Tejas Software Consulting Newsletter

April/May 2004, vol. 4, #2

News moves so fast these days, opportunities don't knock, they just wave at you as they are passing by.
Have you heard the whooshing sound outside as you waited in vain to hear that knock? I picked up this bit of wisdom on Jeff Crilley's Tips page. Jeff is a reporter for the Fox 4 Dallas television station. I recently attended his seminar based on his book Free Publicity, a short but informative book about getting the news media's attention. Especially with today's market conditions, we have to get find creative ways to publicize a business.

In this issue I talk about my latest tool for networking, and give you an interview with someone who's used to asking the questions himself. You can catch up on past issues and make sure you hear about future issues all at one place - http://tejasconsulting.com/newsletter/. Thanks so much for taking the time to give an audience! Feel free to forward this newsletter as long as you keep it all intact.

-Danny R. Faught, Software Alchemist
faught@tejasconsulting.com -- http://tejasconsulting.com/ -- +1-817-294-3998

Contents

Tejas Newswire

I gave an interview for WhatIsTesting.com, where I had a chance to discuss several subjects that are close to my heart.

I will be teaching several continuing education workshops at the University of Texas at Arlington this summer. No, I'm not becoming a professor, just using a new channel for teaching short courses like I've done before. Actually, these all take a different angle than the subjects I've taught before, and you'll notice I didn't limit the range of topics. :-) If you're in or near the North Texas area, please take a look.
My review of The Book of VMware is now posted on StickyMinds.

I posted my article "Let's Hear It for the Underdogs" from the Better Software 2004 Tools Directory.

The latest feature posted to Open Testware Reviews is a review of jenny, a pairwise test design tool that gives ALLPAIRS some tough competition. Articles newly released to the public are the InstallWatch review and the GUI Test Driver Survey.

My column "Testing, Zen, and Positive Forces" was featured on StickyMinds.com for the week of March 15.

My article "My Mentor: The Internet" was published in the February 2004 issue of Better Software magazine.

Feature Article
Linking Up on LinkedIn

On New Year's Day 2004, I got an interesting email. It was from John Brewer, a person I had met at a workshop in New Mexico and had been in touch with sporadically. He wanted me to join his network on LinkedIn.com.

LinkedIn is one of many available social networking web sites that facilitate electronic introductions for people. I had previously turned down an invitation to join one of the first social networking sites, Friendster, because its focus on dating didn't seem to be much use to a married man. But LinkedIn is all about business, and I need all the help with my consulting business that I can get. So I signed up, and had one connection in my network.

While I was there, I checked to see if anyone else I knew was registered. Sure enough, I found several familiar names, so I invited them to connect directly to me. My network started to grow, and I was hooked. I now have 64 direct connections and a reachable network of 157,600 people. Oops, a few hours later, it's now 65 connections and 158,200 in my network. It can be addictive, keeping tabs on how much my network is growing and how many people I know have signed up.

What's it all about?

If you visit LinkedIn.com, there's not much to look at. If you sign up without an invitation, you can only view the profiles of the people who have decided to make themselves visible to all users (about 8% of members do this). To see the rest of the 350,000 members, you have to know them, or know someone they know, etc. You can see people up to four “degrees” away from you (a friend of a friend is two degrees away).

Like me, most people join the site after getting an invitation from someone they know. That first connection seeds your network, so the number of people in your network depends on how many people are in your colleague's network. You can then enter the email addresses of other people you know to see if any of them are already members. If they're already signed up, you simply ask them to connect directly to you, otherwise you can invite them to join and start building their own network.

LinkedIn has stringent privacy features. You can see the contact information for the people you're linked directly to, but for all the rest, you only see their name and whatever parts of their employment history that they choose to post. You may choose to let your direct contacts see who you are connected to, or you may hide this information. You may also limit the types of referrals that you'll accept from your network.

There are ways around all of these controls; for example, if your contact information is available anywhere else on the Web, anyone can use a search engine to match your LinkedIn profile with your contact information. But overall LinkedIn does a good job of letting you prevent unwanted contact. One person did use LinkedIn to send me a resume that I wasn't interested in. That contact probably wouldn't have happened if I hadn't made my profile globally visible.

