Forem: Angela Riggs

Looking for Work!

Angela Riggs — Sun, 06 Sep 2020 00:00:00 +0000

I’m currently in search of a new role - please read through and get in touch if you think I would be a good fit for your organization!

This post was inspired by Julie Pagano’s “reverse job hunt” blog post. Part of the purpose behind writing this is to reduce my unknown unknowns - there are roles and companies out there that would be a great match, but I can’t apply if I don’t know they exist. Creating this post means I can share it out with my network and have a higher chance of connecting to those opportunities. It also gives me a chance to reflect on what’s important to me in my next role and company, and to be explicit about what I want or don’t want.

❓ Why

This past Thursday, Instrument dissolved the engineering team I was on and eliminated my role at the company.

📆 When

Now or soon!

🌍 Where

This is kind of a squishy question right now - all companies are Covid-remote, but not all companies are planning to maintain a fully remote workplace once it’s safe to return to an office. So I’m flexible on the “where” requirement! Locations include:

Portland, OR
US remote
Non-US remote if the time zone differences work out for everyone
Open to future relocation, US and abroad

😄 About Me

Please review my LinkedIn profile for a detailed overview of my accomplishments and experience. You can also download my resume for a more compact overview if needed.

I’m a QA Engineer with 5+ years of experience in tech and quality. I’ve been embedded on cross-functional engineering teams, on a centralized QA team within the engineering department, and most recently been a QA manager where I created an internal Quality Engineering discipline from the ground up.

My role as an individual contributor is to be the team’s stakeholder for quality. I use an exploratory testing approach while balancing the perspectives of the team, the users, and the project stakeholders to make sure we’re building the right things in the right way. I consider everything from developer experience to user experience, and try to make sure the needs of both are supported.

As a manager, I love being part of people’s growth. I enjoy helping set the vision for quality and engineering, and being a part of making that vision a reality. My role as a leader is also to advocate for the people at the company - are the policies in place meeting their needs? Are they able to grow their careers? Do they have clear understandings of the work that’s expected of them? Have we created clear avenues of communication across teams, departments, and organizational hierarchy?

In either type of role, I often rely on my experiences as an early childhood teacher. I’m adaptable and curious, which means I can learn new things as the job calls for it. I work with compassion and the understanding that we all bring our whole selves to work - and I know that company success starts with supporting its people, personally and professionally. I understand the nuances of change management, and how to iterate policies or processes in a way that minimizes churn. (The deck for my talk Why is There a Marble in Your Nose? actually gives a pretty good summary of the skills and approach I bring to work!)

🏢 What I’m Looking For

Type of Role

I really enjoy working within the QA/QE space and I would love to continue my growth as a manager, so I strongly prefer that my next role be as a QA Manager!

I’m open to an Engineering Manager role that doesn’t require hands-on technical contributions as part of the role. I don’t have the experience or desire for coding, and the type of role that required that work wouldn’t be a good fit. But if you’re looking for someone to manage the growth and careers of developers and help support the stability and vision of engineering and quality, let’s talk!

I’m potentially open to an IC role at a company that has a clear path back to QA management. However, I also know that promotions depend on many competing factors within an organization, so an IC role is not my main focus. The role and company would need to be pretty compelling in other ways in order for me to consider it.

Culture

These items are important aspects of company culture that I look for and would strive to maintain while I’m there.

Psychological safety: People feel safe advocating for their needs. People feel safe trying new things because they know mistakes aren’t punished. People feel safe asking questions and expecting honest answers.
Authenticity > niceness: Sometimes you have to have hard conversations, and that’s okay. The ability to hold those conversations in a respectful and meaningful way is what allows us to move forward and improve.
Collaboration: Across departments and hierarchy, people consistently work together to solve problems, share knowledge, and create.
Compassion: People understand that there are identities outside of their own, especially if they benefit from intersections of inherent privilege. E.g. I’m a white straight cis able-bodied woman, which benefits me in many ways that I haven’t earned - so I have to be mindful about incorporating and understanding perspectives and experiences beyond my own default. This applies to the people we work with, as well as the users we’re building things for.

Pros

These are strong preferences I have for any company I’m at!

Unlimited sick leave
401k matching
Proactive outreach and meaningful support for employees during the Covid crisis
15+ days of vacation
Trans-inclusive healthcare
Parental leave policies
Budget and time off for professional development
Active in their communities and industry

Cons

These aren’t dealbreakers, but they’ll make me more hesitant to be part of your company.

The executive leadership group consists only of white men.
No career ladders. Career ladders, when created and implemented correctly, offer a shared understanding of expectations for hiring, reviews, and promotions. They help remove subjectivity and bias and attempt to bring in more objectivity, which benefits people who are most harmed by biased decisions.
Hidden pay bands, or no pay bands. Under-represented and minoritized groups are most harmed when salaries are not transparent. Pay bands, when adhered to across the org, allow for equitable pay practices in hiring, raises, and promotions. If a company has chosen not to implement and enforce transparent pay bands, I would assume that people are being harmed by pay inequities.

Dealbreakers

You don’t have an official HR
You don’t have any Black employees

Contact Me

If my experience and expectations sound good to you, please reach out! You can email me at riggs.ang+jobs@gmail.com and include the following in your email:

The name of the organization you are contacting me about
Your role within the organization
Where the organization is based, and whether the role is Covid-remote or fully remote
What kind of organization it is (e.g. private/public company, non-profit, agency, product company)
Information about the position(s) and/or a link to relevant job postings
A brief description of why the organization would be a good fit for me and vice versa
Any other information you think is useful

Thanks in advance - I look forward to hearing from you!

Resources for Self-Education and Allyship

Angela Riggs — Mon, 01 Jun 2020 00:00:00 +0000

I’m seeing a lot of non-Black folks seeking ways to support their Black friends and coworkers, to advocate against racism and police brutality and the systems of oppression that are becoming harder for people with inherent privilege to ignore.

I’m also seeing a lot of great resources out there for self-education and allyship, so I thought I’d compile some of them into one place. This is intended to be a living article, so I’ll update it as I continue to learn and engage.

If you have resources for any category that you would like me to include, please drop by Twitter to DM me or send me a tweet at @AngelaRiggs_. If it’s a resource that someone else created, please make sure to include the appropriate way to credit them!

Effective advocacy & support

3 Steps for Leaders to Take in Emergencies: Lara Hogan’s article on things you should prioritize as a leader in order to support your team
- https://larahogan.me/blog/3-steps-for-leaders-in-emergencies/
Tatiana Mac’s Twitter thread full of tips about how to usefully engage on social media when you’re pushing back against orgs or people who are being racist
- https://twitter.com/TatianaTMac/status/1267252980882997249
Maki’s Twitter thread for non-Black folks on how to check in on your Black friends without adding to their fatigue or stress
- https://twitter.com/makirollOFC/status/1267114319772372993
Black Tech Pipeline’s article sourced from Black people on how they want to be supported by their employers
- https://blacktechpipeline.substack.com/p/hey-employers-do-black-lives-matter

Educate yourself

Curated book list from Baratunde Thurston on a variety of themes related to race and history
- https://bookshop.org/shop/baratunde
A variety of anti-racism resources, compiled by Sarah Sophie Flicker and Alyssa Klein
- http://bit.ly/ANTIRACISMRESOURCES
Why “Black” is capitalized when we’re talking about race
- https://www.mic.com/p/yes-black-is-capitalized-when-were-talking-about-race-19208252
The History of Black Wall Street
- https://www.oneunited.com/the-history-of-black-wall-street/
History of the Tulsa Massacre
- https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/local/wp/2018/09/28/feature/they-was-killing-black-people/
Context around the change from referring to the Tulsa Massacre as a riot
- https://www.tulsaworld.com/news/local/racemassacre/tulsa-race-massacre-for-years-it-was-called-a-riot-not-anymore-heres-how-it/article_47d28f77-2a7e-5b79-bf5f-bdfc4d6f976f.html
Black Trauma and Showing Up
- https://www.refinery29.com/en-us/2020/05/9841376/black-trauma-george-floyd-dear-white-people
Rihanna’s NAACP Image Awards speech on the importance of Black issues being everyone’s issues
- https://www.refinery29.com/en-us/2020/05/9841376/black-trauma-george-floyd-dear-white-people
Stats That Matter, an animated episode series from Titus Animates
- https://www.instagram.com/p/CA51NLcBIU5/
Mapping Police Violence
- https://mappingpoliceviolence.org/

Donate

Note: As Kimberly Bryant pointed out, donating isn’t just about the immediate needs of bail funds - it’s about funding grassroots organizations that are working for systemic and community changes.

