32:32,336
Don't talk about fighting.

590
00:32:32,336 --> 00:32:38,836
It's that, because I just find that
sometimes you can talk about people can

591
00:32:38,836 --> 00:32:41,056
get fixated on automated testing for the
wrong reason.

592
00:32:41,056 --> 00:32:46,052
And if you reframe it into, I just need to
go get some information.

593
00:32:46,908 --> 00:32:49,808
think about why and what is that going to
unlock.

594
00:32:50,208 --> 00:32:56,328
I find you can sometimes have more
productive conversations instead of

595
00:32:56,328 --> 00:32:59,108
getting into a holy war about stuff.

596
00:32:59,405 --> 00:33:00,141
Absolutely.

597
00:33:00,192 --> 00:33:03,442
But like what you just, this, what you
just said about wanting to learn things.

598
00:33:03,442 --> 00:33:07,132
And I think this is a thing that's often
misunderstood with automation or not

599
00:33:07,132 --> 00:33:09,640
focused on enough is.

600
00:33:10,456 --> 00:33:15,296
If I want to do more digging into a system
and I want to learn something about it,

601
00:33:15,296 --> 00:33:21,276
the actions that I'm going to take are
going to be influenced by how I believe

602
00:33:21,276 --> 00:33:23,616
the system already works.

603
00:33:23,616 --> 00:33:24,076
Right.

604
00:33:24,076 --> 00:33:28,836
And what the automated testing that you
have in place does is it gives you

605
00:33:28,836 --> 00:33:33,196
confirmation that your knowledge that you
believe you have is still correct.

606
00:33:33,196 --> 00:33:37,376
And therefore when I go into that new
piece of work, I'm doing it with the

607
00:33:37,376 --> 00:33:39,088
knowledge that

608
00:33:39,224 --> 00:33:43,304
the confirmation that my knowledge I have
is valid and still appropriate and

609
00:33:43,304 --> 00:33:44,204
correct.

610
00:33:44,204 --> 00:33:48,464
And I know for a fact that when I then
start to design new test ideas or do

611
00:33:48,464 --> 00:33:55,804
exploration, I am 100 % using that fact,
that confirmation to influence my testing.

612
00:33:55,804 --> 00:34:00,584
And I know that to be true because when
tests fail, I get that icky feeling where

613
00:34:00,584 --> 00:34:02,964
I go, I need to do more testing in that
area.

614
00:34:02,964 --> 00:34:08,418
I need to investigate that area because
just one test failed.

615
00:34:08,792 --> 00:34:11,292
And I think it's the same.

616
00:34:11,292 --> 00:34:13,122
I know the same happens when they all goes
green.

617
00:34:13,122 --> 00:34:16,832
And you mentioned this before the, I talk
about it as the illusion of green.

618
00:34:16,932 --> 00:34:21,172
I know that the feeling isn't as strong
for the illusion of green.

619
00:34:21,232 --> 00:34:25,762
So like there's an element of wanting to
automate it to help you get the knowledge.

620
00:34:25,762 --> 00:34:30,092
But I think this, this, this confirmation
that happens when things do remain as they

621
00:34:30,092 --> 00:34:31,568
are, that's important to.

622
00:34:33,287 --> 00:34:37,287
You're giving me ideas for further podcast
episodes here, Rich, like, you know,

623
00:34:37,287 --> 00:34:40,387
emotions in software testing and software.

624
00:34:41,747 --> 00:34:45,327
We should definitely come back and do that
episode.

625
00:34:45,327 --> 00:34:46,187
What do you think folks?

626
00:34:46,187 --> 00:34:49,407
Talk about emotions in the.

627
00:34:49,867 --> 00:34:51,944
Okay.

628
00:34:51,944 --> 00:34:59,904
Right, so let's do the final topic of
conversation, which I believe is coming

629
00:34:59,904 --> 00:35:00,996
from you.

630
00:35:03,047 --> 00:35:03,764
yeah, sorry.

631
00:35:03,764 --> 00:35:07,494
the talk that you are doing tomorrow, but
not the tomorrow when you listen to this,

632
00:35:07,494 --> 00:35:10,215
the tomorrow that happened when we
recorded this.

633
00:35:10,215 --> 00:35:12,714
However many days ago that is.

634
00:35:12,956 --> 00:35:20,716
yeah, when you listen to this, I will have
done a talk at the Agile Yorkshire Meetup,

635
00:35:20,716 --> 00:35:25,736
which is organised by an old friend of
mine and an old colleague of mine called

636
00:35:25,736 --> 00:35:27,196
Roy de Roche.

637
00:35:27,295 --> 00:35:29,776
So I'll be up in Yorkshire.

638
00:35:29,776 --> 00:35:32,056
I think it's in Leeds I'm going up to
tomorrow.

639
00:35:32,056 --> 00:35:38,414
And the topic of the talk is how we're
setting QEs up to fail.

640
00:35:40,097 --> 00:35:42,637
I started to have these ideas.

641
00:35:42,637 --> 00:35:45,417
I think it was the end of 2022.

642
00:35:46,357 --> 00:35:52,137
I was working with my friend Cassandra and
we were talking about stuff, Cassandra

643
00:35:52,137 --> 00:35:53,137
Leung.

644
00:35:53,137 --> 00:35:55,257
And she sent me this.

645
00:35:55,897 --> 00:35:57,537
So this is 2022.

646
00:35:57,537 --> 00:36:07,097
So the plague was, you know, there was You
know, people were talking about quiet

647
00:36:07,097 --> 00:36:07,757
quitting.

648
00:36:07,757 --> 00:36:09,473
That was a topic that...

649
00:36:09,473 --> 00:36:11,912
people were talking about.

650
00:36:12,773 --> 00:36:17,033
And then Cassandra sent me a talk by a
legend called Tanya Riley.

