The TCL Vision - Where will we be by 2020?

We have a Big Hairy Audacious Goal (BHAG) at TCL, which is to say that we have a dream. A dream of what the company will become and we've set out to achieve it by 2020. It's not the only dream the company will ever have, but for now it's the priority one and it's the one that is very personal to the founders, shareholders and owners of the company.

So what does this dream look like? The short answer is that there is no short answer to that question. Like most dreams it's a little hazy when you wake up, but the outline looks something like this:

We want TCL to become a world wide, world class, centre of testing excellence. This means that we want to establish TCL as a Centre of Testing excellence which has world class solutions and we are able to deliver them to any industry in any country.

When we have reached that goal, the company will look something like this:

Our company will benefit its employees and their families. They will benefit financially, emotionally, ethically, technically and physically through the way the company is run.

Our company will be financially robust and secure. We will have sufficient alerts and contingency plans in place to ensure we can survive economic peaks and troughs whatever the root cause.

The communities in which we operate will also benefit from TCL. We will actively make efforts to be involved in those communities and the issues that are important to them. We will actively demonstrate in our social conscience and encourage it in our team and the Clients and Suppliers with whom we engage.

We will also ensure that some of our profits are given to worthwhile charities. These are charities that are important to the people in our company.

Our culture will be totally inclusive, with all levels of the organisation being informed and involved. Each person in the company will have a personal understanding and empathy with their colleagues in relationships that demonstrate integrity and respect at every juncture. There will be awards each year for long service and through this long service we will ensure a continuity of culture and corporate memory at the foundation of the company.

A team that supports and focuses on the vision will regularly introduce new ideas to keep the company aligned with the purpose, values and BHAGs and will be a proven source of information and inspiration around the company. Competition to be part of this forum will be high, and it will be necessary for the participants to undergo three month secondments to the team to get the work done.

The TCL solutions will be aligned and accredited with organisations such as ISO and the BCS. Our method SMaRT will be recognised as a management model and be used as a template and standard in blue chip organisations around the world.

Our employees will be proud to belong to TCL and will contribute to the company progression each day with energy and enthusiasm.

We will be using the latest technology and involved with the strategic decision making process with each of our clients having demonstrated consistently our ability to add value to that process.

Our reputation will be such that there will be healthy competition to join TCL, and the selection process will be rigorous to ensure that only people who display the core values and have the aptitude to support and contribute to the TCL vision are involved.

We want to take testing to a new level. A professional discipline that is consistently recognised for its value and resourced, planned and funded accordingly within all development lifecycles.

Our Research and Development capability will lead the way with innovative and intuitive solutions that are derived from the latest theory, technology and thinking across the world. We will involve and include academic research and consideration as well as commercial best practice.

Our solutions will have been benchmarked with companies in five continents and proven within more than ten industries including Defence.

We will be the testing partner of choice for Safety Critical Applications and SIL levels 3 and 4.

We will have offices on three continents and research and development capabilities at each. These will have links to Universities and we will provide some financial support and assistance to these universities in the areas of research that will further help the TCL purpose.

Our presentations at industry forums will be actively sought and solicited and our representatives praised for their credentials, innovation and inspirational style of presenting.

When a project declares that their testing will be conducted by TCL it will be perceived at all levels of an organisation that this is the best way to go and that both cost and quality will be in ideal balance for this delivery.

We will be seen for our Quality and Innovation but we will never be seen as overpriced - simply realistic for the demonstrable value we add.

Now, there are lots of things left to think about with regards to how TCL will look in 2020, and each year we challenge the dream and things become progressively clearer as to what we can achieve, what the market wants us to achieve and where things are all going. I hope from reading this article you can already see that some of the things are here now, and some are on there way - in fact you may be involved in making it happen. The spirit of the vision is alive and well. But I suspect that you might also see that some things around the company aren't quite there yet - and from reading this today you will know that we don't want them to stay like that. It just isn't our dream.

I truly believe that if you understand this dream, then you will understand the essence of what TCL is about and what the founders of the company are trying to achieve. As the "custodian" of the vision, I welcome any thoughts you have on this dream, this BHAG, of ours and warmly invite you to call or email me to discuss things. You can also take advantage of my time at roadshows, company parties and promotion days to talk to me in person.

Stewart Noakes

Chairman

Transition Consulting Limited

Jon Wright goes to Boston

PEST Boston III – September 5^th 2007

Yesterday was PEST Boston III, my first PEST!