Code 2040
- http://www.code2040.org/
Hack the Hood
- https://www.hackthehood.org/
Project Include
- https://projectinclude.org/
INTech
- http://www.code2040.org/
Black Girls Code
- https://www.blackgirlscode.com/
Rachel Cargle’s Loveland Foundation
- https://thelovelandfoundation.org/ways-to-give/
Black Visions Collective (BLVC)
- https://blackvisionsmn.org
Reclaim the Block
- https://reclaimtheblock.org/home
Campaign Zero
- https://www.joincampaignzero.org/
Police Use of Force Project
- http://useofforceproject.org/
The Bail Project
- https://bailproject.org/
Autostraddle’s list of bail funds:
- http://autostraddle.com/43-bail-funds-you-can-absolutely-support-right-now/
Act Blue bail fund that allows you to easily split your donation across multiple funds:
- https://secure.actblue.com/donate/bail_funds_george_floyd
George Floyd Memorial Fund
- https://gofundme.com/f/georgefloyd
I Run With Maud
- https://gofundme.com/f/i-run-with-maud

Action

5 Calls: Demand reform on police use of force
- https://5calls.org/issue/police-use-of-force-reform
Consistently support Black-owned businesses! Here’s a great roundup for Portland from Stephen Green and Built Oregon
- https://siliconflorist.com/2020/03/03/missing-the-daily-black-history-month-tweets-about-portland-founders-me-too-relive-them/

New Managers: Effective Management

Angela Riggs — Tue, 19 May 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Welcome to the fifth and final post in my New Managers series! I’ve talked about creating a supportive culture, tips for self-care, and what your responsibilities might look like as a new manager. For this last post, I want to talk about how to manage people effectively so that you and they can succeed!

The tl;dr of effective management is to develop your core skills (also known as “soft skills”). It’s a somewhat common fallacy that core skills are innate - e.g. you either have them or you don’t - but as a former early childhood teacher please believe me when I say that core skills are 100% learnable throughout your entire career. (If you’re interested in a broader exploration of this topic, I’ll be speaking about it at Test Leadership Congress this summer!)

But let’s dive a little deeper into this! When I asked for feedback and advice about being a new manager on Twitter, here are some of the responses that fell into this category of effective management:

Know your folks as individuals and treat them as such. There is so much value in what an individual brings when one can see it and pave the way for that person and what they have to offer.
Don’t think of yourself as “the boss”, but someone who is responsible for supporting, developing, and enabling my people to do their best work and love what they do.
Help them establish both career and personal development goals.
Be overly clear on expectations. People are more happy/productive if they don’t have to guess about their day-to-day work. Be transparent on the why behind priorities.
Learn everyone’s preferred communication style and how they’d like to be recognized for doing well.
Avoid fixing people; channel your energy into getting them into a position where their weaknesses don’t matter and their strengths can shine.
Small early feedback is gentler and more successful than waiting till the problem is a large problem.
Ask people to solve problems and deliver a capabilities rather than to do tasks. You want to engage their ownership and creativity.
Don’t try to scrap everything broken in your first month. Pick the key hill to die on.
Effective delegation can help to up skill team members.
See reports as appreciating assets, not an operational cost. The more you invest in wellbeing and development the more you gain in return. Set expectations and shared objectives, then support with coaching and opportunity to grow.
Learned to manage up & down. Understanding personality types & how they respond to stress. And protecting teams at all costs.
Don’t assume we have the same weaknesses/strengths. Don’t assume we make decisions the same way.
Set them up for success and make expectations (yours or from above you) transparent so they can hit them and know it.

Looking at that feedback, you can see that effective management depends on communication, curiosity, empathy, leadership, compassion, change management, adaptability - core skills, every one of ‘em.

Know your folks as individuals and treat them as such. Get to know the people you’re managing. Your people are different from each other, and they’re different from you. How do they like to communicate? How do they celebrate wins? What stresses them out, and what does that look like? What are their goals? How do they like to learn? What are their past experiences and how does that affect how they work?

Find out when they need coaching and when they need mentoring. Understand how they receive and share communication. Take the time to know what gets them excited about work! As you build trust and rapport, get to know them as a whole human - help them achieve the work/life balance that meets their needs, anticipate when they’re starting to burn out and need a break, ask what their core needs are and what they need from you to support those needs.

People bring their whole selves to work. Ignoring that fact means that you won’t be able to effectively coach or connect with your people.

Small early feedback is gentler and more successful than waiting until something is a large problem. YES. This is really hard for lots of people - we don’t like giving negative feedback and we often just don’t know how to do it. This is where the “feedback sandwich” happens, or where managers just avoid giving the feedback at all until they absolutely have to, at which point the employee is surprised by something critical that they’ve never heard about. But it’s literally your job to give feedback, so you need to understand how to do it effectively.

The first thing to know is that “effective” and “kind” are not mutually exclusive - you can give effective feedback without being a jerk. The second thing to know is that it’s hard to give negative or corrective feedback. It just is! Accept that and do it anyway. I really like Lara Hogan’s equation for feedback: observation of a behavior + impact of behavior + a question or request. There’s nothing wrong with doing it in a formulaic way, as long as you do it with kindness.

The third thing to know is that feedback, whether it’s positive or negative, should be given early. If it’s praise, share it freely! Build up your people’s confidence, show them that their work is noticed and valued. If it’s corrective, bring it up as soon as it’s relevant - in your next 1:1 or ad-hoc if it’s something more urgent. I’ve seen managers wait until a quarterly review, or until it’s something that becomes more of a blockers. In both cases, you’re not giving them a chance to address the feedback in a timely and useful manner, which is unfair to them and detrimental to their progression. Kind, honest, timely are the watchwords for effective feedback. Take it to heart.

Don’t try to scrap everything broken in your first month. Pick the key hill to die on. 🙋‍♀️ Hello yes, this is me. I’ve always enjoyed finding the operational gaps and figuring out what sort of solution is needed. But I can have a tendency to look at the next several things instead of just the next thing, and try to tackle all of those things at once. This isn’t great for a couple of reasons. One, it stretches my efforts thin across too many things instead of being able to give effective focus to one important thing and see it through to the end, being able to adapt to changing needs or perspectives along the way. And two, it probably means that I’m not practicing effective change management.

If I’m trying to solve an operational or process challenge, I’m connecting with different people and teams and needs and opinions in order to understand the context and help create a solution or change. If I’m trying to solve multiple challenges, those connections are also multiplied, which means I’m increasing the amount of churn and change - and people don’t like change. It’s nothing personal, it’s just that change is hard. So being effective here means choosing your battles, picking a couple of trees in the forest to focus on, and work on those until they’re done (whatever “done” might look like.)