651
00:36:17,033 --> 00:36:20,023
You should definitely go and check out
this talk.

652
00:36:20,023 --> 00:36:22,773
Her talk was about glue work.

653
00:36:23,213 --> 00:36:28,173
And it got me thinking, like what, I
started to have this idea around a

654
00:36:28,173 --> 00:36:35,373
relationship between glue work and what
that is, quiet quitting and what that is

655
00:36:35,373 --> 00:36:38,977
and quality engineering slash software
testing.

656
00:36:38,977 --> 00:36:40,837
and what that is.

657
00:36:40,837 --> 00:36:44,377
And I wrote a little bit about it and then
I turned it into a talk and that's the

658
00:36:44,377 --> 00:36:49,677
talk that I'm going to go and do in
Yorkshire tomorrow.

659
00:36:51,077 --> 00:36:52,402
So yeah.

660
00:36:52,402 --> 00:36:53,722
Can we have some spoilers?

661
00:36:53,722 --> 00:36:57,002
Can we like, what are the comparisons?

662
00:36:57,522 --> 00:37:00,061
Like, you learn?

663
00:37:00,061 --> 00:37:01,161
okay.

664
00:37:01,161 --> 00:37:03,033
Okay, so.

665
00:37:03,122 --> 00:37:08,542
Or can you like for me, I've heard the
terms quiet quitting, but I probably

666
00:37:08,542 --> 00:37:10,506
wouldn't be able to define it.

667
00:37:12,257 --> 00:37:14,617
Okay man, this is, ooh, alright.

668
00:37:14,617 --> 00:37:18,517
So, I'll start with glue work and then
I'll come to quite quickly.

669
00:37:19,058 --> 00:37:23,038
Well there's a podcast about glue work, I
know what glue work is.

670
00:37:23,905 --> 00:37:25,005
about glue.

671
00:37:25,042 --> 00:37:25,962
You

672
00:37:31,277 --> 00:37:33,231
boy, what podcast is that?

673
00:37:33,242 --> 00:37:38,221
It's the Vernon Richard show.

674
00:37:38,233 --> 00:37:38,893
yeah.

675
00:37:38,893 --> 00:37:43,613
Anyway, anyway, moving swiftly on for
Richard, you know, takes over completely.

676
00:37:43,613 --> 00:37:46,513
So, glue work, what is glue work?

677
00:37:47,413 --> 00:37:52,693
The way I interpret this, when I first
heard about it, and this is what Tanya

678
00:37:52,693 --> 00:38:02,093
talked about in her presentation, is I
interpreted it to be that stuff that needs

679
00:38:02,093 --> 00:38:04,737
to get done in a given...

680
00:38:04,737 --> 00:38:09,497
a piece of work, whether it's a discreet
project or something that's ongoing.

681
00:38:09,497 --> 00:38:18,317
It's that stuff that needs to happen that
is often not explicitly someone's job.

682
00:38:18,477 --> 00:38:23,577
But if it doesn't happen, whatever you're
doing will not be successful.

683
00:38:23,757 --> 00:38:28,817
Or if it is successful, it will be
successful at great cost and stress and

684
00:38:28,817 --> 00:38:32,146
extra energy for everybody involved
concerned, right?

685
00:38:32,146 --> 00:38:34,885
By chance as well.

686
00:38:35,366 --> 00:38:36,181
Look.

687
00:38:36,181 --> 00:38:38,081
god, yeah, indeed.

688
00:38:38,741 --> 00:38:41,921
And, and so.

689
00:38:43,585 --> 00:38:50,625
And another characteristic of this work is
that because it falls outside of, you

690
00:38:50,625 --> 00:38:55,405
know, your quote unquote, your job
description, you don't always get the

691
00:38:55,405 --> 00:38:57,925
credit that you deserve when you do it.

692
00:38:57,925 --> 00:38:59,165
Because we were like, well, that's not
your job.

693
00:38:59,165 --> 00:38:59,834
Why are we doing that?

694
00:38:59,834 --> 00:39:01,365
You should have been in this thing over
here.

695
00:39:01,365 --> 00:39:04,565
And so if you want to pay rise or
promotion, that's a no from me because you

696
00:39:04,565 --> 00:39:05,215
didn't do your job.

697
00:39:05,215 --> 00:39:06,455
You're doing all this other stuff.

698
00:39:06,455 --> 00:39:09,425
And you're like, yeah, but that stuff was
useful and valuable.

699
00:39:09,425 --> 00:39:11,737
Like, what's going on here?

700
00:39:13,057 --> 00:39:20,177
So, and the key thing that Tanya said that
set off the light bulb for me is that glue

701
00:39:20,177 --> 00:39:23,817
work is technical leadership.

702
00:39:24,397 --> 00:39:25,647
It's technical leadership.

703
00:39:25,647 --> 00:39:27,957
So remember that, because we're gonna come
back to that later.

704
00:39:28,917 --> 00:39:30,187
Now, Richard Rich, aka Mr.

705
00:39:30,187 --> 00:39:34,317
Bradshaw, friendly tester my ass, he asked
what is quiet quitting?

706
00:39:34,317 --> 00:39:36,477
So I will explain what quite quitting is.

707
00:39:36,477 --> 00:39:37,581
Quite quitting.

708
00:39:39,489 --> 00:39:44,989
is when you say to yourself, do you know
what?

709
00:39:45,269 --> 00:39:50,029
I have been busting my ass, like I've been
busting my tail at this job, doing all

710
00:39:50,029 --> 00:39:52,809
this stuff and I'm not getting anything
out of it.

711
00:39:52,809 --> 00:39:54,369
Like I'm not getting any thank yous.

712
00:39:54,369 --> 00:39:58,069
I'm not getting, you know, people are not
thanking me with, you know, pound sterling

713
00:39:58,069 --> 00:40:02,849
or dollar bills or yen or whatever the
currency is in your territory.

