Off Topic Posts

How to Build a Successful Team

How to Build a Successful Team

After reading one of my previous posts about improving the team, one of my friends asked me to write about my experience in building a team. In fact, there are many articles available on the internet about team building and several of these articles talk about team building stages which are Forming-Storming-Norming-Performing. Moreover, we all agree that good leadership skills especially social skills are highly needed to build a team successfully. Now, let me ask a question here: How about building the team with Love and Respect in addition to trust? (more…)

Quitting is an Option!

Employees in working environments get promoted to new positions such as management or leadership positions. Moreover, it is really common that those promoted employees have the feeling and make the assumption that if you become a manager or a leader then this means you should keep there. In other words, you should never leave that position to someone else for any reason. However, what if you are not getting enough support in your new position as a leader or manager? What if you could not satisfy the interests and goals set by the organization even if those interests and goals contradict with the tasks of the new position? (more…)

Rounding Off this Year’s Resolutions*

In January 7, 2013, I wrote a post in this blog and the title was “New Year.. New Start”. In that post, I talked about making 2013  a year of success and I shared some ideas that hopefully helped a lot of us. Those ideas were mainly about setting goals for 2013 and achieving them. These days, we all started to count down for 2014. Indeed days are moving so fast. The question to everyone is: What have you achieved in 2013? (more…)

Why don’t Developers Test?

Several times and when I get to see some output from the development team, I do ask myself: What if developers have tested their work well? Unfortunately, the majority of developers stop when they get the job done with development only. They do not walk the extra mile and do testing. If they do testing of their own work, then many software issues would have been solved early which means less time, effort and costs for the project. The question is: why don’t developers test? (more…)

When Testers Lead

When Testers Lead

Usually and during the lifetime of any software development project, programmers do take the lead and control almost all project activities. They keep their focus and goal to finish the tasks especially writing the code in addition to to get it running. Programmers are always in a rush especially when they follow Agile methodology. This rush causes them to ignore testing of their code including both unit testing and integration testing. Also and once you ask programmers about testing or why they ignore testing then you will find out that they consider testing  as a destructive activity and will waste their time. In addition, programmers do believe that testing team should find all the issues in the software including issues with the code. Unfortunately, not only programmers think like that. You may find some senior employees or even those in management level who share the same thoughts. However, what if the opposite thing happens? What if testing team takes the lead? (more…)