Be overly clear on expectations. People can’t succeed if they don’t know what the definition of success is. Whether it’s yours or the company’s, make sure you understand and communicate what the expectations are - from low-level day-to-day to high-level promotion readiness. If people have to guess or continually ask, they’ll feel unsupported and unsafe. Some of the times that I’ve felt most unsatisfied at a job is when I know I’m doing great work, but I have no idea whether it’s contributing to the expectations for my role. In those times, I wanted my manager to coach me, to explain what their expectations or the org’s expectations of me were and whether I was meeting those expectations. It absolutely killed my morale to see my hard work go unrewarded with raises or promotions because I wasn’t meeting unknown expectations.

Make sure you’re proactively level-setting with your people. This feeds into your communication and feedback skills - are they on the right track? Do they need coaching? If there are expectations being handed down from above you, are those expectations attainable?

Engage people’s ownership and creativity. I think this is such an important reminder. As a manager, it’s easy to to just give someone a challenge and a solution - but that doesn’t do anything for your people’s growth or trust. Give them a challenge, but let them figure out a solution. You can even start with a high-level desired outcome to inform their choices without hampering their ability to solve it themselves. They’ll come away feeling pride and ownership over something, and you’ll come away with a solution - and show that you trust them and their expertise.

Thank you for joining me on this journey! I have thoroughly enjoyed thinking and writing about these “new manager” themes! It’s helped me reflect on the kind of manager I want to be, and understand what different people look for in their managers. I hope this series helps you in the same way, New Manager (or Future Manager!). There’s no One Right Way to be a good manager, but there are some common themes and things to think about in order to inform your manager self:

Creating Culture: What kind of culture will you choose to create as a manager?
Support & Self-Care: How do you get support and take care of yourself so you can support your people?
Being a Manager: What are the shifts in responsibilities and strategy that you’ll need to make when you transition from an IC to a New Manager?

Feel free to leave a comment here or chat on Twitter if you want to explore any of these topics further - I’m always happy to have a conversation!

New Managers: Being a Manager

Angela Riggs — Sat, 04 Apr 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Congratulations, you’re a manager 🎉 First step off the IC path, first rung of the leadership ladder - exciting career changes!

So - now what? How is your role changing? What do you do when you’re a manager? What shifts in work and, more importantly, shifts in strategy and perspective will you need to make? A career ladder should offer some insights here, but many companies don’t have one. Drawing on the advice of tech managers who have learned this through experience, let’s take a look at some of those shifts:

Be ready to change what “productive” looks like in your mind. Your to-do list is more about others and making sure they are able to complete tasks than about your contributions to the deliverable.
Develop your people not your position, if you do your position will develop itself with management and just importantly with your team. Good luck!
Speak mostly in terms of objectives and goals, work for collaboration within the team and with peers and our customers.
I would have focused very intently on understanding what my company values from the role. It looks very different in different places.
While your team may be reporting to you, you are actually working to enable them.
That management without leadership will get you nowhere. And that leadership, just as management, is something you study and practice and improve over time, it’s not charisma or a hidden talent you either have or don’t.
For me: delegate, be patient, and remember the speed bumps you hit aren’t the end of the world. My mom told me when I first become a tech manager that a manager’s job is to give their team the tools and space to succeed and it turned out to be the best advice.
Your success will be measured through your teams success.
Oh, and never ever abandon the consequences of your own leadership. I reiterate - you’re the leader. It’s on you. If it’s broke, own it. It’s the cost of leadership. Cry in the bathroom if you have to, and then go back like you were always in control the whole time and fix it.
Learn how to redefine success for yourself. Productivity is no longer easy to quantify
Every bit of IC work you do is a missed opportunity for someone else

A manager’s job is to give their team the tools and space to succeed. In part, a manager’s success is based on the success of their people. How are you helping them succeed? I’ve seen managers who micromanage their people to success, which may reflect well on the manager but does absolutely nothing for the person they’re managing. On the flip side, I’ve seen managers who operate under a system of benign neglect, where they give people all the space they need but none of the tools to help. My goal is to have my people learn what success looks like for them, give them time to try and learn and try and learn, and make sure I’m there to give a boost when they need it. I took a great workshop with Lara Hogan last year on coaching, mentoring, and sponsorship that has helped give me the tools I need to help my people in the ways that they’ll need. (She also has a talk with some great resource on her site!) My job as a manager isn’t just directing my people around - it’s understanding what they’re doing, what they want to accomplish, and helping guide them toward creating that success.

Never ever abandon the consequences of your own leadership. Some of the worst managers I’ve experienced are the ones who abandon their people at the first sign of trouble - they save themselves and get out of the way of whatever’s coming down the pipe. But just like part of my job is helping my people succeed, part of my job is also helping fix things that fail. If a project is consistently going sideways, if someone is struggling to learn the skills they need, if there’s an interpersonal conflict that is’t getting resolved - it’s my job to step in, understand the challenges, and help figure out a solution. It may not be my fault or my responsibility on paper. But in practice, I am accountable. As the person who’s leading the Quality Engineering discipline, I’m the face of the team within the company. I’m ultimately accountable for the methods and success of the team and the work that we do.

Be ready to change what “productive” looks like in your mind. As a QA engineer, “productive” was often measured in how many tickets I QA’ed or how many releases I did. Those are easy metrics to grasp, even if I didn’t agree that they were a useful measure of productivity. But as a QA manager, I’m typically not the person responsible for doing QA reviews or releases - instead, I’m managing the folks who are. So what are my metrics? In my particular role, where I’m introducing QA and Quality Engineering as internal disciplines, I’m looking at QA engagement on our client services teams. Do we have a steady influx of work that needs QA services? What’s the utilization percent for my QA engineer? (It’s not - and should never be - 100%!) I need to be building relationships and trust with the other teams and team leads - how is that looking? I’m also setting the foundation for the Quality Engineering discipline, like resources for testing processes, learning, and accessibility. Instrument has Growth Profiles for the various disciplines, so I’m adding to that for QAE and also figuring out how we can iterate that into actual career ladders.

Understand what your company values from the role. You have to know what you’re aiming for! If you’ve got a career ladder, you probably have an advantage here, because the org already has some definition of success. (I say probably because not all ladders are created equal.) But let’s assume you don’t have a career ladder - how do you discover this information? Ideally, it’s come up in pre-promotion conversations with your manager. If you feel comfortable talking to your manager’s manager, you should also get their perspective on it. Know who the key players are in your career trajectory, and make sure you’re aligned with their assumptions. This doesn’t mean that you have to give in or give up your ideas of success! For my role, I have ideas and goals about the value that I bring to the company - I want our QA team to be the go-to experts on quality and testing. I want to build up a team that’s as comfortable coaching and advising around quality as they are diving into the actual testing. I want our client services teams to engage with QA services early in the process, not just when development kicks off. And I think these goals are worthwhile and achievable! But I have to balance my goals against other people’s perceptions and expectations, because I need to work with them in order to truly create that value. I need to understand what their understanding of QA is, and how they currently think it should be incorporated. I’m trying to change the way other people work, and that is definitely not something I can just push ahead on without thinking about what other people need.

If this is the first New Manager post that you’re reading, don’t forget to check out the previous articles in the series:

It's Okay Not to be Okay

Angela Riggs — Sat, 04 Apr 2020 00:00:00 +0000

That’s it. That’s the post. (Well, almost.)