714
00:40:03,789 --> 00:40:05,399
No promotion, nothing.

715
00:40:05,399 --> 00:40:07,569
It's just, hey, thank you for doing this
work.

716
00:40:07,569 --> 00:40:08,449
Here's some more work.

717
00:40:08,449 --> 00:40:10,369
Excellent.

718
00:40:10,369 --> 00:40:13,489
So what people have started to do was kind
of say, do you know what?

719
00:40:13,489 --> 00:40:18,479
I'm backing all the way off and I am going
to stick to the letter of my job.

720
00:40:18,479 --> 00:40:22,409
So whatever's in my job description, that
is what I'm doing because it isn't worth

721
00:40:22,409 --> 00:40:26,309
my while to push out beyond those
boundaries.

722
00:40:26,569 --> 00:40:31,409
It's too tiring, it's too exhausting and I
get no recognition and no reward.

723
00:40:32,489 --> 00:40:39,169
So Jenna Charlton talked to, well, they
weren't talking about, hmm.

724
00:40:39,169 --> 00:40:43,849
I don't think they were explicitly talking
about quiet quitting, but what they were

725
00:40:43,849 --> 00:40:47,069
talking about was defending boundaries.

726
00:40:47,529 --> 00:40:51,749
Defend your boundaries, establish them and
maintain them.

727
00:40:51,749 --> 00:40:54,959
And that's how I like to think of what
quiet quitting is.

728
00:40:54,959 --> 00:40:59,749
What quiet quitting is essentially doing
is saying, do you know what?

729
00:40:59,749 --> 00:41:04,109
I need to maintain the boundary of work
and what isn't work.

730
00:41:04,109 --> 00:41:06,937
And I'm gonna stay in these very...

731
00:41:07,105 --> 00:41:10,425
explicit parameters and I'm not going
outside of it because every time I go

732
00:41:10,425 --> 00:41:13,505
outside of it, problem city for me.

733
00:41:13,525 --> 00:41:15,025
So that's quite quick.

734
00:41:15,484 --> 00:41:16,895
And then what is quality engineering?

735
00:41:16,895 --> 00:41:22,825
I hear you say, okay, so quality
engineering is, you know, you, you'll hear

736
00:41:22,825 --> 00:41:25,365
different people call it different things.

737
00:41:25,385 --> 00:41:31,605
So my, my friend, Stuart day, by the way,
Stuart day and Chris Henderson have also

738
00:41:31,605 --> 00:41:32,255
started a podcast.

739
00:41:32,255 --> 00:41:33,395
You should go listen to it.

740
00:41:33,395 --> 00:41:35,969
It's called quality talks podcast and it's
sick.

741
00:41:35,969 --> 00:41:38,239
They've got such a better logo than us
right now.

742
00:41:38,239 --> 00:41:39,229
It's massively annoying.

743
00:41:39,229 --> 00:41:40,429
Anyway, go listen to the thing.

744
00:41:40,429 --> 00:41:41,409
It's on YouTube.

745
00:41:41,409 --> 00:41:42,389
They are awesome.

746
00:41:42,389 --> 00:41:46,849
But Stuart talks about quality
engineering.

747
00:41:48,969 --> 00:41:51,174
Stuart talks about quality engineering.

748
00:41:51,174 --> 00:41:53,204
I'm sorry, I'm not letting that go.

749
00:41:53,204 --> 00:41:55,414
I'm not letting that go.

750
00:41:55,414 --> 00:42:00,894
Like me and Vern had a lengthy
conversation last week about our own

751
00:42:00,894 --> 00:42:05,153
initiatives in the industry, side hustles,
all these kinds of ideas of what we're

752
00:42:05,153 --> 00:42:06,334
thinking of doing.

753
00:42:06,334 --> 00:42:09,054
And he was like, you don't need logos.

754
00:42:09,054 --> 00:42:10,254
Logo's the last thing you need.

755
00:42:10,254 --> 00:42:12,897
And now he's criticizing my logo.

756
00:42:12,897 --> 00:42:14,297
I'm not criticizing it.

757
00:42:14,297 --> 00:42:16,106
I'm saying I'm just saying it's better.

758
00:42:16,106 --> 00:42:18,937
I'm giving trying to give true love and
what hating on our logo.

759
00:42:19,197 --> 00:42:20,697
That's what I'm doing.

760
00:42:21,197 --> 00:42:23,667
Exactly.

761
00:42:23,667 --> 00:42:29,497
I'm not advocating to do although although
I will say I do want some t shirts, man.

762
00:42:30,477 --> 00:42:31,154
Maybe.

763
00:42:31,154 --> 00:42:35,034
me you told me logos don't matter and yet
immediately on this podcast you are also

764
00:42:35,034 --> 00:42:36,422
really nice logo.

765
00:42:37,313 --> 00:42:40,393
Yeah, but our logo is not like we can take
our logo and put it on a t -shirt.

766
00:42:40,393 --> 00:42:41,853
Like that's absolutely legit.

767
00:42:41,853 --> 00:42:43,633
We don't need a new logo.

768
00:42:43,633 --> 00:42:45,502
Like for...

769
00:42:45,502 --> 00:42:46,922
a week making a new logo now.

770
00:42:46,922 --> 00:42:47,782
Right.

771
00:42:47,782 --> 00:42:51,122
that's what's happening.

772
00:42:51,122 --> 00:42:55,142
Anyway, Stuart's got a brand new podcast
link in description.

773
00:42:55,142 --> 00:42:57,902
we can't put the links up here yet because
we need a thousand subscribers.

774
00:42:57,902 --> 00:42:59,502
So help us get a thousand subscribers.

775
00:42:59,502 --> 00:43:01,672
We'll put the links up here.

776
00:43:01,672 --> 00:43:03,108
sorry, back to Vern

777
00:43:03,553 --> 00:43:08,433
So yes, so Stu talks about quality
engineering in terms of the culture.

