Thursday, October 20, 2016

Insights from the Test Obsessed Blog

This week I found the Test Obsessed blog interesting. The title of the post is “I Prefer This Over That’. The blogger goes on about a tweets she had made about her preferences. They are: Recovery over perfection, Predictability over commitment, Safety nets over change control, and Collaboration over handoffs. I will talk on just two of them and if you seem interested check her blog out at the bottom of this page. It will be the first in the list.
·         Recovery over Perfection
The overall gist of this is that something will go wrong. Basically the software might not do what its suppose, the server may crash, or any other plethora of things, but the key is not to aim for perfection otherwise you’ll be too afraid to actually deploy. She says basically that there is the plan B. Make sure you can roll back if the deployment fails, and update the software quickly if it behaves badly.

I like her idea on this as I often find myself trying to perfect things only to have a setback along the way and end up mildly discouraged. She makes a good point and I will try and put this into practice. I mean nothing is perfect, there will always be some sort of speed bump. The question is will you be prepared? As long as you plan for unforeseen events all should be ok.

·         Collaboration over Handoffs
The overall theme of this is pretty straightforward. Instead of passing the buck and blaming others for issues that go wrong over bad communication, work together on issues.

I may not have any experience in the programming world as far as employment, but I will say that it never ends up pretty when you hand off work or a checklist to someone without actually going over it with them. Something generally goes wrong, the boss gets ticked, starts yelling and people look for other people to blame. It all comes down to communication and collaboration. I mean when you are at work you are all supposed to be on the same team, not a bunch of solo artists. I have seen it work beautifully when the team works together and communicates. So much less stress involved and I think that this comes into play in the programming industry when multiple people are working on different parts of the whole. If there is no communication or bad communication things go wrong and you end in a mess of in fighting.
Here other points are well written in my opinion and hit the nail on the head. A lot of it is common sense, but we all lose sense at times and need to be grounded. Overall I thought there were some good points she made and I hope that you think so too.


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