So what?

I've gotten two benefits from using LinkedIn. First, it inspired me to renew my contact with people I already knew. I found an ex-coworker whom I had lost track of. We had a nice lunch, and he offered me a great opportunity to meet with some of the executives he knows. I also arranged to meet someone I had been in touch with only via email before, and he referred me to a potential client. I met with someone I had heard of but hadn't been introduced to before. He discussed a newsletter that he writes that's an opportunity for free publicity for me.

Second, I've started venturing outside that comfortable circle of people I already know. After all, the point of networking is meeting new people, right? My first attempt was to try to reach a representative of a local company I've been trying to find contacts for. I sent a request for contact without a referral, since he was more than four degrees away. But he never responded. I also sent a request to someone who was only two degrees away. The request was forwarded by a mutual contact, and he responded quickly, though he's been too busy to give me the feedback I was asking for.

I can't say that LinkedIn has brought me any revenue at this early point in my experiences with it, but I have certainly had some worthwhile interactions that were facilitated by LinkedIn. John, who originally invited me to LinkedIn, says he also hasn't booked any business that he can attribute to LinkedIn, and he isn't using it very actively now. However, his network is continuing to grow as more people he knows join the site and invite him to connect to them.

What about the downside? A few people I've invited who aren't members yet have turned down my invitations, saying that they're worried that it will bring them more spam. Actually, LinkedIn's fairly stringent privacy protections have worked well for me. You can learn far more about me from Google than from LinkedIn.

Learning the ropes

LinkedIn is a new kind of technology that takes some getting used to. I suspect that several people I've invited haven't responded because they just can't figure out what to do with the invitation or what they'd gain by signing up.

One thing that takes some practice is deciding when to connect with someone. Now that I'm comfortable with the privacy features on the site, my natural inclination is to connect with everyone I possibly can in order to increase the size of my network. I now have a list of about 40 people that I know how to contact and I know are already signed up at LinkedIn. But I don't know most of them very well. The LinkedIn instructions have this to say about connections: "Only invite those you know well," "Only invite those you trust," and "Only invite those you want to forward things to you." So I'm holding off on inviting everyone I possibly can.

In fact, one former co-worker declined my request for a connection because she didn't feel that we had worked closely enough to justify making the connection. No hard feelings - different people have different rules that they apply. She suggested that we find someone we both knew well to connect to both of us, so at least we'd only be two degrees away, and we did.

Then there are the hard-core networkers. I talked to Marc Freedman, my connection who has the most LinkedIn connections of his own (158). I have to admit that I'm drawn to relax my rules about connecting when I find people with big networks, because they can help my network grow very quickly. But building a large network comes with a price - Marc said he gets a pretty steady trickle of requests to forward contact requests to other people in his network. By the way, through Marc I'm two degrees away from Thomas Power, probably the networking champion for all of LinkedIn, with 2,221 connections. I can't imagine keeping track of that many people.

Why pay more attention to people who are already on LinkedIn? Because they're likely to already have several connections in their network, hopefully people I don't already know. But when I invite somebody new, they may never connect to anyone else other than me. So when deciding who to invite, I focus on the people who are most likely to benefit from joining and sharing my network.

It's exciting to see people in my network who I have some loose association with or who I want to get to know. But it doesn't make sense to connect with them if I don't know them well. I realize that this is where I need to take a depth-first approach, introducing myself to a few new people, but I don't have the time or the mental capacity to create new relationships with all of them at once. So for many of the familiar names that are popping up in my network, I have to just make a note to look them up later, and set aside the excitement of finding them.

Here's an interesting thought. Some of the people I'm connected to really dislike some of the other people I'm connected to. What are they thinking when they read my list of connections? I'm not going to hide who my connections are because of this, but it does bring out the real possibility of playground politics.