778
00:43:09,433 --> 00:43:17,173
So he's really, what he really focuses on
is you have things like DevOps and

779
00:43:17,173 --> 00:43:19,509
continuous delivery and continuous
deployment.

780
00:43:21,377 --> 00:43:26,777
which is culture but also has a lot of
tooling involved.

781
00:43:26,857 --> 00:43:30,597
And so when he's talking about quality
engineering for him, he's really on the

782
00:43:30,597 --> 00:43:33,397
culture aspects of things.

783
00:43:33,397 --> 00:43:33,661
There

784
00:43:33,757 --> 00:43:43,177
other folks like the modern testing crew,
which I hope I'm part of that group.

785
00:43:44,077 --> 00:43:46,617
And they would talk about...

786
00:43:46,977 --> 00:43:50,617
this in terms of accelerating the
achievement of shippable quality, or at

787
00:43:50,617 --> 00:43:53,177
least that is the last definition I
remember.

788
00:43:53,577 --> 00:44:04,197
And that is around systems thinking and
looking for bottlenecks and empowering the

789
00:44:04,197 --> 00:44:04,477
team.

790
00:44:04,477 --> 00:44:06,592
And again, cultivating the culture

791
00:44:06,737 --> 00:44:10,537
than being the person who owns all the
testing as the testing specialist.

792
00:44:11,777 --> 00:44:17,145
Or you might take a context driven
perspective on this, which is I...

793
00:44:17,345 --> 00:44:22,095
in order to do good testing, sometimes I
would have to demo the product.

794
00:44:22,095 --> 00:44:24,815
Sometimes I would have to go and advocate
for a bug.

795
00:44:24,815 --> 00:44:28,325
Sometimes I'd have to go and teach some
developers how to do stuff.

796
00:44:28,325 --> 00:44:31,205
I'd have to go and learn the architecture,
et cetera, et cetera.

797
00:44:31,665 --> 00:44:36,365
What all of that means is, for me, is that
we have testing.

798
00:44:36,365 --> 00:44:40,005
I'm interacting with the product as a core
skill.

799
00:44:41,325 --> 00:44:46,489
But then it doesn't take long for you,

800
00:44:46,497 --> 00:44:48,157
and to the testers in the crowd.

801
00:44:48,157 --> 00:44:50,817
It doesn't take long for you to start to
say things like this to yourself.

802
00:44:50,817 --> 00:44:55,897
You'll go, man, it would be so much easier
to test this if...

803
00:44:57,921 --> 00:44:59,481
and then a whole bunch of things come out.

804
00:44:59,481 --> 00:45:04,781
If these user stories weren't so vague and
difficult to understand, it'd be so much

805
00:45:04,781 --> 00:45:09,561
easier to test if I had test data that I
could just grab from production and use in

806
00:45:09,561 --> 00:45:10,461
my test environment.

807
00:45:10,461 --> 00:45:14,941
It'd be so much easier if this application
was more testable and I was able to

808
00:45:14,941 --> 00:45:20,761
control it and observe it much more easily
and so on and so on and so on and so on.

809
00:45:20,861 --> 00:45:23,331
So why is all of this important?

810
00:45:23,331 --> 00:45:25,427
It's important because...

811
00:45:25,793 --> 00:45:28,123
we usually get positioned as testers.

812
00:45:28,123 --> 00:45:33,673
So we're interacting with the product and
then we start pushing outside of that

813
00:45:33,673 --> 00:45:34,673
boundary.

814
00:45:36,737 --> 00:45:37,667
Greetings, GlueWork.

815
00:45:37,667 --> 00:45:38,297
How are you?

816
00:45:38,297 --> 00:45:38,837
How's it going?

817
00:45:38,837 --> 00:45:40,177
Hey, what's happening?

818
00:45:40,177 --> 00:45:40,937
I'm GlueWork.

819
00:45:40,937 --> 00:45:42,437
Nice to meet you.

820
00:45:42,437 --> 00:45:44,981
But then you don't get any reward for any
of that shit.

821
00:45:46,465 --> 00:45:49,375
And so people start to say, man, I've had
enough.

822
00:45:49,375 --> 00:45:50,665
I'm going to go back to testing.

823
00:45:50,665 --> 00:45:55,545
The problem is that increasingly these
days, our job is positioned as.

824
00:45:57,537 --> 00:45:59,197
all the things.

825
00:45:59,797 --> 00:46:07,497
And I keep seeing Maaret Pyhäjärvi quoting
Anna Baik with a brilliant quote, which is

826
00:46:07,497 --> 00:46:13,577
something on the lines of we are the only
people who have to fix the organization in

827
00:46:13,577 --> 00:46:15,397
order to do our jobs.

828
00:46:17,097 --> 00:46:21,097
man, we're the only people who have to fix
the organization before we can do our

829
00:46:21,097 --> 00:46:21,937
jobs.

830
00:46:23,521 --> 00:46:24,721
That presents.

831
00:46:26,305 --> 00:46:31,055
That presents a problem because if the
expectations have not been set properly,

832
00:46:31,055 --> 00:46:37,005
if we've not been positioned properly, it
makes our job a lot more difficult because

833
00:46:37,005 --> 00:46:39,925
people are expecting us to interact with
the product and do some testing.

834
00:46:39,925 --> 00:46:42,564
And what we're saying is, you know, this
testing is not the problem.

835
00:46:42,564 --> 00:46:45,025
The problem is we're not collaborating
over here as a team.

836
00:46:45,025 --> 00:46:47,195
The problem is that we can't test in
production when we need to.

837
00:46:47,195 --> 00:46:49,545
The problem is that we can't get access to
these logs when I want them.

838
00:46:49,545 --> 00:46:53,065
The problem is that I can't spin up a test
environment and bin it off quickly, et

839
00:46:53,065 --> 00:46:54,305
cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

840
00:46:54,305 --> 00:46:56,775
I want to help with those problems because
that amplifies everything.