We’re working and living through a pandemic. Everything’s weird. A lot of things are kinda fucked. Some things are really, really fucked. Many states have issued shelter-in-place orders, and many people are (hopefully) self-quarantined at home. I know that I’m in a place of relative privilege during this - my husband and I both work in tech and our companies were able to pivot to remote work. We have multiple grocery stores nearby, plus a plethora of restaurants offering takeout and several options for CSA-type deliveries.

People are being fired and furloughed. The number of people filing for unemployment is astronomical. Service workers who continue to show up and do their jobs are working under unsafe conditions. Pockets of the US are being hit incredibly hard by COVID-19 and hospitals don’t have enough supplies or people or time to care for everyone, including the hospital staff who we’re depending on.

So yeah, it’s okay not to be okay. Throw away those articles with all of the best “work from home” practices. Unless they mention having to balance your day job with your partner’s day job in a house with no office and two toddlers, that article is pretty much useless.

I’m doing my best to set a good example as a manager, and be open about taking breaks or having a hard day. I don’t want people to feel like they have to hide their hard days. I want people to prioritize self-care, whatever that might look like for them. Maybe it’s having enough work so they don’t have to think about the other stuff, and maybe it’s taking a day off so they don’t have to work through their stress.

Take desk breaks. Take deep breaths. Stretch a little. Drink some water.

Be a little kinder, a little more forgiving - especially with yourself.

If making a sourdough starter and getting into bread baking helps get you through this, do it.

If eating Nutella from the tub while binging Nailed It helps get you through this, do it.

It’s okay not to be okay.

I have days where I’m anxious, and my focus is just getting to lunch, getting to the end of the day. I have days where I’m focused and working and the day goes by really fast. Sometimes I bake or do some loom weaving, and sometimes I forget to eat and sit at my desk reading articles that stress me out.

I’m trying to check in or chat with one or two people a week. I like helping other people, and having positive interactions is something that often makes me feel better when I’m stressed, but those things also feel a lot harder right now.

It’s okay not to be okay.

There are things that people can generally do to feel better, right? Exercise. Healthy meals. Getting a good night’s sleep. But those things are easier said than done when you’re experiencing life in the middle of a pandemic.

I’m trying to set smaller goals for myself, like doing some form of exercise each day. Sometimes it’s a DVD workout, or 20 minutes on the exercise bike, or an arm workout. Sometimes it’s nothing, because I just can’t do it today.

I already know that I have a habit of skipping meals when I’m stressed, so I’m trying to make sure I eat breakfast every day. I’m doing pretty well with that, but not doing as well with remembering to eat lunch.

It’s okay not to be okay.

My office setup is not great. My desk is too high for my chair, my chair doesn’t have adjustable arms, and I don’t have a desk lamp so my face is always in shadows on video calls. On the other hand, having to be in my office every day motivated me to get the room into shape, so I have shelving in the closet and pretty curtains to hide the shelving, and I have a little reading nook that I have thus far spent zero time reading in.

I have probably 8-10 unread sci-fi and fantasy books that I keep thinking would be a great distraction right now, but I’ve been re-reading supernatural romance series because I don’t have the energy to read a new book.

It’s okay not to be okay.

Do what you need to do to get through the day. Take care of yourself. Stay well. Wash your hands. Have a conversation with someone. Take a bubble bath. Eat some ice cream. Make a cake. Feel the things you’re feeling, and know that it’s okay not to be okay.

New Managers: Support & Self-Care

Angela Riggs — Thu, 06 Feb 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Hello there 👋🏼 This is the third article in my “Advice for New Managers” series! If this is your first stop, you may want to check out the original post that I wrote after getting a ton of awesome feedback on Twitter, and you can read the second article on creating culture as a new manager here.

After reading through and reflecting on the responses from Twitter, the second theme that stood out was Support & Self-Care. As someone who believes in the sanctity of work-life balance and not sacrificing your self for your job, I love this theme. How do you seek out advice when you’re struggling? What’s your pep talk when you’re facing a new challenge? (Maybe you tweet about it!) What does celebrating your wins look like? How do you handle the stresses of people management? How do you take care of yourself so you can take care of your people?

Some of the advice that stood out to me around this theme:

I wish I’d created (and used) a network of peer managers earlier. Managing can be isolating and you need to get feedback and ideas from others!
Asking for help can be so hard when you’re the boss! It’s easy to fall in the trap of thinking you have to have all the answers all the time.
Everyone hates change. Don’t mistake this for resistance to you.
You can’t pour from an empty cup. It’s easy to get lost in making sure you invest in your direct reports, but forget that you need to make sure you are feeling fulfilled, energized, and truly love your job.
Don’t go in, guns ablaze, and attack. The people who work there know a lot and can help you achieve your goals.
Listen enough and sleep enough. And trust yourself.
Find your people. Set up regular meetings with other managers and talk things through with them
Learn to recognise my own needs and feelings too. Always so good at doing it for others… Awful at doing it for myself
Realizing that I couldn’t do it all and that I needed to build resilience to be able to play the infinite game rather than trying to do everything

Everyone hates change. Don’t mistake this for resistance to you. I’m a huge advocate of change management, but I hadn’t thought about how those principles might apply to people management! As a manager, you’ll often be the messenger of change for people - and change is an emotional thing, from fear and frustration to indifference or excitement. But introducing change doesn’t mean you’re a bad person or a bad manager. It’s just part of your job! Make sure you’re being reflective of the difference between people disliking the message and disliking the messenger.

You can’t pour from an empty cup. YES. This was one of my favorites from the hundreds of responses that I got. It’s like the safety presentation on an airplane - you have to put on your own oxygen mask before you help other people. We all know this, right? Of course we’ll take care of ourselves… right after I take care of this task and that task and help out this team and make sure that person has what they need and and and. I have always fought to make sure companies support people taking time off - for mental and physical health, for their families, for those “just because I need a break” days. But I’ve realized that I don’t always support myself in that same way.

I don’t always know how to admit that I’m struggling. But if I’m not able to be vulnerable and trust that I’ll be supported, how can I encourage the people I manage that it’s okay for them to be vulnerable and trust that I’ll support them? You don’t have to spill your guts or get more personal than you’re comfortable with, but I think - I hope - you should be able to feel safe asking for the things you need. In my case, I’m struggling to balance my role (which currently requires a lot of face-to-face relationship building) with chronic leg pain as I’m working to counter hypermobility in my knees. I have days where all I can think about it how much my hip flexors or IT bands hurt, and on those days it’s exhausting to make it through meetings and QA reviews and being able to sit at my desk. I find it hard to explain, even though chronic pain is not uncommon and I know that the only response I’d get from my team would be “How can we help?”

So one of my goals for self-care is to get comfortable speaking up when I need to work from home or even take a day off. I wouldn’t hesitate or question if someone else came to me and said they need to do either of those - so I shouldn’t hesitate for myself, either. By prioritizing my self-care instead of avoiding it, I can show the people I manage that I also prioritize their self-care.

Create and use a network of peer managers. My thoughts on this are basically an echo of Lara Hogan’s blog post on creating a Manager Voltron 😄 Even as I get more experience being a manager, there will always be aspects of the role that I have to work harder at. There will always be new challenges to explore. Having a network of people in similar roles with different experiences and backgrounds can help me be a better manager by expanding my knowledge beyond my own personal experience. To this end, I’m in a couple of leadership Slack teams, and I have a wonderful crew of women in tech and testing who are awesome at sharing advice as well as their own challenges in management.