I arrived in Boston the day before – my first time in America – and although passport control and customs were a bit of a trial (secondary passport control established I knew who I was and who I work for, and the sniffer dog established that I sometimes carry sandwiches or fruit to work in my laptop bag!) I eventually collected my rental car – with satnav – and drove straight into the first tunnel out of Boston Logan International…

Since then I’ve been having a brilliant time – among others, I’ve met with people from Northeastern University and Wellesley College, and tomorrow I’m meeting with Stanley Sclaroff of Boston University, where we are about to commence a new scholarship program – exciting times!

It has been really great to meet some people I had already heard about from previous PESTs, and there were a couple of new faces in the group who everyone enjoyed meeting – Hongwei Xi from Boston University, and Sara-Jane Haven from Tufts Health Plan.

The venue was Owen O’Leary’s in Southborough, which worked really well for the number of people we had – but the suggestion from PEST II of a round table in a more secluded area still stands, and if anyone has any suggestions please let us know!

We had two experience reports in the evening – the first from Nancy O’Leary of HP, on automation, which led to an interesting discussion that could easily have gone on for ages had Don not gently reminded me of my role for the evening J

The second experience report came from Dan Downing of Mentora – a case study on the subject of load and performance testing – a thought-provoking account of working with an organisation who appeared to have made some classic mistakes.

Things we learnt this time:

• Automation tools should have comprehensive evalutaion versions to assess their usefulness.
• Beer can have bits of fruit in it and still taste good (our server was pushing the Plum Beer to get a free T-shirt, which we managed for her!)
• Estimation of the maximum expected number of concurrent users for an application can be calculated in some interesting ways.
• Throwing hardware at a performance problem can easily make things worse not better overall.
• Architecture problems might be obvious, but if they're hard to solve they may stay an 'elephant in the room' until it's too late.
• Academia and industry see some things in different ways and each can learn from the other - it was good to have Hongwei with us at this PEST to give a slightly different perspective!
• It is important to establish a set of metrics for automation tools, so their efficiency can be accurately determined for repeat usage

Our PEST website is nearly ready to go live, so hopefully we will soon have a forum for the continuation of some of the lively discussions we have had, and a place for people to keep in touch between events.

In the meantime if anyone would like more information about PEST (or about our scholarship programs) please send me or Stewart an email.

I hope to meet everyone again at some point in the future – thank you to everyone who attended for making it such a good evening. Remember the point of PEST: none of us is as smart as all of us!

Jon (jonathan.wright@transitionconsulting.co.uk)

P.S. Additional thanks to Don St. Pierre for his helpful advice and for booking the venue!

PEST III - 05 September 2007

PEST Boston III is going to be held on 05 September 2007.

The venue is yet to be decided, but likely to be around the Marlborough area again, as this worked out well for most people that came along last time.

Steve Govednik (monster.com) and Dan Downing(Mentora) have voluntered for giving experience reports/challenges to the group next time.

Nadereh (mathworks) and Nancy (HP) have agreed to do stuff for the session after/ be alternates for the session in September.

If you want to come along please send me a mail to confirm, and also please look to bring a buddy. We'd like to get the attendance above 20 this time if possible :)

Stew

PEST Boston II - 18 July 2007

PEST BOSTON II - Brilliant :)

So here we are in Boston, and its PEST II at the Naked Fish restaurant.

Everyone who came last time was here, and we had some new friends too in the form of colleagues from HP Bangalore and Monstor.com.

I was very excited about coming to this PEST. Partly because I was looking forward to seeing everyone again - last time was a lot of fun, and partly because I wanted to tell everyone about our new scholarship scheme which is just starting up at Boston University. Our first outside of the UK, which will start in September this year, and have interns with us in summer '08. Its a very personal passion of mine to invest in the future of our industry, and its wonderful to see the scholarship schemes starting all over the world.

Although we still haven't cracked the venue side of things - it was a bit noisy even in this separated out area - everyone contributed well and we had some great discussions right from the start.

With such a mix of hardware/software experience along with the international flavours from the background of those attending US (7 people), India (2), UK (1), Iranian (1) we had some amazingly different view points as well as a lot of synergy.

The session started with an experience report from our own Don St Pierre, who was taking part in PEST as his last official act with TCL USA. He's off to join EMC from next week, and it was great timing that he could do this before he left.

Dons experience report focused mainly around the experiences he documented in his white paper last October - about the need for separation between QA and development reporting lines, and we were lucky to have Steve with us who had worked with Don on the same project and could add his ideas and recollections too.