841
00:46:56,775 --> 00:46:59,405
And people are like, no, no, no, Testa,
get back in your box.

842
00:46:59,405 --> 00:47:03,025
You need to just interact with the product
and tell me if there's any bugs, god damn

843
00:47:03,025 --> 00:47:04,045
it.

844
00:47:04,045 --> 00:47:06,125
I want to know about bugs in the product.

845
00:47:06,125 --> 00:47:08,885
I don't want to know about bugs in the
organization.

846
00:47:09,305 --> 00:47:10,245
Clear off.

847
00:47:10,962 --> 00:47:13,185
I've got two.

848
00:47:13,185 --> 00:47:14,245
Thank you very much.

849
00:47:16,114 --> 00:47:18,134
I think that's going to be amazing.

850
00:47:18,134 --> 00:47:20,674
I wish I could go, but I can't.

851
00:47:20,674 --> 00:47:24,634
But if you are, if you hear this now, it's
already happened.

852
00:47:24,634 --> 00:47:27,374
So it's not going to help you.

853
00:47:27,374 --> 00:47:33,214
So there's two things that came up while
you were talking, and then you kind of,

854
00:47:33,214 --> 00:47:36,634
you repeated it in a different sense that
made my thought, made me feel better about

855
00:47:36,634 --> 00:47:41,274
having my thought was you mentioned
DevOps, right?

856
00:47:41,274 --> 00:47:46,304
As an example of a culture as was Stu Day
talking about quality engineering.

857
00:47:46,465 --> 00:47:47,321
Mm -hmm.

858
00:47:47,346 --> 00:47:52,286
And the first thing that got me thinking
was, I remember all the tweets and posts

859
00:47:52,286 --> 00:47:54,076
about you don't have a DevOps team, right?

860
00:47:54,076 --> 00:47:57,226
That's, that's an anti -pattern to have a
DevOps team, right?

861
00:47:57,226 --> 00:48:01,485
You have to have a, I don't know, a
platform team or engineers focusing on

862
00:48:01,485 --> 00:48:03,626
that space.

863
00:48:03,766 --> 00:48:03,966
Yeah.

864
00:48:03,966 --> 00:48:11,378
If you're seeing quality engineering is a
cultural kind of,

865
00:48:11,378 --> 00:48:12,718
It's not a role yet.

866
00:48:12,718 --> 00:48:14,618
We're all called quality engineers.

867
00:48:14,618 --> 00:48:16,398
You know, that's the thing that my brain
got me thinking of.

868
00:48:16,398 --> 00:48:21,578
We don't have DevOps engineers, but if
DevOps is the same example as quality

869
00:48:21,578 --> 00:48:24,118
engineering, why do we have quality
engineers?

870
00:48:25,098 --> 00:48:28,858
Like that almost sounds again, like the
same anti -pattern as saying when you have

871
00:48:28,858 --> 00:48:30,178
a DevOps engineer, right?

872
00:48:30,178 --> 00:48:32,598
Is that, am I making sense?

873
00:48:33,249 --> 00:48:34,189
You're making sense.

874
00:48:34,189 --> 00:48:35,033
I don't.

875
00:48:36,929 --> 00:48:39,954
What I'll say is if I said it's not a
role, I shouldn't have said that.

876
00:48:39,954 --> 00:48:41,724
No, no, you didn't say it's not a role.

877
00:48:41,724 --> 00:48:44,854
Sorry, people say DevOps is not a role.

878
00:48:45,034 --> 00:48:46,214
Right?

879
00:48:46,214 --> 00:48:49,346
So comparing DevOps to quality
engineering.

880
00:48:51,218 --> 00:48:55,918
And then we've already established as an
industry that DevOps is not a role.

881
00:48:55,918 --> 00:48:58,498
Why is quality engineering a role?

882
00:48:58,878 --> 00:49:03,538
And then that led me to the second thing
that you mentioned, which was we do all

883
00:49:03,538 --> 00:49:07,158
this, we're often labeled as testers and
we do all this glue work.

884
00:49:07,278 --> 00:49:12,858
But then if quality engineering shouldn't
be a role because it's, it's a cultural

885
00:49:12,858 --> 00:49:16,304
whole team thing, what the hell should we
be called?

886
00:49:16,377 --> 00:49:22,677
Well, this is why I said I was gonna come
back to the technical leadership thing.

887
00:49:23,137 --> 00:49:27,357
Because remember, glue work is technical
leadership.

888
00:49:27,357 --> 00:49:32,777
So if you are doing quality engineering
and quality engineering is glue work, then

889
00:49:32,777 --> 00:49:35,017
that means quality engineering is
technical leadership.

890
00:49:35,017 --> 00:49:37,277
And if we were positioned differently.

891
00:49:37,277 --> 00:49:43,417
So if I went into a company as a quality
engineer and started to...

892
00:49:45,393 --> 00:49:54,613
challenge my product manager around the
quality of user stories, let's say, that

893
00:49:54,613 --> 00:50:02,113
was coming out from them, I might get some
pushback.

894
00:50:02,833 --> 00:50:10,745
If, same me, everything's exactly the
same, no six pack, not six foot tall.

895
00:50:12,533 --> 00:50:21,193
But my role was engineering manager or my
role was senior developer or my role was

896
00:50:21,193 --> 00:50:23,213
director of engineering.

897
00:50:24,773 --> 00:50:29,049
I'm not getting, I'm not getting at, no
one's questioning what I'm doing there.

898
00:50:31,105 --> 00:50:37,805
And I think some of that is because like
the job title of tester before it, it's

899
00:50:37,805 --> 00:50:38,505
overloaded.

900
00:50:38,505 --> 00:50:44,565
It has a lot of baggage and interpretation
and therefore expectation.

