INNEA ! The Unique ONE: April 2017

Sunday, April 9, 2017

Why you need to be prepared before starting as a test engineer in agile environment?

Why do you need to prepare before exam? Why do you need to preheat oven before baking? Why do you warm up before exercising?

For all of the above questions the answer is same so that you are better prepared and ready for what follows.

In the same way you need to be prepared when you are going to get started as a software test engineer in agile environment. Agile environment and agile development or testing methodology is fast paced and competitive.

If you miss a deadline, if you leak a defect or if you fall behind a task then whole product life cycle can change and sometimes can have drastic effects on future and upcoming projects which are in the pipeline.

So the best way to get ready is know and be well prepared to perform as expected and even surpass the expectations set on you. In Silicon Valley and globally too there is has been a trend where work culture has evolved from being easy to tough, and cut throat competitive.

Every day more and more qualified engineers are coming in the job market and some of them are toppers, some of them have more skills than others etc. Also there is already a pool of experienced software testing professionals in the market who compete to get the best job, best salary, best role, be benefits and best of everything.

So think if you are not prepared and jumping in agile testing or agile development and you don't know how work is done in this methodology. How you will cope with it, what are the tips and best practices you need to follow to succeed and grow. What terminology it is based on, what processes are being followed, how testing is done, how work is assigned, and many more such questions. How do you plan to get answers for them. Do you plan to work and learn that is good strategy but it is all catching up rather being in the action and performing at your best.

So if you feel what this is all about and if you think you wish to learn. In order to get your learning back on track and be prepared to win in agile testing please read my book available at link below:

http://mayankmohansharma.blogspot.com/2017/04/my-first-book-published.html

Saturday, April 8, 2017

Mentoring in Software Industry

Many times people think that mentoring is just training people and making them learn certain skill set by giving few classes and the jobs' done. Rather it has all of these things like tutoring, knowledge transfer or knowledge sharing etc engulfed in itself.

Mentoring is lot more than just training and advising people. It is actually you as a Mentor taking responsibility and ownership of making sure that whoever you are mentoring becomes successful and learns how to use certain skill set or knowledge for personal and organizational growth.

Mentoring means following up regularly and monitoring the progress closely. It means making people understand technical topics easily and ensuring that people remember these things without much revision.

For example: if you tell a person that bash_profile is a file that saves certain paths and configuration settings on your mac and this file gets loaded before your terminal loads shell environment etc. Then it will be very difficult for someone to understand this. But if you tell them that a bash_profile can save short forms or aliases for certain commands that you use or type usually, and it can also be used to save path to a certain directory under a shortcut or can be used to save certain access keys etc then the person will remember this for long and can easily know what the practical application of the bash_profile is.

Mentoring helps a Mentor to understand judge his/her capabilities and also lets them know that how well they communicate. Another important aspect of mentoring software engineers is that we need to keep track of all the mentoring/training sessions with proper documentation. This helps people to easily follow the steps and follow the instructions when they need to recall something in future.

Make fear go away: Make sure that you infuse confidence in your mentees that coding or learning a new tech tool or programming language is not difficult and they have nothing to fear as you are always available to help them
Go easy with sessions: Plan sessions to go easy on the mentees. Make sure the initial sessions are short and are precisely pointing out the ways by which it will help them.
Always have practical exercises during sessions: Remember only theory never helps unless your mentees are armchair detectives. A little bit of practical session will always help them retain the knowledge for long and will give them opportunities to ask questions and explore.
Document as you go: Document each session as you go along giving training sessions. This will help in future by providing references and create a central knowledge repository to share and expand.
Test and Analyze: Regularly take frequent quizzes so that you can judge the level of understanding that mentees are holding.
Encourage: Give kudos to good mentees so that they are motivated to do even better.
Give space to explore on their own: Give them time to explore certain problems on their own so that they can develop self-exploratory and problem solving skills.
Continue the above cycle: Proceed with the above points until all the desired skill sets are developed.

This is how I perceive and try to mentor software engineers. Feel free to provide suggestions/feedbacks. Thanks for the read!

Later on we can deep dive in to how it actually works but the first step is to make people understand the need or application of the thing we are trying to tell them about

How to approach participating at Hackathons or Innovation Weeks

Nowadays Hackathons or Innovation Weeks are organized in almost every company. The goal of these type of competitions are to bring out the hidden talent or ideas from employees which otherwise remains hidden. These talents or ideas or concepts remains hidden because first of all there is always lack of time. Second thing is that the priority of actual work is always greater than any other thing for an employer.

So when you get time to do something you have always wanted to do at your workplace in terms of being creative and floating and trying out new things then this is your time to show what you have it in yourself.

Here are few points to consider when you are planning to work on something in the upcoming Hackathon or Innovation week:

Try to find solution to a problem that is related to your work and your boss also agrees with you that it should be solved.
Be clear of scope of the problem on which you will work on as sometimes can be very huge to solve and you cant get whole of it covered.
Make sure you have the right and balanced team with you.
Building a team and working with your team is very important for those professionals who feel and have got feedback that they are not very good team players.
Have a pitch ready that clearly states your problem statement and what is your approach. A point or two stating that how this problem has been a bottleneck will strengthen your case.
Work by enjoying this time with your team don't stress out too much.
Be focussed on the minimal viable product approach and do not try to put much in at first go.
After the MVP is done make a brief plan on how you would like to go with it in future.
Provide estimate of how much time it would take to make the final product ready for deployment.
Make the final presentation representing your ideas plus points and present it with passion like it is your startup idea.
Enjoy the win with team as there is no one actually loses when all work together for good.