Asking for help can be so hard when you’re the boss. Managers are people too! We wouldn’t expect anyone else to know all the answers or get things right all the time, and we shouldn’t expect that of ourselves. I learn best when I’m directly applying the thing I’m trying to learn, but that means that I sometimes flail around a bit before getting it right. And that’s okay! Some flailing is fine - but admitting that I need reinforcements is also fine. Remember that manager peer network I mentioned? Call on them!

Sometimes asking for help is as simple as saying “I don’t know”, which is an underrated skill. Maybe it’s my teaching background, but I’ve become really comfortable speaking up when I don’t know the acronym someone is using, or the process they’re describing, or the complex techncial solution they just summarized. I find it really easy to ask “What does that mean?”. It feels so good! It’s empowering! It lets me learn more! And I’ve often found that when I speak up to say “I don’t know”, someone else in the room also didn’t know - but they didn’t feel comfortable asking for more information. So you get to feel great and empowered and learn, but you also get to help other people!

Listen enough and sleep enough. I’m all about building that sleep routine! I try to put down my phone about an hour before bed, both to reduce blue light and to reduce cramming more things into my brain. I’ll wash my face, do some stretching, and use some lavender lotion on my hands (I found one that smells really nice and not too strong or perfume-y). Then I’ll massage my forehead because I tend to have tension there by the end of the day and it feels super relaxing! I might read a book if I’ve got a current one, and I’ll try really hard not to unlock my phone again when I plug it in. I’ve started taking L-theanine at bedtime to relax, since I have a tendency to start writing emails and to-lists or reviewing conversations in my head once everything is still (hello, fellow internal monloguers! Do we all struggle with this when it’s time for sleep?). I also just got a sunrise alarm clock, which is AMAZING and has made waking up so much better. There are studies upon studies that reinforce how much sleep - or lack of it - affects your health. When I successfully get a good night’s sleep, I can feel the difference both mentally and physically. Get your eight hours!

What’s your experience with support & self-care as a tech manager? What routines or foundations have you set for either?

New Managers: Creating Culture

Angela Riggs — Mon, 20 Jan 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Last week, I wrote about the new manager advice I received on Twitter. A lot of the responses fell into a handful of themes, one of which was Culture. By culture, I mean the culture that I cultivate for my people as their manager. What sort of environment do I want to offer them? What kind of culture am I building? What are my values, and how do I communicate them?

Some of the advice that stood out to me around this theme:

Explain the why of management choices. Inform people earlier better then later, even if stuff is still uncertain
Listen, really listen, to the people who report to you
Be present and available to everyone, even the ones who seem to be doing fine
Also being an advocate for their best selves… Focus on getting them as close to you can as the three main happiness indicators for employees: autonomy, master, purpose
As a manager you have many tools available to get “the pulse,” empathize and provide direction for your reports. But, it is often just a friendly casual chat over lunch that will get you there quicker
Take notes about their personal life events and follow up later. It’s amazing when your leader remembers about something that is not related to work and cares about it
Be the leader each person needs, which means being adaptable rather than asking everyone to adapt to you.
Ensure they have not only my support but they know it’s my role to ensure they have the tools and the means to succeed in their role
There’s nothing more confusing and demotivating for a team member than not understanding how to succeed
Be more forthright about my knowledge gaps when I didn’t have answers to questions they ask. I inherently assumed I should to have all the answers to be their manager. Instead, point them in the direction they might find answers, and be open to learn from them
Don’t promise to do anything you can’t follow through on. When you fail to follow through, be out front and honest about it, and do better next time

“Explain the why of management choices. Inform people earlier rather than later.” As an IC, I’ve always preferred managers who err on the side of transparency. I know that can come with more uncertainty or churn, since it means I might know information before it’s finalized or have to deal with an upcoming change that I don’t have control over. But I also know how to understand and deal with my emotions and reactions. I know that I can’t control everything. I know things might happen that I disagree with or that I would do differently. But I’d rather know, because I can make better decisions with better information.

As a manager, I want to operate from that same place of transparency. I want to make sure my team has the information they need to make the best decisions for themselves. I know that this approach might require extra coaching and communication, because it does mean inviting more feedback loops from the people who are being informed and might have questions or concerns - but I think that’s a worthwhile tradeoff to encourage transparency within the team culture.

“Be present and available to everyone; be an advocate for their best selves.” I want to create an environment where my team feels personally and professionally supported. We bring our whole selves to work, and I need to make sure people feel safe doing that. Part of my job as a manager is really listening and paying attention to the people on my team. How are they feeling? How did that project onboarding go? How is their work-life balance? What stressors are they experiencing right now? What are they worried about, happy about, nervous about? This assumes building a level of trust over time, but understanding my team means I can do a better job of giving them what they need to succeed. I have a really bad memory, and I love the suggestion to take notes so I can make sure I’m keeping track of the events or work that people need support around.

Someone also suggested setting the example of taking sick time and vacation time. I am a huge advocate for this - your sick time and your vacation time is absolutely yours to take! If you’re sick, you deserve to have the time to recover and come back when you’re well. Also, nobody else wants to get sick - don’t be patient zero for the flu that wrecks its way through your office. And I am definitely the person who takes all of my vacation. When it’s unlimited, I average about 5 weeks of vacation. I give notice way in advance, I check with teams and projects before I’m out, and I don’t check email or Slack while I’m gone. Taking vacation time, even if it’s just giving yourself a four-day weekend at home, helps you relax and recharge. It’s the “life” part of that work-life balance we hear so much about.

“Be the leader each person needs.” As an able-bodied straight white cis woman without kids, advocating for everyone’s best self also means being able to set aside my privilege and my assumptions of work-life needs. I don’t know what it’s like to be a caretaker for an infirm parent. I don’t know what it’s like to be Black, or gay, or disabled. I need to put in the work to meet people where they are. It’s my job to create an environment of compassion and trust where people truly feel safe bringing their whole selves to work at whatever level is comfortable for them.

“Be forthright about my knowledge gaps, and and be open to learn from the people who report to you.” As a manager, your ability to contribute and learn with your team sets the example for everyone else to have that mindset. The ability to say “I don’t know” is such a great skill. If you can’t admit to not knowing something, how can you learn? We’re in an industry where things change all the time - it’s not reasonable to assume that you’d know everything!

But I can see how it might feel hard to say in front of people who report to you. As a new manager, you might feel pressure to act like you have it all together and know all the answers. Personally, I’ve struggled to respect managers or leadership that is incapable of saying those three little words. It causes a lot of toxicity because it creates an environment where other people don’t feel safe saying it. The appearance of knowing everything doesn’t serve you and it doesn’t serve your team. It’s better to lead by the example of admitting when you don’t know something and then doing the work to find out.

It also means acknowledging that you can learn from the people you manage. You hired them for their expertise and experience, so let them use it! It speaks to a really positive culture when there’s a mix of knowledge, skills, and experience where everyone can learn from each other without shame or judgement.

“There’s nothing more confusing and demotivating for a team member than not understanding how to succeed.” I feel this. As a QA Engineer, a lot of my jobs have been fairly self-defined. There was no pre-existing criteria for success, which meant I was free to try and decide what success looked like for myself. On the one hand, there’s a certain freedom to this that I’ve really enjoyed. On the downside, it meant that sometimes my definition of success would get torpedoed when someone else decided that they had an opinion after all - and we did not have the same idea of success. I don’t want my team to experience that frustration, or the stress of having to meet unknown expectations. I’ll have expectations as a manager, but I also need to remember to take individual needs and goals into account. We can create and meet expectations of success in a way that serves both the company and the people on my team.