901
00:50:44,565 --> 00:50:50,805
And that's a problem because sometimes
we've been half positioned as Van is going

902
00:50:50,805 --> 00:50:54,305
to come here and disrupt all the things.

903
00:50:55,005 --> 00:51:00,257
And much like your New Year's resolution
on New Year's Eve,

904
00:51:00,257 --> 00:51:03,097
to go to the gym five times a week.

905
00:51:03,097 --> 00:51:05,417
It's all shits and giggles at the start.

906
00:51:06,057 --> 00:51:10,557
Until you find your funky ass in the gym
and the personal trainer is screaming in

907
00:51:10,557 --> 00:51:12,797
your face saying, that's light work.

908
00:51:12,797 --> 00:51:14,447
You've only done 20 ,000 reps.

909
00:51:14,447 --> 00:51:15,967
You need to do another 20 ,000.

910
00:51:15,967 --> 00:51:16,757
You're like, what?

911
00:51:16,757 --> 00:51:18,137
I've actually got to do some work?

912
00:51:18,137 --> 00:51:19,217
No.

913
00:51:19,637 --> 00:51:20,387
It's similar.

914
00:51:20,387 --> 00:51:23,437
It's like people are challenged and
they're like, you're gonna disrupt

915
00:51:23,437 --> 00:51:23,777
everything.

916
00:51:23,777 --> 00:51:24,477
That sounds great.

917
00:51:24,477 --> 00:51:25,297
We need that.

918
00:51:25,297 --> 00:51:27,361
And then when the disruption is.

919
00:51:27,361 --> 00:51:30,201
presented to them and it means they have
to change something about how they're

920
00:51:30,201 --> 00:51:30,921
working.

921
00:51:30,921 --> 00:51:33,501
They're like, sounds like a good idea at
the time.

922
00:51:33,501 --> 00:51:36,041
Actually, I'm not really up for that.

923
00:51:36,041 --> 00:51:37,381
So Mr.

924
00:51:37,381 --> 00:51:39,941
Tester, you can go away.

925
00:51:39,941 --> 00:51:42,691
And that's kind of what I'm talking about.

926
00:51:42,691 --> 00:51:44,992
And so if we're not positioned as
technical

927
00:51:45,319 --> 00:51:50,357
this speaks to a lot of the problems that
we run into or certainly I've run into.

928
00:51:50,575 --> 00:51:53,705
So when I, so that's why all these things
kind of coalesced together.

929
00:51:53,705 --> 00:51:55,855
Cause like, yeah, that makes sense.

930
00:51:55,855 --> 00:51:58,695
You know, this glue work, this is
technical leadership.

931
00:51:58,995 --> 00:52:03,055
Like, you know, I've been, I've joined
teams where people have asked me to join a

932
00:52:03,055 --> 00:52:06,315
team because they're adamant that there
are testing problems.

933
00:52:06,315 --> 00:52:06,815
Absolutely.

934
00:52:06,815 --> 00:52:08,795
Hey, testing is taking too long.

935
00:52:08,795 --> 00:52:10,135
It's too slow.

936
00:52:10,135 --> 00:52:15,535
Well, testers are not, are not, they don't
have the right behaviors that we want, et

937
00:52:15,535 --> 00:52:16,755
cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

938
00:52:16,755 --> 00:52:18,665
And then you go into the situation.

939
00:52:19,631 --> 00:52:22,691
The tester is completely isolated, is
getting no support.

940
00:52:23,451 --> 00:52:25,091
The test environments are trash.

941
00:52:25,091 --> 00:52:27,251
The user stories are vague.

942
00:52:27,891 --> 00:52:30,831
You know, just on and on and on and on and
on it goes.

943
00:52:30,831 --> 00:52:33,411
But somehow all of that is the tester's
problem.

944
00:52:33,411 --> 00:52:35,371
They're not empowered.

945
00:52:35,371 --> 00:52:39,611
They haven't been coached or supported to
empower themselves.

946
00:52:40,031 --> 00:52:42,731
But like I say in the talk, there are two
aspects to this.

947
00:52:42,731 --> 00:52:46,631
I am not trying to position us as these
helpless individuals who cannot do

948
00:52:46,631 --> 00:52:47,651
anything about this situation.

949
00:52:47,651 --> 00:52:49,017
That's not what I'm saying.

950
00:52:49,775 --> 00:52:51,575
So there's a whole bunch of stuff that we
can do.

951
00:52:51,575 --> 00:52:54,835
And many of us have been talking about
many of those things only for years.

952
00:52:55,535 --> 00:52:57,705
But this is an organizational issue.

953
00:52:57,705 --> 00:53:02,155
That's the main thing that I want to say
it in this talk is that this is an, this

954
00:53:02,155 --> 00:53:03,655
is an organizational issue.

955
00:53:03,655 --> 00:53:05,605
And that's why I talk about positioning a
lot.

956
00:53:05,605 --> 00:53:10,875
It's like, how have you positioned your
people in that organization?

957
00:53:11,275 --> 00:53:19,055
How are you as an engineering manager or a
director of, or a VP of?

958
00:53:19,055 --> 00:53:21,815
or a CXO, right?

959
00:53:21,815 --> 00:53:26,475
How have you positioned this role and
these activities with your peers?

960
00:53:27,335 --> 00:53:31,795
Have you said, expect Vern to show up in
meetings just because he trying to look

961
00:53:31,795 --> 00:53:32,355
for problems?

962
00:53:32,355 --> 00:53:33,195
Are you saying that?

963
00:53:33,195 --> 00:53:34,995
And he's like, he's not trying to be an
ass.

964
00:53:34,995 --> 00:53:37,275
Here's the mission that I've established
for this guy.

965
00:53:37,275 --> 00:53:40,295
He's trying to do this, he's trying to do
that, right?