The bottom line

I talked to Konstantin Guericke, Marketing VP for LinkedIn, who says that the site is growing at the pace of one new member every twenty seconds. It'll be interesting to see if the site's popularity continues to grow, and if it outpaces competing sites like Ryze.com. Ryze now charges for many of its services; LinkedIn is free now but will eventually start asking for money. I was recently invited to connect with someone on orkut.com, which seems to be cross between LinkedIn and Friendster. I reluctantly accepted, though I certainly don't want to try to duplicate my network on every networking site I come across.

So far, LinkedIn has been most useful for helping me reconnect with people I knew but lost touch with. Perhaps I'll have more luck getting to know new people after the newness of the site wears off. Meanwhile, LinkedIn will have to continue to prove that it can help me do things that I couldn't do with my network without its help.

See the PC Magazine article "Make Contact"  for another perspective, and to learn about some of the other social networking services. By the way, couldn't help but check again - 67 connections and 165,200 people are now in my network. :-)

Feedback

Bill Matthews continues the thread on keyword-driven test automation -

As for the keyword stuff, I found it difficult to find much on the web. StickyMinds has a few articles by Hans Buwalda and others. Buwalda's book [Integrated Test Design and Automation] is quite good once you get past the sales talk of the first few chapters. Carl Nagle has a project on SourceForge  for a keyword/action word engine and has a paper that was interesting. Also found a few short articles by Linda Hayes on the Certify product. I pretty much looked at what was out there and experimented.

Nagle's tool, SAFS, is definitely one I'd like to take a closer look at. Thanks for the reference to his "Test Automation Frameworks" paper - it has a nice bibliography.

Michael R. Wolf wrote:

Happy anniversary/birthday. A three-year-old company! How many is that in dog or human years?

Feels like about 30.  :-)  Michael responded to my admission that I'm running Windows on my laptop -
Good for you! Many techie folks cannot hear the business reasons for having a Microsoft desktop. I've tried others, but it has me focus too much on the tool, and not enough on my customer.

In my case, at least one problem is that the built-in wireless device won't work with Linux yet. So there's a chicken and egg problem - not enough people use Linux to justify supporting a driver, so Linux doesn't work as well as it should, so not enough people use Linux. Hopefully we'll start seeing computers at the local stores with Linux pre-installed and Linux-compatible hardware. Your point is a good one - figuring out how to use open source software can be a big distraction.

Your experience with text and spreadsheets is better than mine -- I invested in the whole MS Office package. I found the Word equivalent to be awkward and crashy. I found the Excel equivalent to be very thin, lacking at least two of the very first things I was looking for, [including] pivot tables. Sorry, OpenOffice, I tried, but you didn't make the cut. I've got work to do.

I've had good luck with recent versions of OpenOffice, and I can't recall the last time I saw it crash. I still chase a bug here and there. One recent bug I filed triggers a bug in Microsoft Word when it opens a file exported from OpenOffice. This was found by a client who was trying to copy from a document I sent her. Because interoperability is so important, I was able to convince the OpenOffice developers that OpenOffice needs to work around the problem.

I'm not a spreadsheet power user, so I haven't run across any additional features I need there. Your mileage may vary, of course.

But what irks me more is that they're trying to play catch-up. They will *never*, IMHO, be as good at being Microsoft as Microsoft is, so it's a bad game to play. While racing sailboats, I learned that if you're way behind, you cannot follow the leader. You've got to set off on a different tack, hoping for different winds. If you follow, even a mediocre boat can always stay ahead because you're always in the same wind. You can't get ahead by playing the same game in the same wind.

I don't expect OpenOffice to have a better word processor or spreadsheet than Microsoft. I just want a basic productivity suite that's reasonably reliable and can write files that other applications can read. For many users, that would present a better value than what they'd get if they bought Microsoft Office.

Bonus Feature
Interviewing the Interviewer: Turning the tables on Vipul Kocher

Vipul Kocher recently published his interview with me on WhatIsTesting.com. I had been told that he was a good interviewer, and indeed I was impressed with the process.

Not since Software QA magazine was still in production have I seen interviews of people in the software testing community. I've enjoyed reading the interviews that Vipul has published so far. But there's one interview he's not likely to do. I decided to reverse the roles and ask him a few questions. Read on to learn about the creative force behind WhatIsTesting.com.

