The Tonka Theory

Dear Tonka - you sure know how boys think
(Image courtesy of luv2bid.com)

As a kid, I loved Tonka trucks. I loved the idea of the power of the life-sized trucks they represented, and the holes those machines could dig and the dirt they could move.

After first getting these toys as gifts, I would purposefully seek out any construction going on locally in order to watch those machines work. I'd watch, agape, as a backhoe would dip its shovel into solid ground like it was liquid and pull out a massive chunk of earth. I'd run back to my backyard, inspired, grab a shovel to start digging a hole. Only, the ground was really, really hard. And my small little frame did not have the leverage to pull a shovelful of dirt out of the ground. I'd give up, eventually, only to start this whole process again when I saw another truck.

(Image courtesy of
babywit.com)

Lately, I've been attempting to hold weekly QA learning sessions at my work during the lunch hour once a week. These meeting were originally created in order to help each of us share our domain experience as well as any "relevant" methods or practices.

The meetings started out well received, but slowly, our QAEs have begun to find excuses not to hold them. One of the excuses was "we don't have time to study this stuff." What? I thought. You don't have time to learn how to do your job better? That is a truly sad predicament indeed. It is truly like being asked to learn how to use a massive backhoe to dig a hole instead of using a shovel, and responding with "I don't have time to learn how to use this backhoe, I need to dig this hole!"

(The Big Wheel -
Image courtesy of Christiane Eisler)

If you truly are under such time constraints that you cannot refine the way you do things - to work smarter, not harder, I would suggest that you are harmfully overworked. I'd venture to say that the problem is more internal.

Appropriately enough, the word "Tonka" is Dakota-Sioux for "Great" or "Big". For now, you may want to buy a Tonka truck for your desk and reflect on whether you're still using a shovel instead of one of these great big bad boys.

What Motivates Us?

Here is the truth. If you work, you typically want 4 things. However, if I asked you, you probably wouldn't know what they are, except money. But a surprising truth about money is that we are not as endlessly manipulable by it as we think. 

So, if it isn't really just money that motivates us, what is it? What motivates a person to be passionate about something? Please take the time to watch this very interesting video based on a talk given by Dan Pink, a writer, motivational speaker, etc. Done by the geniuses at RSA Animate, it is the UPS white board commercials on steroids. 

If you haven't seen this video, please watch it. A passionless Quality Assurance Engineer is, I dare say, an ineffective one. I hope this video helps you figure out what motivates you, and  helps you put that to work in your life. I'm not saying this is the secret to life, I'm saying it is something that makes life -- as well as your job and your contribution to the world -- more enjoyable.

The Economics & Marketing of Quality Assurance

(Image courtesy of downsouthhiphop.com)

I recently took some graduate-level courses in Microeconomics and Marketing Management. Yes, I know - what do those have to do with Quality Assurance you ask? I'll tell you.

There are those that feel like quality is binary - either you have it or you don't. Your application has bugs or it doesn't. I'm sure you can guess how naive I think that view is. In reality, your application either has "known bugs" or bugs that haven't been discovered yet. Permutation & combination math show us that it is nearly impossible to fully test all logic paths & permutations of input of an application with no more that 100 lines of code.

(Image courtesy of blog.readycontacts.com)

So, what do we do? Well, this is where the marketing aspect comes in. Marketing basics teach of market segments - groups of your consumers based on common characteristics. Every product cannot appeal to every consumer, so you must have a target segment. This target segment has desired characteristics for your product - Speed, accuracy, price, etc. Just as it makes no sense to design a product that looks fantastic, but provides no real value to the customer, it makes less sense to develop a product for sale to a target market without targeting their desired characteristics.

(Image courtesy of gmicksmithsocialstudies.blogspot.com)

Here's where the economics part comes in. Each consumer has his level of quality (which is not only of varying degree, but of varying category. The reason a consumer will buy a product is because of the "consumer surplus" it gives him. This is the difference between the consumer's valuation (what the consumer would pay for the product) versus the actual selling price. It is very much like "profit" for consumers. The larger the consumer surplus, the more likely they are to buy.

Each software business needs to focus their quality efforts on what their targeted market segments perceive as high-value. If they are providing value, but at a cost much higher than what the consumer is willing to pay (possibly because they are focusing effort on something their segment doesn't care about - adding unnecessary cost and no value). This focus comes from establishing a "Quality Philosophy" (Thanks Lisa Crispin). But that is a post for another day.