• This week I accidentally ran into an article from 2020 listing 7 tensions between traditional and emerging leadership approaches. At first, I read it as an ex-manager with openness to reflect on my own managing styles and with curiosity to evaluate whether those 7 tensions make sense at all. But the further I read the more I recognized the similarities with tensions between the traditional testing school (Michael Bolton, James Bach, etc. - advocating personal education of testing professionals as highly skilled experts of their complex craft) and the “Modern Testing” school (Alan Page, Brent Jenson, Bryan Finster, Lisa Crispin, Janet Gregory, etc. - advocating that good quality is more important than good testing and that testing should be done early, should be done by everyone, and that almost everyone can learn to perform good testing).

    It is difficult for me to communicate their exact ideas in such short summaries, but I hope you get the idea, and I hope even more that you are already familiar with those “schools” as there are a lot of thoughtful resources to explore deeper.

    So, getting back to the original article and those 7 tensions - don’t get me wrong, I am not saying that traditional and modern testing schools represent the completely opposite ends, no. Both of them are balancing between those tensions, and in most cases one is closer to the one end, and other - to the other one. And in some tensions, I assume, both schools would agree on the same thing (i.e. regarding Tension 2: The Constant vs. the Adaptor - I believe, both of them would agree to “context is the king” statement shifting to the Adaptor side heavily, and in testing that is what we do - being the Adaptor is our Constant).

    Finally, and most importantly, its summary statement sums up the debate very nicely - “The truth is that most executives need to be able to move back and forth between those two leadership styles.” Similarly, in the field of quality leaders should be able to balance between testing-focused (traditional) and quality/value-focused (modern/emerging) approaches as those two are not enemies, but more like a supplement to each other in unique ways.

    Let’s end this point listing all the 7 tensions as this list can help for thinking about one’s leadership style in a search for the right balance:

    • Tension 1: The Expert vs. the Learner
    • Tension 2: The Constant vs. the Adaptor
    • Tension 3: The Tactician vs. the Visionary
    • Tension 4: The Teller vs. the Listener
    • Tension 5: The Power Holder vs. the Power Sharer
    • Tension 6: The Intuitionist vs. the Analyst
    • Tension 7: The Perfectionist vs. the Accelerator

  • Continuing with another leadership article - somehow the next article and its problem resonated highly with me. Probably, that is because recently I saw a lot of management roles around me (including my role) being questioned if they are necessary at all. And, it gets a little different color when such questions come from the bottom compared to when it comes from the top. So, without any further ado, I introduce you - “My boss says we don’t need any engineering managers. Is he right?” by Charity Majors. And extra points for the amazing domain name!

  • OWASP is widely recognized as an open web application security authority. In my experience, I saw a lot of projects in which security requirements started from (or yearly security awareness training that was based on) OWASP TOP 10. But do you know there is a separate list targeting one of the sexiest techs of recent years - OWASP TOP 10 for LLM applications?

  • Tired of Selenium vs Playwright vs Cypress vs (something else) blog posts? It looks like Selenium creators have gotten tired as well as they published their own blog post debunking some of the popular statements and advertising some of the upcoming features. And talking from my personal experience, Selenium was never the problem :)

  • Let’s end this with a funny bug. Bugs are funny when you can watch them as a spectator and eat some popcorn. Believe me, they are not that funny when you are working as a tester for that product or use that product for an important task. So, it seems there is a bug in Amazon Print-on-demand service that from time to time prints 20 pages of some random book inside the book you ordered. Can you imagine the possibilities of how that can go wrong?