Why you should own your opinions

I know you can’t tell from the looks of it, but I’ve been hanging around here a lot lately, working on a post that wants to turn info a book of its own. I’m making good progress getting it tamed into a reasonable length. But first, inspired by LinkedIn posts from James Bach and from Jon Bach and subsequent comments, I want to explore another idea rattling around in my head.

I’m going to talk about three examples where members of a community were accused of groupthink of some sort. In many cases, some people observing the communities say that they see cult-like behavior. I’d prefer not to use the derogatory term “cult” here for a couple of reasons. One, because cult leaders actively encourage groupthink and blind obedience, and I don’t see that happening in these cases (even if their followers are picking up some of these traits). And also, because real cults have done a lot of damage, such as permanently ripping families apart. Let’s not try to equivocate that with what I’m talking about here.

Example 1: I learned a lot from the author and consultant Jerry (Gerald) Weinberg. I am of his followers. People outside his circle often don’t understand the level of devotion that many of his followers exhibited during his life and afterward. Someone even coined a term for it: “Weinborg”, which many of us have adopted for ourselves. (If you don’t get the reference, look up the fictional “Borg” in the Star Trek universe – we have been assimilated).

I attended three of Jerry’s week-long workshops. Every time I’ve been through an intense experiential training, it has been a deeply moving experience. That’s true of Jerry’s workshops, plus other experiential trainings I’ve attended (several Boy Scout training sessions come to mind, for example). Once you’ve recovered, you want more. But you can’t effectively explain why it was so moving to someone who wasn’t there, in fact, for many of them, you can’t give away too many of the details, or you may ruin the experience for someone who attends later.

There are likely many other behaviors among Jerry’s followers that looked odd to outsiders. Perhaps we would invoke his laws by name, like “Rudy’s Rutabaga Rule”. Or we might reference “egoless programming” and point to the book where Jerry wrote about it. We might get ourselves into trouble, though, if we recommended that people follow his ideas without being able to explain them ourselves. “Go read his book” isn’t very persuasive if we can’t give the elevator speech ourselves to show the value in an idea.

Early in my career, a wise leader cautioned me to build opinions of my own rather than constantly quoting the experts. That has been a guiding principle for me ever since, and one that I hope has steered me away from groupthink.

Example 2: James Bach is a consultant and trainer who has influenced a lot of people in the software testing community, along with his business partner. I have learned a lot from James, and I continue to check in with him periodically, though I have never chosen to join his community of close followers. Incidentally, he has also been influenced by Jerry Weinberg.

James has grown a community of people who agree on some common terminology, which streamlines their discussions. It gets interesting, though, when someone uses that terminology outside that community without explaining what it means to them. I remember attending a software quality meetup that advertised nothing indicating that it was associated with James Bach or his courses. But then I heard the organizers and some attendees use terminology that I recognized as originating from James. It’s been several years since the meetings I attended, but I think I remember them presenting other ideas that closely align with what James teaches, not always identifying where they came from or why they recommended them. I vaguely remember that I stood up once or twice and told them that I hadn’t accepted some of those ideas, and I don’t recall the discussion going very far.

If a group has an ideology that they expect participants to adopt as a prerequisite for participating, that’s fine, but it needs to be explicit. Otherwise, they need to be prepared to define their terms and defend their ideas.

Example 3: I participate in the “One of the Three” Slack forum and often listen to its associated podcast created by Brent Jensen and Alan Page. They have spoken out about James Bach and his community a few times. At one point, some participants piled on to some negative comments that seemed to have no basis other than “because Alan and Brent said so.” I called them out for groupthink, not unlike the very thing they were complaining about. Fortunately, I think they got the message.

I remember talking about the “luminary effect” with author and consultant Boris Beizer years ago. This is where people hesitate to challenge an expert, especially a recognized luminary in their field, because of their perceived authority on a topic. But in fact, all of the experts I’ve mentioned love for you to give them your well-reasoned challenges to any of their ideas. Granted, the more they love a debate, the more exhausting and intimidating it can be to engage with them. There are smart, after all, and you need to do your homework so you can competently defend your ideas – that’s not asking too much, right? In fact, one of the best ways to get their respect is to challenge them with a good argument. I just hope that a few of my ideas here will survive their scrutiny.

In this post I’m talking about some controversial people and some controversial topics. Where I’ve stayed neutral here, I’ve done so very deliberately, and though I have some further opinions unrelated to the topics I’m discussing, I’m not going to muddy this post with them.

Further reading – Beware Cults of Testing by Jason Arbon.

As I sit here listening to Christmas music, I’m giving myself the gift of extra time to write. I want to respond to something Paul Maxwell-Walters recently tweeted:

If there is such a thing as a Tester’s Mid-Life Crisis, I think I may be in the middle of it….