What say you, tech managers? How did you create a positive and supportive culture for your team? Join the conversation by leaving a comment here or replying on Twitter!

Advice for New Managers

Angela Riggs — Wed, 15 Jan 2020 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve recently started in my first role as a manager! I recognize that this isn’t just a promotion from being an individual contributor (IC) - it’s a separate career path, and it requires a different way of working. As a new manager, I want to learn from the experiences and expertise of other managers! So last week, I asked a question on Twitter: Tech managers, what is something you wish you’d done differently in your early manager roles?

I got so many great responses! It was very cool to see how many managers out there took the time to share some advice, or even congratulate me and wish me luck. I spent a lot of time reading through the replies, and it was also really neat to see how the replies lent themselves to a handful of themes: culture, support & self-care, what it means to actually be a manager, and managing people effectively. One-on-one meetings was also a big theme, but that is more easily boiled down to:

schedule your 1:1s
don’t cancel your 1:1s
never ever say “let’s chat” with no warning and no agenda.

But what about those other themes? There’s a lot to unpack there, and I really want to try and capture my understanding of them through the advice that was shared. I want this article to act as a reminder for myself as I’m getting started, but also as a resource to share for other managers in tech. Instead of having one enormous article, I’m going to use this as a jumping-off point. I think this will be a great way to introduce the advice and themes at a high-level, and be able to dive deeper into each theme with more consideration in subsequent articles.

Culture

This means the culture you create for your people and your teams as a manager. What sort of environment do you want to work in? What culture are you building? What are your values, and how do you communicate them?

Support & Self-Care

Whether you’re a brand-new manager or have been doing it for years, you can benefit from the advice and support of other people doing the same thing as you. It helps to have people to bounce ideas off of, troubleshoot challenges, and celebrate your wins with you. Having what Lara Hogan calls a manager Voltron can help you build your best manager self. At the same time, you need to take care of your human self so you can be your best manager self.

Being a Manager

What even is this job? What do you… do all day? Switching careers from an IC to a manager means understanding what your responsibilities are now, and what success looks like.

Managing People Effectively

Speaking of your responsibilities as a manager… learning how to effectively manage people is important! Whether it’s our own time as a manager or being managed, we all have experiences that range from fantastic to benign neglect to actively terrible. How do you get closer to the fantastic side of the spectrum? How do you coach and mentor and manage people - their goals, their growth, their careers?

Resources

Along with the advice based on personal experience, people recommended resources that have helped them become better managers. I’m not familiar with all of these, so YMMV, but also keep in mind that different resources can resonate differently for everyone.

The Manager’s Path, Camille Fournier
The Making of a Manager, Julie Zhuo
The Memo, Minda Harts
Resilient Management, Lara Hogan
Radical Candor, Kim Scott
Ask a Manager, Alison Green
Better Allies, Karen Catlin
97 Things Every Engineering Manager Should Know, Various authors

To everyone who retweeted and replied, THANK YOU. I’m super excited about starting down this new career path, and this support and knowledge-sharing is an amazing way to get started!

Next up - culture!

Self-Reflection and Lessons on Useful Advocacy

Angela Riggs — Mon, 28 Oct 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Through a series of conversations and interactions dealing with white supremacy and advocacy on Twitter, I’ve learned some lessons on what it means to begin being a useful advocate. I wrote a short thread on some of those lessons, but I wanted to write them down in a more permanent spot and to expand on some of them in a more meaningful way. This is mostly a way for me to continue to reflect on those conversation, but I also hope that it helps other white people be better advocates for marginalized people.

The conversations in particular were around a white woman broadly tone-policing people who do diversity and inclusion work in tech; a white man who broke into those conversations and attacked participants - especially several Black women - who were trying to educate the first woman; and another white man who entered the conversation by prioritizing the need for niceness over the needs of the people being harassed, as well as calling out a Black woman who was doing (and does) a lot of work to advocate for diversity & inclusion in tech (it’s actually her job).

I’ll start with some definitions that Kim Crayton highlights in her work - you can see them on her website along with some others.

Privilege: is about access. Defined as “a special right, advantage, or immunity granted or available only to a particular person or group.”
Underrepresented: is about numbers. Defined as “insufficient or inadequate representation.”
Marginalized: is about treatment. Defined as “treating (a person, group, or concept) as insignificant or peripheral.”

When a racist or bully (henceforth known as $JERK) is showing themselves to be a racist or bully, believe them.
Giving $JERK the benefit of the doubt in their motivations contributes to the harm they’re doing. For one thing, it allows them to continue their harm for longer. But it’s also important to know that the benefit of the doubt is often a privilege reserved for white people. Marginalized groups are forced to prove themselves ten times over for something that white people can be given the benefit of the doubt for. When we’re talking about whether someone was “racist by accident” or “they said {racist thing} but they’re not really like that”, it’s incredibly damaging and harmful for the people on the receiving end of that racism. You can begin to be a useful advocate by resisting your urge to give that benefit of the doubt, but you can continue your advocacy by looking for receipts of past behavior - they’re often easy to find.
Engage without the assumption that $JERK wants to change their behavior. They likely don’t, and engaging them in good faith allows them to continue doing harm. A lot of racists and bullies will respond in ways that seem that they want to be helpfully educated and invite thoughtful conversation, but they are really setting themselves up to continue repeating their harmful and racist behavior. If you respond, do so with the assumption that you are not leading $JERK toward a path of enlightenment about their behavior, but maybe with the hope that a bystander will learn something. It’s also okay to respond to them without any politeness or niceness at all - telling them to scram is acceptable. Being a useful advocate means supporting the people being harmed, and sometimes that means standing up to $JERK and telling them to GTFO.
Make sure you’re not speaking FOR someone. During my participation in the conversations, I was trying to advocate for a few Black women who were being harassed and bullied by $JERK, but I ended up speaking over another Black woman who was actually doing the work to counter $JERK. She wasn’t being bullied, and she didn’t want me associating her as his victim.
It was hard for me to say the words “you’re supporting white supremacy.” We see all the time how society shies away from speaking plainly about things that make people with privilege uncomfortable, e.g. “racially charged” instead of “racist.” Call it what it is. This country was built on white supremacy. The infrastructure of pretty much everything rests on that foundation. As a white woman, I can be a useful advocate by speaking the truth, even when it’s hard, which reduces the ability for someone to hide their racist behavior behind less impactful words. Allowing $JERK to hide behind wishy-washy phrasing supports their racist behavior.
When someone calls you out on your own behavior, swallow your defensiveness and apologize for your action or impact without centering yourself. Then do better.
Make sure your desire to be an ally doesn’t overrun someone else’s desire to be removed from the toxic conversation that’s happening. If you decide to continue engaging the person doing harm, consider whether it’s appropriate to keep the people being harmed in that conversation. Don’t let your eagerness to be an ally end up continuing to force the toxicity/abuse/etc into their space.
Don’t center civility over truth. Tone-policing is often employed to support white supremacist and racist behavior. It can take the form of a $JERK saying that they’ll listen to your side, but only if you speak calmly (followed by a callout of your angry tone and how you’re actually the one being toxic here). It can take the form of white people at work assigning angry or rude behavior to Black men and women speaking passionately about something, or even just using a regular conversational tone.
Amplifying the voices and work of others can be more useful advocacy than adding your own voice to the mix.
As Kim points out in this tweet, I don’t get to call myself an ally. “Only those who you support can determine through your consistent, demonstrated behavior if your efforts are valued as an ally.” But I can work to be a useful advocate by supporting, sponsoring, and amplifying people who are marginalized. So other than a specific bullet where I use the word “ally” to indicate that it’s often a title people strive to attain, I’ve transitioned to using “advocate” instead.

