Thursday, September 07, 2006

How to deal with a distant Manager!!

Have you ever had a manager that was basically non-existent? There's both a postive and negative side to this type of Manager, the positive being you don't have someone looking over your shoulder constantly trying to do your job for you and butting in where they are not wanted, but on the negative front a distant Manager can lead.....well nowhere!

At a previous employer my Manager worked in a different city, so already we had a little bit of distance between us. When he first took the position we talked at least once a week and emails every other day, etc. Then something happened where he seemed to settle into a rountine and I could go 3 weeks without talking to him or not getting an email from him for days - basically he became non-existent! He had six direct reports many of whom where in the same boat as myself. At times I thought maybe it's because he knows very little about Testing practices or Quality Assurance, then once I spoke to other peers it became very apparent that it was his MO not to get involved.

Below are some good do's and don'ts when dealing with a bad boss I found by Randell Hansen


Do act professionally in all situations.
Don't reduce your productivity, feign illness, or otherwise compromise your job.
Do find a mentor -- within or outside the organization.
Don't confront your boss in an emotionally-charged rant.
Do consider scheduling a meeting with your boss to discuss ways your boss could change his/her behavior.
Don't go to the boss of your boss, except as a last resort.
Do find an outlet to vent your frustrations and anger, but don’t do it with co-workers.
Don't expect your boss to change -- or at least change overnight.
Do watch for opportunities to transfer to another department within the company.
Don't simply try and block out all the bad behavior; doing so will impact your physical and mental health.
Do use your network to keep abreast of better opportunities outside the company. And do have your resume up-to-date and ready to send out.
Do evaluate your performance on the job and consider ways to improve your behavior, but don’t blame yourself for a bad boss.
Don't think you are alone in having a bad boss; several studies suggest that many of us have to deal with a bad boss at one time or another in our careers.
Do consider keeping a journal that documents all the bad behavior of your boss.
Don't sacrifice your health of self-esteem by staying in the job for the sake of a job. Do consider quitting your job -- even if you don’t have a new job lined up -- if continuing to work for your bad boss is likely to permanently damage your career.
Do continue to document all your accomplishments.

Wednesday, September 06, 2006

Have you ever had the opportunity to stop and look at every process you perform on a daily basis to see if it's an efficient or effective process? Many of us in the Testing world barely have the time to scratch our royal behinds due to the time constraints we're put under to get a product out the door to meet some committment that has been made by some Sales or Business Executive who has absolutley no friggin idea what it takes to design, build and test something! The point I'm trying to make is that if we do take some time to analyze what we're doing manually to see if it could be automated we could actually save ourselves some additional time.

Many companies still use spreadsheets to drive a lot of their Test Planning, Creation, Execution and Defect Management processes. Many are unaware of some free testing tools or relatively cheap tools that could automate many of the manual processes that they carry out on a daily basis. Take for instance comparing data from one release to the next, I have encountered many companies on my consulting travels that would sit for hours and compare line by line looking for differences when they are tools out there like Beyond Compare by scooter software www.scootersoftware.com that for a few hundred dollars could save hours and hours of human prone error work.

Bugzilla is a defect management tool that can be acquired that will automate your defect management process pretty easily and has add-on's like Testopia to help with the test management effort- you can see all the add-on's at http://wiki.mozilla.org/Bugzilla:Addons.

Here's a few web-sites to check out tools that are either free or you pay mega bucks to purchase:

http://www.softwareqatest.com/qatweb1.html
http://www.aptest.com/resources.html#mngt