966
00:53:40,655 --> 00:53:42,495
Is that happening?

967
00:53:42,595 --> 00:53:47,955
Or do the Vernon's of the world have to
literally fight to get into these

968
00:53:47,955 --> 00:53:49,139
conversations?

969
00:53:49,295 --> 00:53:51,855
Do they have to, you know, bring cake?

970
00:53:51,855 --> 00:53:53,765
Do they have to bring cake and bribe
people?

971
00:53:53,765 --> 00:53:55,435
Please give me access to production.

972
00:53:55,435 --> 00:53:56,595
my God.

973
00:53:57,095 --> 00:54:00,015
Yeah.

974
00:54:00,215 --> 00:54:01,115
Yeah.

975
00:54:01,115 --> 00:54:01,525
Do you know what I mean?

976
00:54:01,525 --> 00:54:02,595
And all of these things.

977
00:54:02,595 --> 00:54:06,155
And this is, and this, this loops back to
what Rich was talking about earlier,

978
00:54:06,655 --> 00:54:06,985
right?

979
00:54:06,985 --> 00:54:16,015
Around you were talking about the hats and
this, this, if, if you overemphasize a

980
00:54:16,015 --> 00:54:18,623
given hat, a given skillset,

981
00:54:18,671 --> 00:54:24,911
So you were talking about technical
testing and neglect communication and

982
00:54:24,911 --> 00:54:26,791
neglect sales.

983
00:54:26,791 --> 00:54:31,131
I'm learning that sales and
entrepreneurship is the antidote, I think

984
00:54:31,131 --> 00:54:32,551
to all our testing problems.

985
00:54:32,551 --> 00:54:33,391
It's ridiculous.

986
00:54:33,391 --> 00:54:34,871
And I'm going to try and explore that some
more.

987
00:54:34,871 --> 00:54:37,211
But I'll probably talk about that in a
little bit.

988
00:54:37,211 --> 00:54:42,351
But yeah, that's that's it's a positioning
issue, which means I'm actually talking to

989
00:54:42,351 --> 00:54:45,911
the technical, you know, I'm talking to
the engineering managers at organizations

990
00:54:45,911 --> 00:54:46,331
right now.

991
00:54:46,331 --> 00:54:47,599
I'm talking to.

992
00:54:47,599 --> 00:54:56,519
directors of I'm talking to VPs of I'm
talking to CTOs, COOs, CEOs, CMOs, CPOs,

993
00:54:56,519 --> 00:55:06,299
all of you CXOs, you know, staff, people,
all of you with any leadership stuff, how

994
00:55:06,299 --> 00:55:11,318
are you positioning your quality
engineering teammates?

995
00:55:12,839 --> 00:55:16,907
Yeah, so that's kind of the talk.

996
00:55:17,708 --> 00:55:18,148
mint.

997
00:55:18,148 --> 00:55:22,948
I'm going to encourage you to, let's talk
about how it goes in the next episode.

998
00:55:22,948 --> 00:55:26,028
Maybe let's document that.

999
00:55:26,028 --> 00:55:29,588
Like anyone watching me while Vernon was
chatting that night, you can tell my like

1000
00:55:29,588 --> 00:55:36,528
my brain's like freezing, like, cause I'm,
but I'm fixated on like maybe just to try

1001
00:55:36,528 --> 00:55:42,008
and tie this up in my own head is I'm
fixated on that DevOps examples though.

1002
00:55:42,008 --> 00:55:45,214
But because I think that was one shift.

1003
00:55:45,296 --> 00:55:52,076
that I'm not saying is finished, but it
seems to be a shift that did require

1004
00:55:52,076 --> 00:55:53,666
organizational change.

1005
00:55:53,666 --> 00:55:58,196
I know that quote from Anna does make
sense, but I think to go from releasing

1006
00:55:58,196 --> 00:56:04,916
half once a year to releasing multiple
times a day potentially, or thinking about

1007
00:56:04,916 --> 00:56:09,676
that, like that definitely is also a
shift, but also just the way the industry

1008
00:56:09,676 --> 00:56:11,168
went with that route of...

1009
00:56:11,168 --> 00:56:12,968
Well, there's no such thing as a DevOps
engineer.

1010
00:56:12,968 --> 00:56:15,238
That's such a stupid title oxymoron,
right?

1011
00:56:15,238 --> 00:56:16,898
So we ended up with like SREs.

1012
00:56:16,898 --> 00:56:18,198
We ended up with platform engineers.

1013
00:56:18,198 --> 00:56:20,408
We ended up with these dedicated roles.

1014
00:56:20,408 --> 00:56:20,648
Yeah.

1015
00:56:20,648 --> 00:56:23,968
In testing, I think we ended up with this
weird shift towards everyone being a

1016
00:56:23,968 --> 00:56:26,008
quality and quality engineer.

1017
00:56:26,008 --> 00:56:26,228
Yeah.

1018
00:56:26,228 --> 00:56:30,288
Now we're discussing what, what is quality
engineering and how it potentially is this

1019
00:56:30,288 --> 00:56:32,688
cultural shift, right?

1020
00:56:32,688 --> 00:56:36,408
Do we act, have we actually gone, not
saying we've gone in the wrong direction,

1021
00:56:36,408 --> 00:56:36,678
right?

1022
00:56:36,678 --> 00:56:39,704
But would it have, does it make more sense
to keep?

1023
00:56:40,032 --> 00:56:45,912
the roles of estet or automation engineer
or test engineer, because they're very

1024
00:56:45,912 --> 00:56:51,212
specific parts of that overall puzzle of
getting a company to take quality

1025
00:56:51,212 --> 00:56:55,772
engineering seriously or take quality
seriously.

1026
00:56:55,772 --> 00:57:00,032
So anyway, that's, that's where I'm,
that's what I was stuck trying to think

1027
00:57:00,032 --> 00:57:01,176
about in my head.

