New Year Special 2018 | Show 004

Do you make New Year Resolutions? I set goals that I believe in, then create work plans, and adjust my expectations based on what I do, and I do change my mind based on experience. But I also, use my testing skills to do all of that.

How to use your Testing Skills to define goals and plans - The Evil Tester Show - New Year Special 2018

In this show you will learn:

What is a resolution?
why do you want it?
how your beliefs help you
how your testing skills help you define goals and create action plans
Big goals or small goals?
how to explore progress on goals as value add chunks
Prioritise and learn to say NO
Books for Questioning - The Structure of Magic - vols 1 and 2
see also “NLP for Testers”

Podcast - Use Your Testing Skills to Boost your New Year Resolutions

Show Notes

Welcome to the Evil Tester Show - New Year Special 2018

eviltester.com/show

Do I actually make resolutions? I set goals that I believe in, then create work plans, and adjust my expectations based on what I do, and I do change my mind based on experience. But I also, use my testing skills to do all of that.

What is a resolution?

a decision
- a decision for what? to do something
- what is it? a requirement?
  - why do you want it?
    - beliefs are important, they can keep you going while things are hard
    - helps you identify the stakeholder - is it you, are you doing this for other people?
    - are you going to learn to automate? why? who for? for more money? what else could you do to achieve that goal?
      - get your “why” sorted
    - are you committed?
  - how will you know you have achieved it?
Big Goals
- too big, fear of not being able to achieve it
- too small, not enough work to achieve anything meaningful
- exploratory testing often doesn’t set ‘big’ goals.
- we might have big risks we are targetting, or big areas, but we explore them in small chunks
- we can learn from each exploration
- Cybernetics started by looking at feedback. Take a step, get feedback, are we on track? positive feedback, are we offtrack? negative feedback
- a goal, that we work to in small chunks
- Agile, build in small increments where each increment adds value that way the fear of ‘we haven’t met our BIG goal goes away, you constantly get small ‘wins’ - positive feedback

What do you need to follow through on a resolution? Resolve, commitment.

how will you know you have commitment?
- because you take action.
  - what action?
    - you need to have a plan - what action are you going to take?
how will you know you are going to commit to taking action?
- you will have added it to your calendar, or you will know when you are going to take action, and you will check that you have done it.

Prioritise - what are you going to give up?

most people are already too busy.
- I said “no” to a bunch of conferences last year, I said “no” to an opportunity over Christmas because it wasn’t the right time for me to take it up. I could have tried to squeeze it in - but then I would have let those people down and myself down. Resolve. Commit. Often means saying no.
you can’t test everything, did you just add something new that takes more time? Did you drop something?

Part of testing is the ability to question, we should use that skill when goal setting.

For me the biggest things are:

setting goals, what I’m trying to achieve
knowing ‘why’ I’m doing stuff, I need that ‘belief bedrock’ to keep me going
writing it down - plan it - that helps me keep on track and keep committed and I can see if I’m taking action
- I have 7 big projects in Q1 - I have to plan that well in order to keep on track and make progress
small steps - you have to explore your way to success - little steps, little experiments, little feedback cycles

These are all testing skills.

Book for Questioning - The Structure of Magic - vols 1 and 2