So I got in touch with Adam to see if he’d be interested in having a quick chat to answer some questions that I had in regards to his test approach at RainStor. He replied back very quickly, letting me know that he’d be more than happy to chat with me, and even offering me to come down to RainStor to see how they do things.
To be honest, I’d expected a positive reply, and I’ll tell you why. The testing community is still relatively small in terms of active participants online. Those that do get involved in discussions, writing articles, or public speaking, are generally very giving. Sure, you will get the odd troll, but to be honest I’ve personally never seen one yet. So I guess what I’m saying is that if you give a little to the community, others with happily give a little back. If you give a lot, you’ll get a lot back. Sure, this might not always be the case, but most of the time members of our community are very kind and helpful.
So anyway, we’d talked over the phone for around ninety minutes, starting off with us talking a little about what our companies do, and then with me asking him a lot of questions. My main goal of the chat, was to find out how Adam had approach performance testing, and scaling up to levels similar to customer environments.
I got a lot of useful information from him, in terms of scalability I’m still not 100% sure as how best to approach this for our company since our companies testing differs in terms of technology, they real with archive data, whilst we deal with live data and archive. It’s something that has us all scratching our heads on how to do this in a cost effective manner. None the less I’m sure we’ll think of something, and if not we can always go for our plan B which whilst inexpensive in terms of money spent, does at the same time impact potential revenue. That being said though, this plan B could lead us to making more money in the long run, strangely enough, confused? Yup, well sadly this is one of the rare occasions when I can’t disclose information.
So back to my chat with Adam and why this makes an interesting topic for me, that is of course if you weren’t already thinking this yourself. The testing community is potentially huge! The active community is much smaller. The amount of people actively engaging other members of the community for information, is again much, much smaller!
Now, making use of other members of the community is something I’ve always done when I’ve spotted the potential to learn something new. Do others though? I makes me wonder why we don’t engage in discussions with companies doing similar things more often? Sure, quite often they might be the direct competition, but perhaps we’ll have the chance to work together, to help push each other forward.
Me and Adam are now going to keep in touch, and perhaps set up a mailing list at some point between our teams if we see some potential for learning from each other, or even as a means to share ideas. In the future we might even split the costs for in house training if it works out well for us. The founder of our company, my boss David Irvine, being the forward thinking guy that he is, has said he’s happy for Adam’s team and others to make use of our resources in terms of test scripts, automation and so on. That’s a rare thing, but hey what an opportunity right? So it was certainly beneficial for me, and I’ve certainly got lots of things to think about.
So why don’t we all help each other more often? I get that legality comes into the equation for some people, but hey, it doesn’t harm to ask! I’ll certainly be looking in to expanding my network in the future. Perhaps at some point even, this circle of similar companies exchanging ideas, might just get that edge over those who’d closed their doors from the outside world. Thanks for reading.
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I’ve never come across two teams in potentially competing businesses sharing knowledge and resources like this before, but I hope it catches on!
Knowledge sharing within a team is very important, but the danger is that if nothing new comes in to the team you get in to old habits. If you’re doing this across companies, you’re not only learning what works for you, but what does and doesn’t work for them.
Great post. Thanks for sharing.
Regards,
Adam
Hi Adam,
Thanks for the comment. I tried something similar in my last job which was owned by a large software group who’d bought up a bunch of software companies all specialising in different areas of the market. So potentially I think we had around eight different companies test teams to work with.
I’d set up a mailing list and we had some activity, but as a whole it didn’t really turn out to be that useful for us sadly. I think this was mostly because we all did different things, so our testing varied greatly, therefore discussions generally only became active around tools we’d used, which was common ground that everyone could discuss.
I’m hoping that like Adam’s company there is a few others willing to exchange information to better ourselves, and not simply view each other as direct competition. At least in this sense it is a lot more valuable as the teams are all doing similar types of testing, therefore we’ll have much more valuable information to share and discuss.
Cheers,
Darren.
When I went to work as a computer auditor I was surprised how much close co-operation there was between rival companies. There was a monthly Scottish computer audit discussion group, mainly involving banks and insurance companies. One company would host it and we’d all meet up to hear a talk and swap ideas. I also worked with some direct rivals on areas of common interest, co-operating on industry bodies and developing fraud investigation techniques.
I think this sort of co-operation is maybe something that more developed professions do quite naturally and testers are just feeling their way into. When I was a straight IT developer I was very insular. We never met anyone outside the company (expect suppliers and sales staff). Perhaps testers have been infected with that insularity and are only just starting to break out in large numbers?
It’s always been an easy sell to persuade senior management that this sort of sharing is good. It’s not about sharing commercially sensitive material, just about helping each other do things better, faster or cheaper. A couple of hours chatting with another professional working on similar problems can prevent weeks of floundering around.
Hi James,
That’s really interesting, I’d no knowledge of how other industries operated, it does sound like we’re lagging behind.
I think you’re right though, perhaps it’s our closed off mentality. As developers/testers mostly we don’t care about what is happening outside our own bubble. Some even have no interest, or visibility of what the competition is doing, so indeed how can we expect them to reach out and work with others, out with their own bubbles. It’s strange, and certainly the bigger the company becomes the more bubbles surround a team.