He followed it up with an interesting blog post–The Fear of Age and Irrelevancy – On the Tester’s Midlife Crisis (1)

Paul cited the director of a counseling center who said mid-life crises are likely to happen between age 37 through the 50s. Paul, approaching his 40s, worries that his crisis is here. As I see my 50s getting large on the horizon, I don’t know if my crisis has past, is still coming, or will never come. I was actually around Paul’s age when my consulting business dried up and I ended my 16-year run in software testing. Four years later, though, I went back to my comfort zone, and had four consecutive short stints in various testing jobs.

That last testing job morphed into a development job. I’m very happy with my current employer for encouraging that path to unfold. Over the years, I have fervently resisted several opportunities to move into development, some of them very early in my career. I had latched onto my identity as a tester and staunch defender of the customer, and I wouldn’t let it go.

Paul wrote:

I have also come across people around my age and older who are greatly dissatisfied or apathetic with testing. They feel that they aren’t getting anywhere in their careers or are tired of the constant learning to stay relevant. They feel that they are being poorly treated or paid much less than their developer colleagues even though they all work in the same teams. They hate the low status of testing compared to other areas of software development. They regret not choosing other employers or doing something else earlier.

That’s surely the story of any tester’s career. Low status, low pay, slow growth. I embraced it, because I loved the work and loved what it stood for. The dissatisfaction seems to be more common now than it used to be, though. My advice, which you will know if you’ve been reading things on my blog like “The black box tester role may be fading away“, is: get out! Don’t transition to doing test automation. Become a developer, or a site reliability engineer, or a product owner, or an agile coach, or anything else that has more of a future. I think being a testing specialist is going to continue to get more depressing as the number of available testing jobs slowly continues to dwindle.

Because I’m writing this on Christmas Eve, I want to put an It’s a Wonderful Life spin on it. What if my testing career had never been born? In fact, what if the test specialist role had never been born?

Allow me to be your Angel 2nd Class and take you back to a time when developers talked about how to do testing. Literature about testing was directed toward developers. What if no one had worried about adding a role that had critical distance from the development process? What if developers had been willing to continue being generalists rather than delegating the study of testing practices to specialists, while shoving unit testing into a no-man’s land no one wanted to visit?

And what if I could have gotten over the absolute delight I got from destroying things and started creating things instead? I’m sure I’d be richer now. I’d have better design skills now. But alas, I’m not actually an Angel 2nd Class, and more to the point, I haven’t dug up enough historical context to really play out this thought experiment. But I’ll try to make a few observations. Within the larger community of developers, I might not have been able to carve out a space to start a successful independent consulting practice, which I dearly loved doing as a tester. Maybe I wouldn’t have developed my appreciation for software quality that I have now. Maybe I wouldn’t have adopted Extreme Programming concepts so readily as I have, which has now put me in a very good position process-wise, even if I’m having to catch up my enterprise design and architecture skills.

How about not having any testers in the first place? Maybe the lack of critical distance would have actually caused major problems. Maybe the lack of a quality watchdog would have allowed more managers to actually execute those bad decisions. And maybe those managers would have been driven out of software management. Would the lack of a safety net have actually improved the state of software management by natural selection, and even allowed some companies with inept executives to die a necessary death? I think I’m hoping for too much here, and perhaps being too brutal on Christmas Eve.

It has been a wonderful career. It could have been a different career, but I’m just glad that it has taken me to where I am now. Paul, I wish you a successful outcome from your mid-career crisis. I realize that my advice to get out is much easier said than done.

I have given myself a challenge that I’m enjoying right now – immersing myself more deeply in the Wikipedia community. The culture that has developed around the people who add to and edit Wikipedia bears some resemblance to the culture that we see with users of services like Facebook, Twitter, and Slack, but it’s much more complex. I aim with this article to convey a sense of the richness an online community can develop, and the frustration that an outsider can feel, much like a physical community. Maybe I’ll convince you to be a Wikipedia editor too.

First I’ll mention another online community that encourages its members to make contributions that everyone can benefit from. I made an attempt to become a productive contributor on Stack Overflow, a web site for asking and answering questions about computer programming.

Stack Overflow uses a reputation system, where various contributions you make will increase your reputation score. Additional features becomes available when your reputation grows. I thought that building a good reputation on Stack Overflow could be something I could add to my resume. I answered a few questions, and was able to especially build reputation when I answered questions that no one else had answered. But I had trouble finding questions that hadn’t already been thoroughly answered within minutes of being posted. And I was chastised a few times for not strictly following the rules when I posted answers, which was disheartening when I had put effort into answering the question. I understood that a community should have rules, but I lost interest before I really learned enough of the rules to be productive on the platform. I went back to only reading the content on the site, which, like many programmers, I do often.