My goal is to take these lessons to heart and learn how to be a better, more useful advocate. I might mess up sometimes, and I hope to learn from that too, and I hope it’s in a way that doesn’t cause more harm. I can also learn from other advocates doing the work, and sharing their lessons as well.

Maureen McElany wrote a really good article about white women doing white supremacy in non-profit culture: https://www.wokeatwork.org/post/white-women-doing-white-supremacy-in-nonprofit-culture
Avdi Grimm wrote about his education and self-reflection after seeing the same conversation that I referenced at the beginning of this post: https://avdi.codes/on-gatekeeping-complicity-and-arrival/
Kim Crayton is the founder of #CauseAScene and uses her platform to educate and advocate for safety, inclusion, and diversity in tech.

Shift Teams, Not Testers

Angela Riggs — Wed, 20 Feb 2019 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve written about the many hats that testers wear, and the importance of collaboration between testers and engineers. My thinking in those articles focused mainly on the work that testers put into their teams, but lately I’ve been considering the other side - the effort that teams and companies put into their QA engineers and testers.

The “shift left” narrative is popular, and I think the underlying concept is important. But rather than focusing on testers shifting left, what happens if we refocus to teams and companies shifting their mindset and their process?

I’ve been on teams that understood and appreciated my involvement early on, and enthusiastically brought me into discoveries, architecture planning, client meetings and demos. I’ve been with companies who understood the benefit of the “extra” work I did beyond feature testing and release management, but didn’t appreciate it and didn’t offer the support I needed to work without burning out. I’ve been on teams who sequestered my role as “review and release”, and pushed back when I tried to do documentation, process improvements, or feature initiatives.

It’s not really about encouraging testers to get involved earlier in the SDLC. Most of the testers I know already want this, and understand the importance of it. We know that we bring skills and insights that will benefit the product and the team when we’re included from the beginning. Being involved earlier also benefits us as testers, because it gives us a better base of knowledge about the thing we’re testing, and we’re better equipped to understand and mitigate the risks.

When I’ve been part of a team or organization with a limited definition of the QA role, I’ve found that having a sponsor or advocate really makes a difference. When I’m trying to shift people’s mindset and expectations, it helps to have someone who supports the idea that testers on teams are part of the team, and need to be included as such. It helps if your advocate is a team lead or senior engineer, because their implicit leadership role gives credibility to their opinion. An advocate can call out the “glue work” and help make it visible to the rest of the team. They can explain from their engineering perspective why it’s useful to have someone with a testing mindset in planning meetings. They can support quality process suggestions, and give you feedback on how to roll it out.

I’m curious to hear how other testers have tackled this - how did you get buy-in from your team about shifting their expectations of your role? Did you tag someone to be an advocate, or did you find another way?

A Beginner's Guide to Test Automation

Angela Riggs — Wed, 20 Feb 2019 00:00:00 +0000

[Originally published on Techwell’s StickyMinds ]

If you’re new to automated testing, you’re probably starting off with a lot of questions: How do I know which tests to automate? Why is automated testing useful for me and my team? How do I choose a tool or framework? The options for automated testing are wide open, and you may feel overwhelmed.

I want to help turn some of your “unknown unknowns” into “known unknowns”! The goal of automation is to create anti-fragile tests that are easy to understand, maintain, and hand off. I’ll get you closer to that goal by answering some questions that many of us had when we first started with automated testing, and I’ll also give you some additional questions that are good to consider.

Introducing Automation

Once you’ve decided to start automating, the next step is probably to introduce the idea to your team. Automation may not be the only work you’re doing, but it is going to be a lot of work! Trying to squeeze it in between your regular work means it probably won’t end up getting completed. In order to really succeed with automation work, you’ll need to get buy-in from the team to dedicate your time and effort toward it.

I started the conversation by explaining why automation is important and how it’s useful to our work. One of the things I try to establish with engineering teams is the idea that no single type of testing should bear the responsibility for quality. Different methods serve different purposes, and they are all part of the whole.

Automation can be useful for testing lower-risk functionality, which frees you up to focus on higher-risk, high-priority, or more complicated functionality. On the other hand, maybe you have some high-risk items that will need to be tested regularly, and creating automated testing for those items would create more confidence in them.

Our biggest risk as a team was transitioning from our existing monolith repository to a new microservices codebase. Offering to create automated regression tests had a lot of support from the team: engineers benefited because they could have higher confidence that their work wasn’t breaking anything, and our product owner had confidence that any breaking changes would be quickly found before releasing to production. It also benefited me, since I was now going to automate all the repetitive testing scenarios!

When you’re proposing automation, consider what the team needs are, then determine how you can include automation in a way that balances those needs. You’re more likely to get support if the benefits are more easily felt, so ask your product owner or developers what’s important to them. Overall, the goal is to make sure your automation efforts are supported by the team so you can focus on creating tests that support the team in turn.

Choosing a Tool

One of the most common questions when starting automated testing is “What tool or framework should I use?” The answer, as with many things, is “It depends.” There are several questions you’ll want to consider:

Who is writing the automated tests?
What kinds of tests are you running?
For paid frameworks, does your department have a budget?
If the tool is open source, is there good documentation and community support?

If the developers are writing unit tests, they’re probably going to write them in the same language as the rest of the codebase. If they’re using PHP, they might look at PHPUnit; for JavaScript, they might check out Jest. The goal here is really to make it as easy as possible for developers to incorporate testing in their regular development workflow. So instead of being prescriptive about the framework they use for testing, the focus should be on helping them find the right tool for their needs.

When I’m considering automation tools, my main considerations are usually choosing between code-based and codeless, and open source versus paid.

In my role as a QA engineer, I’ve typically been responsible for QA and testing on multiple engineering teams at a time. It’s not feasible that I’d be solely responsible for automation on all of the teams, so I approach automation with the idea that the developers will also be contributing to these tests. That leads me to choose code-based frameworks, because it follows a pattern of working that the developers are familiar with, and it keeps the work in the same repo as the codebase. A codeless solution would mean learning a totally new tool, another login to keep track of, and testing that’s a bit removed from the codebase they’re already in every day.

When considering open source versus paid, I’ve often run into budgetary restrictions that cause me to choose open source. In comparing open source options, I consider how actively the tool is maintained—are there lots of open, unanswered issues and pull requests? When was the codebase last updated? I look at the documentation and see how easy it is to install and start writing my first tests. If I can, I ask other testers if they’ve had experience with the tool and what they thought of it.

Keep in mind that your needs and situation may differ from mine. This information isn’t intended to tell you what your answers should be, but to give you things to think about. The goal is to consider what you need from an automation tool and understand how to sift through the options to figure out what tool meets your needs.

Writing Your First Test

When I started writing my regression tests, I was focused on getting the tests to pass—that’s the goal, right? I’d get one part of the user journey passing, and then start writing tests for the next bit. It was exciting to see the growing list of green checks every time I ran the tests. Eventually, I had our three main user journeys tested and passing. I was giddy with the power of automation!

I also had an enormous test file.

There are a couple of drawbacks to this. First, all the user journeys were being tested as a single test flow. So if something failed along the way, all of the subsequent tests were useless, because they would also now fail. It would also be much harder to update this file if something changed, because I’d have to go through every single step in all of the user journeys to see what else might be affected by the change. In short, I had created a fragile test.