I remember Rob Lambert posted last year an interesting article that got me thinking called “Turned out in force” (http://thesocialtester.posterous.com/turned-out-in-force). He basically described his experiences attending a trade show, and it got me thinking about why other companies don’t expose their development teams to this side of the business. There is lots to learn, from these events, and perhaps real networking opportunities to explore possibilities for knowledge transfer between different companies teams.
Cheers,
Darren.
I’m not sure why there isn’t more of this between companies. The aviation industry have been doing this for years to improve safety and I’m amazed that the practice of sharing experiences and advice hasn’t made it way into more industries.
James sums it up pretty well, when he says it “about helping each other do things better”. This is the purpose of sharing, and as long as everyone’s goal is that, then I don’t see how it could ever be a bad thing!
Hi Stuart,
Who knows, perhaps in time we’ll improve. I’d like to think that the initial steps we are making as a community by being more involved with each other, via blogs, forums like the Software Testing Club, and large scale events such as Euro Star, that in time, these types of knowledge transfer activities will just be common sense.
I’d still say the online testing community as a whole, is very small. Over the years it has been expanding rapidly, you only have to look at the amount of new blogs, testing magazines, services, products and events that have appeared in the last year alone.
Even for myself, just over a year back I wasn’t even aware of the online testing community. I am now much better off for finding it though.
Cheers,
Darren.
Our team has often visited other teams in our area and stolen their good ideas. *grin* and conversely, we often have people from s/w teams in other companies come visit us, observe our sprint planning and things like that. We are happy to share, and we benefit both ways. In this case it isn’t only around testing, though that’s a big focus of our dev team.
When I went to testing conferences back in the 90s, I didn’t find it easy to meet people and build a network. Maybe it was just me. When I started on an XP team in 2000, I found the ‘agile’ community to be incredibly helpful. Once I called Ward Cunningham to ask him about acceptance testing on an XP team, and he talked with me eagerly for an hour.
With all the social networking, and the cool organizations like weekend/weeknight testers and STC, I’ve been able to find more and more people with whom I can exchange ideas and who provide help for me, I try to pay all that help forward.
Love to see your post, acknowledging the value and joy of this type of cooperation.
Hi Lisa,
Paying it forward is a good mindset, and if you can think that way in life as a person, the world is a much nicer place. Keep happy, and let the stress pass you bye. Seriously I’m starting to sound like a hippy now, but it’s true, I see so many testers jumping in with the wrong mindsets, and presenting feedback with the wrong attitudes. In both cases it sets them up to fail, either from burnout / de-motivation, or from the unwillingness of others to go out of their way for them. So a good attitude, and respect for others does help more than some might think.
On Week Night Testing, I much prefer the Lunch Time Testing that you get to do, seeing that the time with the time zone difference, occurs during your lunch break. That’s actually something I think I could convince our entire development team to participate in, had it occurred during our lunch times.
Cheers,
Darren.
I’m up for lunchtime testing – I’m sure I could get my team involved.
Adam
It sounds like it has potential, perhaps we could do a once a month thing. I’ll have a think about it, and see if there is enough interest in it.
You’re right about shared training Darren. That was one of the big advantages of co-operation. I remember we twice got an American expert over to give training courses in Edinburgh. No single company had more than a couple of people who would benefit and no-one could justify the cost on their own. By working together the cost was easily affordable for high quality training.
Hi James,
I think it’s an excellent opportunity. If you consider the cost’s of in-house training which most often easily exceeding the five digit mark; being able to split those costs with other companies has great appeal. More so as you say if that company only has a few people that would benefit from it.
Now getting the right training is another topic for another day! There is potentially so much money to be wasted in poor, or ill advised training, mostly from people not doing research before buying.
Cheers,
Darren.
Hi Darren,
Thanks for getting in touch and arranging the call, and for this post. I think that the potential mutual benefits from this type of co-operation are significant for small companies like ours. It never pays to operate in a silo which is why, you, I and most others who’ve read/commented here, try to engage in a wider testing community. I’ve lost count of the times when I’ve attended a conference or user group at a point when I’m low on ideas at work and returned refreshed and invigorated from simply speaking to others working on similar problems.
This kind of tighter co-operation has the potential to work very well where the organisations in question (such as ours) possess certain characteristics that may diminish the applicability of some of the more common discussions and talks around the subject. There is also the simple reassurance factor that others face the same issues. As long as the relationship is mutually beneficial and does not hinder impact the core business of the partner then I can’t see any reason for not doing this more.
I look forward to many constructive conversations in the future.
PS : I’d like to point out that the reason that I offered for Darren to visit us instead of vice-versa was the impending arrival of my third child, otherwise I’d be happy to visit.
Hi Adam,
It’ll certainly be interesting to see how this progresses. I’d be keen to seek out similar companies to ours who might also be interested in a bit of knowledge transfer, collaboration activities, or perhaps even sharing training costs. If you’ve been in contact with similar people before, please let me know, I’d be keen to set up something more formal between us all. I’ll also pass any contacts I meet in the future onto yourself.
Cheers,
Darren.