Danny: What kind of work do you do?

Vipul: I work for Adobe Systems in India. I am involved in testing Adobe Reader on Unix/Linux and mobile devices platforms (Windows CE, Palm, Symbian OS, and a host of other devices) in addition to a few other products that Adobe makes. Of course, the opinions I express here are mine and mine alone - I do not speak for my employer.

What's the history and future direction of WhatIsTesting.com?  I seem to remember someone else starting it up earlier.

WhatIsTesting.com (WIT) was started by a colleague, Gaurav Pandey. Since its inception I took keen interest in WIT but I did not steer it in any direction for a long time. Then in 2002 I took ownership of WIT from Gaurav, who could not devote enough time to it because of his other commitments.

The goal of WIT has always been to help humbly spread the knowledge of testing. WIT is run by people who volunteer to "donate" their knowledge or time. These people have submitted or promised to submit their articles for the site, have helped me with the interview questions, and are working on test tool reviews, much like the reviews that you do. In fact, I plan to ask them to work with you, if possible, to strengthen the cause.

In addition to this, WIT provides service to the testing community by posting testing jobs for free. All the resumes received are forwarded for free to the job advertisers. However, if WIT has to raise some money for its operations in future, this is one service which could possibly be used commercially.

In the future, WIT plans to be useful to the testing community by providing more services such as:
Have you seen any anger from people in other countries because so many jobs are moving to India?

In my professional work so far I have not come across any individual who is angry because of outsourcing work to India. But I have seen many newspapers carrying articles either in favor of outsourcing or against it. I am amazed at how big this issue has become since I first started tracking it in 2001.

In the nineties India hardly found any mention in most of the newspapers in most countries. To most people, India was a nation of snake charmers only. That perception has definitely changed now. Friends from various countries, especially the USA, now routinely forward articles mentioning outsourcing and India. I was recently in Japan and even there the English newspapers carried at least one article every day about outsourcing and mentioned India among other countries such as China, Romania, and Russia.

I have talked to a lot of angry Indians in the past. Their businesses and lives were destroyed by big multinational players because these small players could not compete against them. Many governments, including the Indian government, told them that these things would benefit the Indians and that Indians should compete in the global market. Having gone through that experience I think I can understand the anger of anybody who has been hit by globalization. I have most sympathetic feelings for every job that is lost whether in the USA or in India.

I would be very happy if India kept getting more and more work without impacting any other job negatively anywhere in the world.

What are you working on currently?

I am working on three things at this point in time. These are:

1. Questioning patterns: Questioning Patterns (Q-patterns in short) provide a mechanism of arranging questions (a set of possible test cases) for features of varying granularity. The Q-Patterns can be used to document questions/test cases ranging from say, client/server architecture down to the behavior of combo boxes. You can read more about Q-Patterns at http://www.whatistesting.com/qpatterns.htm. I believe that Q-Patterns can promote reuse of test cases. Not only that, Q-Patterns can promote learning how to write test cases. Interestingly, after I submitted my paper to QAI for their second testing conference in India, I opened up Brian Marick's The Craft of Software Testing and found out that my work seemed to have been inspired by his test requirement catalog. I wish I had read his book before I began something which I thought was my original contribution.

2. Unified Test Case Design Method: I am working on unifying various test design methods. I believe that this work holds some promise but I will not know that until it has been published and reviewed. Unfortunately I cannot share anything at this point of time. I hope I will be able to publish the first draft of this method by the end of May, 2004. Once the basic work is complete, I plan to integrate it with Q-Patterns to make test case design and testing a simpler task.

3. What Is Testing book: I am also working on writing a testing book. Well, "writing" would be an incorrect word. I should say that I am working on compiling a testing book. I want to create a living, online, and free software testing book. In addition to the text the book will contain various links to specific articles available on the web and specific chapters of available books that provide more information on the given topic. I shall seek help from the testing community for this task once I am done with the background work. More information on this book will be available at http://www.whatistesting.com/collaboratedbook.htm.

Copyright 2004 by Tejas Software Consulting
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