To improve my automation suite and make it more resilient, I broke out the user journey into smaller chunks and placed those chunks into their own test files. It was a fairly tedious process, as I now had to rerun every test to make sure I hadn’t broken it in the extraction.

In my initial excitement over automating my tests, I’d also committed the basic authentication for our staging site. I figured I’d come back to the credentials with a proper setup later, because my focus was writing the tests and having them pass. Fortunately, I realized what I had done before I pushed my commits, and I was able to do some Git maneuvering to remove the committed credentials.

This experience, tedious as it was, taught me the importance of outlining my tests before I start writing them. An outline gives me a better estimate of the time and effort that creating the tests might take, and it can help me prioritize which are most important to complete if my time is more limited. I also realized that dealing with credentials securely should be one of the first tasks to go in the outline.

It’s important not to get caught up in the idea that you need to write tests that pass. Focus instead on creating your tests so that they’re easy to run and maintain and are as secure and anti-fragile as possible.

Best Practices

Security and test structure are just a couple of things you’ll need to think about as you’re writing automated tests. Here are some of the questions I didn’t know I needed to ask when I first started:

Do the tests depend on each other for data?
Are failures easily understood from the logs?
How easy would it be for someone else to update your tests?

Ideally, your tests can be run in isolation from each other. If they depend on other tests for their data, a failure in one test can have a cascading effect. Whether you’re using fixture data to test at the unit or service level, or testing a user journey at the UI level, make sure the tests can be run independently. Not only does this help you create anti-fragile tests, it makes it much easier to pinpoint failures when they do occur.

And you will have failures, but that doesn’t mean you wrote a bad test. On the contrary, this means you wrote a useful test that caught a failure! Once a test has failed, you need to investigate why, and there are ways to make this easier on yourself.

Don’t just stick to the happy paths as you’re writing tests—make sure you’re including error messaging. If your test doesn’t have an error message, a failure only tells you that the test didn’t succeed; it doesn’t tell you why it wasn’t successful. Having a clear error message helps you narrow down where the failure occurred. For instance, throwing an error like “Service didn’t return the expected 200 response” is much clearer than “It didn’t work” or a silent failure.

By the same token, your test descriptions and test steps should be written for clarity. Test output acts as a log, so you should write your automation with that in mind. Consider a description like “It 404s” versus “Sends a 404 if the file does not exist.” The first one is generic, providing no information beyond expecting a 404. The second example is much more informative, because it tells me that I’m checking for an expected 404 response when the test doesn’t find a file.

Having clear steps and error messages also makes it much easier for the test suite to be maintained and updated, whether it’s by you or someone else. Once the automation is in place, it’s likely that other people on the team will start contributing as well. If you’ve already established a good pattern of writing tests, it’ll be relatively simple for someone else to pick up where you left off.

Go Forth and Automate

The important thing to remember is that it’s not about the One Right Answer to anything. It’s about understanding the questions you’ll need to ask, and how to find the answers that will work for you and your team. Getting support for automation work, creating a practical infrastructure, and choosing the right tool for your needs will give you an excellent foundation for beginning your automation endeavors.

So go forth and automate with confidence. You may not have all the answers yet, but having the questions is a really good start!

Reflecting Back and Looking Forward

Angela Riggs — Mon, 31 Dec 2018 00:00:00 +0000

I don’t typically do a end-of-year post. In fact, I think this is my first one. I wasn’t going to wrote this one, either - mostly because I felt like I hadn’t really accomplished anything. But as I thought back about my 2018, I realized that I actually had accomplished quite a few things that I’m proud of. One of my goals for 2019 is to be more intentional - that is, to do more explicit planning for my path forward, and I know there are things in 2018 that I can use to inform and inspire my approaches and goals for 2019. So my first step toward that is writing this post, thinking about what I did or didn’t do, and how I can use my experiences from the past year to succeed in the new year.

2018 Accomplishments

Overall, 2018 was a really good year for my professional growth outside of work, and I’m happy and proud to look back. I feel like I became more comfortable acknowledging my technical expertise, and started to find my voice and participate more in the software testing community.

✏️ I wrote a lot in 2018! I wrote about my role as a QA engineer; learning about change management; and reflected on the kind of leader I like to be. In addition to just writing for my own blog, Jess Lee reached out and asked me to cross-post on The Practical Dev, which was super exciting! In August, I became a paid author when TechBeacon asked me to write an article for them, which kind of blew my mind. And a month after that, I got to write an article for TestCraft about building better relationships between developers and QA engineers.

👯 In early 2018, I participated in a Career & Technical Panel for Women Who Code PDX. It was a lot of fun (and I got to share the spotlight with some of my favorite women and coworkers), but it was also one of the first times that I spoke to people in software and tech about what I do as a QA engineer. I remember I felt generally nervous about being on a panel and answering questions, but I felt confident about being able to answer them well - no imposter syndrome!

📢 2018 is the year that I gave my first conference talks! I spoke about automating visual regression testing at PNSQC, and how I helped create a culture of quality at TestBash USA. I also met some really fantastic people at the conferences, which felt really good.

💰 In addition to writing and speaking, I got a new job in 2018 - my second job as a QA engineer, and one that came with a 40% pay raise. In part, it was a good reassurance that being successful as a QA engineer wasn’t a fluke, and it was also gratifying to remember that my skills and how I carry them out are in demand and useful.

2019 Goals

I’ve learned that I actually really like public speaking - I enjoy sharing my experiences and my knowledge with other people, and having a voice in the testing community. I also learned that I’ll have an anxiety attack about an hour before I go on stage, but once I get up and start talking, I feel good. I did two conferences in 2018, so my goal for 2019 is three conferences! I’ll be speaking at REFACTR in June, and I’m applying to several others for next year as well. Just to put it out into the universe, I’m especially crossing my fingers for CAST and Agile Testing Days (Europe or USA), and I’d love to speak at PNSQC and TestBash again!

I’ve learned that I like leading, even when my official role isn’t a leadership role. I’ve also learned that in my enthusiasm to support and improve, I can push too much or go too fast. Even if I know that the changes or ideas I’m suggesting are better, I need to wait for everyone else to catch up and decide for themselves. I want to be more thoughtful about how I lead people, and more patient about taking the time to share my thoughts and listen to theirs.

I’ve learned that there are some great communities in social media, especially Twitter and Slack. In 2019, I want to be a more active participant in those communities - less passive reading, and more active and positive contributions to the conversations that are happening. I’ve been inspired by people I’ve met online, and I want to be more engaged in the learning and support that goes on.

I’ve learned that I like learning, and I feel bored and unmotivated when it feels like I’m doing the same work or solving the same challenges over and over. I want to broaden my testing skills in 2019 - security testing and performance testing are two areas that I’m especially interested in. I also want to be better at understanding and creating effective CI/CD practices.

I focused a lot on my career in 2018, and obviously I still have a lot of professional goals coming into 2019! But I also want to think about personal goals in the new year. I want to learn, and explore, and grow. Some things I want to do in 2019:

baking a new kind of bread once or twice a month
taking one kind of DIY or art class per month (I’ve got my eye on a loom weaving class to start!)
figuring out and maintaining an exercise routine
getting involved in a regular volunteer opportunity
getting back into hiking and exploring around Oregon
read more books & listen to more podcasts

At a high-level, all of this means that I want to take more time for myself in the new year. I will always be a work in progress, and I want to figure out who and how I want to be in 2019, and make progress on being the best version of me.

What are your goals for 2019? What are things that you learned from 2018? Have you figured out the secret to motivating yourself to workout every day, or discovered an amazing bread recipe? Leave a comment - I’d love to hear from you!