1028
00:57:02,767 --> 00:57:03,957
We've been talking for a while, right?

1029
00:57:03,957 --> 00:57:10,067
So I don't know, but maybe we can, yeah,
maybe we should come back to this topic

1030
00:57:10,067 --> 00:57:15,047
after I've done the talk and we can answer
some of those questions.

1031
00:57:15,047 --> 00:57:21,087
And if you have questions, comments,
concerns of anything that I've just said,

1032
00:57:21,107 --> 00:57:27,227
hit us up in the comments, DM us, and we
will add that to the list of things we

1033
00:57:27,227 --> 00:57:30,112
talk about in that episode whenever we get
to it.

1034
00:57:30,112 --> 00:57:30,912
Yeah, absolutely.

1035
00:57:30,912 --> 00:57:33,932
The more comments you interact with us,
you know, if you're listening to what

1036
00:57:33,932 --> 00:57:36,872
we've just been saying for the last, you
know, 50 minutes, and you're like, I

1037
00:57:36,872 --> 00:57:39,372
disagree.

1038
00:57:39,372 --> 00:57:42,612
You know, share your thoughts in the
comments, you know, me and Vern, we're not

1039
00:57:42,612 --> 00:57:45,232
going to come back at you in that way.

1040
00:57:45,232 --> 00:57:48,992
We'll just use that information to fuel
our, continue our conversation.

1041
00:57:49,892 --> 00:57:50,882
No, I won't.

1042
00:57:50,882 --> 00:57:53,692
I'm very friendly.

1043
00:57:53,692 --> 00:57:58,880
But honestly, like having a dialogue
underneath these videos is like kind of...

1044
00:57:58,880 --> 00:58:02,540
whole reason like me and Verna chatting
with each other because as you just

1045
00:58:02,540 --> 00:58:08,100
experienced now they trigger each other to
think of things, it helps cement our own

1046
00:58:08,100 --> 00:58:10,927
knowledge and that's value enough for us
but...

1047
00:58:10,927 --> 00:58:18,247
Just at that point, you think this, so we
have been talking, recording the podcast,

1048
00:58:18,247 --> 00:58:21,717
which is probably not gonna survive
editing for an hour, right?

1049
00:58:21,717 --> 00:58:25,627
So let's say it's down, maybe it's an
hour, maybe it's 45 minutes, but we spent

1050
00:58:25,627 --> 00:58:28,333
over an hour talking before we started
recording.

1051
00:58:29,888 --> 00:58:34,268
Yeah, we got together at half eight and
it's now quarter to 11.

1052
00:58:34,268 --> 00:58:40,058
But the same for you, Lotlight.

1053
00:58:40,058 --> 00:58:42,708
If you're listening to us and that's
triggering you to have thoughts,

1054
00:58:42,708 --> 00:58:46,228
reflections, honestly, ping them in the
chat, ping them in the comments.

1055
00:58:46,528 --> 00:58:49,348
They're only going to help me in burning
and they're probably going to help you as

1056
00:58:49,348 --> 00:58:49,548
well.

1057
00:58:49,548 --> 00:58:53,008
Think of some of your ideas and reply.

1058
00:58:53,368 --> 00:58:55,154
We just want to start a dialogue.

1059
00:58:55,471 --> 00:58:59,591
I've said this a bunch of times when I've
been hosting conferences and it is just as

1060
00:58:59,591 --> 00:59:01,131
applicable to this.

1061
00:59:01,131 --> 00:59:04,511
We and Richard are not awesome because
we're doing this podcast.

1062
00:59:05,451 --> 00:59:07,511
We were already awesome.

1063
00:59:08,591 --> 00:59:10,891
And the same applies to you.

1064
00:59:10,891 --> 00:59:14,181
Like we are not the flippin' experts about
anything that we have spoken.

1065
00:59:14,181 --> 00:59:20,611
If you have like, man listen, I am happy
to hear from everybody who listens to this

1066
00:59:20,611 --> 00:59:24,351
and get your input, get your advice, get
your feedback.

1067
00:59:24,463 --> 00:59:27,813
And I'd love to hear your comments on what
we've been talking about on this show,

1068
00:59:27,813 --> 00:59:31,143
because that's, you know, one of the
upsides of doing stuff like this is that

1069
00:59:31,143 --> 00:59:33,793
you get to learn from the conversation.

1070
00:59:33,793 --> 00:59:37,723
So take part in the conversation, throw
some questions our way, comments,

1071
00:59:37,723 --> 00:59:43,424
whatever, and we'll, you know, we'll share
the good ones

1072
00:59:43,424 --> 00:59:44,524
Absolutely.

1073
00:59:44,524 --> 00:59:51,484
So thank you all for listening to us
again, again, again, again, again, again,

1074
00:59:51,484 --> 00:59:52,904
again, again.

1075
00:59:52,904 --> 00:59:57,104
Share your comments, share your positive,
what was it thing, one thing we can do to

1076
00:59:57,104 --> 00:59:59,184
be better next time, did you say?

1077
00:59:59,264 --> 00:59:59,707
Yeah.

1078
00:59:59,707 --> 01:00:01,647
how we can make the show better.

1079
01:00:01,728 --> 01:00:03,768
Advice on how to make it better.

1080
01:00:03,768 --> 01:00:08,988
The whole YouTube subscribe, share, like
all that jazz copy links, DM it to people,

1081
01:00:08,988 --> 01:00:12,528
whatever it is that makes the algorithm
go, this is amazing.

1082
01:00:12,528 --> 01:00:19,628
Definitely do And yeah, the next episode,
we hope you tune in for the next one.

1083
01:00:20,328 --> 01:00:23,064
So yeah, goodbye from me.

1084
01:00:23,167 --> 01:00:25,607
And it's goodbye from me.

1085
01:00:26,272 --> 01:00:27,492
Bye everyone.