I created my Wikipedia account way back in 2003. According to the contribution log, which shows almost every detail from the beginning, this must have been because I wanted to add a new article about load testing. I had made some edits to other pages without an account, but I needed to have an account to create a new article. That article is still there today, and I’m happy to see that after hundreds of edits, some of my original phrasing is still there.

Wikipedia newbies would be wise to hold off on creating new articles, however. I have added a total of seven articles. Of those, two have been converted to redirects to other articles with a broader scope, and one was deleted. I created an article about Brian Marick in 2007. Amazingly, it lasted until 2016 before someone claimed that he was not notable and eventually got it deleted. Recently, someone created an article about Janet Gregory, and within 24 hours, someone started a proposal to delete it. It was deleted 8 days later. For many topics, perhaps especially for articles about people, it’s quite difficult to prove that they meet Wikipedia’s notability guidelines. It must be sad when someone sees that they’ve been declared non-notable. I will probably not be adding new articles any time soon.

My long tenure on Wikipedia has caused others to assume that I’m well-versed in the rules of the road, but with my off-and-on interest in contributing, I’m just beginning to absorb the elaborate set of rules and conventions that editors are subjected to. In response to an edit I made to the article on Jerry Weinberg that was not up to snuff, one editor told me “Surely you know by now that ‘he told me so himself’ is not considered to be adequate sourcing for anything here…” Unlike a traditional encyclopedia with articles written by trusted experts, everything on Wikipedia is expected to be backed up by published independent sources.

I find it rewarding to make edits that improve the content on Wikipedia. Doing the research to justify the edits helps me to build my knowledge. I can refer to the article later when I want to refresh my knowledge of a subject, and so can anyone else. But the benefits are greatly reduced if the changes aren’t accepted by the community. In the case of my edits on the Jerry Weinberg article, I swallowed my ego and asked how I could change my approach. This led to a healthy discussion, and I was successful when I used a different approach. It’s often not easy to engage in this sort of discussion when I’m still smarting from having someone erase my work.

I recently decided to get more involved with Wikipedia because of efforts by Noah Sussman and Alan Page. Noah put a lot of effort into improving the Wikipedia article on software testing. Then Walter Görlitz, another volunteer Wikipedia editor, removed a big edit that Noah made to the article, an action that Wikipedia calls a “revert.” A heated discussion ensued, and little progress was made on overhauling the article like Noah wanted to. Alan issued a call for help to figure out how to effectively improve the article (A call to action: let’s fix the Wikipedia page on software testing), and I and several others joined a discussion on a chat group outside of Wikipedia to strategize.

I decided to take an agile approach; make small changes and watch to see how the broader Wikipedia community responds. A few of us have also branched out and looked at the many other articles related to software testing and found that as a group, they aren’t very well coordinated or well written. We’ve made numerous small changes to these articles now with a great deal of success, though we haven’t made substantial progress on the original goal of completely revamping the software testing article. I’m starting to make somewhat larger edits now and I hope others do too.

Instead of wondering how Walter would react to my edits, I decided to engage with him directly, so I invited him to open a dialogue. I’ve seen that he puts a great deal of effort into improving and reverting vandalism on a large number of Wikipedia articles. Walter tells me that the small edits I’ve made successfully has improved my reputation with him, and he is now less likely to revert the changes I make. Unlike Stack Overflow where reputation is tracked in one place, on Wikipedia your reputation is earned individually with each editor.

I’ve found that the best way to get consensus on Wikipedia is to use the “talk page” feature on the site itself, so everyone who is following the changes on the page have an opportunity to respond. In fact, the Wikipedia community prefers for discussions like this to take place on Wikipedia, otherwise some editors may get suspicious that one person is trying to recruit a cabal of “meatpuppets” to artificially amplify their influence. Our chat group is very loosely coordinated, and the edits we make are all an individual decision, so I’m not worried that we’ll raise this suspicion, especially now that we’re using the talk pages more.

The response to an edit can vary significantly based on who is watching for changes on the article. Many areas don’t happen to have anyone watching closely, so whether the edit is useful or not, it may stay around for years. If someone feels strongly about maintaining the quality of a particular article, you’ll be held to a higher level of scrutiny. I’ve also found that newly added information may be held to a higher standard than what is already in an article. Once I added some information to an article without including a citation to back it up, and the information was removed, despite the fact that most of the information already in the article was also not referenced. It was just easier for the editor who did it to revert a recent edit than to address the broader problem. You can avoid this if you scrutinize your own contributions very carefully.

If you’re afraid you’ll have difficulty getting edits on Wikipedia to stick, take this to heart, from the instructions to “Be Bold” with your edits:

Think about it this way: if you don’t find one of your edits being reverted now and then, perhaps you’re not being bold enough.

Now if you’ll excuse me, that load testing article has become a bit of a mess.

My thanks to Simon Morley and Walter Görlitz for helping me improve this article.