We drew on these experiences to look at how we report from testing, and particularly how a set of metrics such as DRE can be used to create an 'apples with apples' comparison across projects. Across the group there was also a lot of experience of how metrics and measurements can hurt you as much as help - with the 'what gets measured gets done' approach that we see a lot with teams.

We also recognised that you can generate 'behaviours that exactly meet the metrics, rather than make sense' - things like if you measure a team on numbers of bugs raised then you get every little typo raised as a separate entry and lots of time wasted.

Now as you can see I remembered my camera so we have a couple of pictures which is great!
(Watch out for this lady at the front of the table - shes a trouble maker ;) )

Don did some great prep work for this session and gave out copies of his white paper and some definitions of DRE. We also shared some best practices from TCL in terms of using the DRE metrics at gateways and to help create measurement of process maturity.

Some other things that we learnt between us across the session included:

• There is a job website called Dice which costs only $60 per posting, compared to Monster.com which is circa $360
• QA can often be mistakenly seen as the root cause of defects
• Root cause analysis on defects is very important in a continuous improvement environment. How can we set up our defect tracking to then generate suitable reports to do this? Perhaps a topic for next time.
• Common performance issues are missed when environments do not represent live in a quantifiable / scalable way
• Upper management can often try to micro manage QA - and when they do they look at things they understand rather than (perhaps) the things that are actually important
• Date and budget driven objectives that don't include quality - and particularly post live quality metrics generate very unhelpful behaviours on projects
• Bringing customer found bugs into the post implementation review and post live defect tracking is very important in a continuous learning environment
• Release specific scorecards are very useful - particularly when they track DRE
• Public vs Private metrics - what can you track and what can/should you publish. A difficult balance
• Reporting to senior managers, VPs and Presidents means finding things that both interest them and help us - you cant just talk quality, you need to talk value.

A lot of stuff came out from these discussions, and I'll be very pleased when our PEST website is up and running so that we can all share and discuss things online - and keep much better records. Hopefully that will be in September, just in time for the next PEST in Boston - week of 3rd September.

That's about all for now, except to say:

• I'm hoping to have a private room, with a round table for the next PEST Boston - probably at the naked fish restaurant again
• Steve Govednik (monster.com) and Dan Downing(Mentora) have volunteered for giving experience reports/challenges to the group next time
• Nadereh (mathworks) and Nancy (HP) have agreed to do stuff for the session after/ be alternates for the session in September
• I'm going to look to bring some of the scholarship essays along for the group to have a look at - some of them have been really brilliant
• Don will be coming along to the next PEST, and has promised Matt hes going to bring a few people from EMC too!

Big thanks to everyone who came along this time, and who made it such a great event. Look forward to seeing you next time.
Stew

The point of PEST: None of us is as smart as all of us!

PEST Boston- Metrowest July 18th at the Naked Fish in Westborough Ma.

Hi Folks,
The PEST will be at the Naked Fish in Westborough, MA, on the WEST bound side of Route 9. The new date is Wednesday, July 18th starting at about 5:30 pm. The subject for this PEST will be how to improve defect removal efficiency and approaches used.
I have a more private area, a room where we should be able to talk better.
Thanks and we look forward to seeing you!

PEST "BOSTON" in MARLBOROUGH

The following was written by Stewart Noakes..

PEST Boston - May ‘07
So here I am in Boston and it’s a beautiful day. Matt and I have just been to see HP, at their amazing campus offices in Marlborough – No I have no idea if this is where the cigarettes come from! – and now its time to get ready for PEST Boston!

This is the first one we have run in the USA, and unfortunately after sending out the invites and getting the tables booked at a local Pub 99 Don St Pierre has had a bit of an aberrant week and can"t make it along and so its me and Matt that are going to entertain and excite people about testing!

Luckily, we have a good crowd – or who knows how it might have ended up !

Great to see our friend from Mentora, Dan Downing who came along and got involved straight away. His stories from similar peer sharing forums really opened up the forum and there were some instant lively discussions.

Chris Reeves from Sepaton, Nancy O’Leary from HP, Mike Raia from Gtech and Nadereh Rooein from Mathworks all joined us for the session and got seriously stuck into the sharing from the start. Some tall, cold beers set the scene and half a dozen platters of appetizers also helped matters along.

Our theme today: How to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of testing. A hard one, as it has so much scope, so we used experience reports from two projects that I worked on to create a focus. We talked about how the supplier relationships, process and controls were used along with the questions we had to ask ourselves and the vendors about demonstrating test effectiveness.

The conversation bubbled and boiled into different areas of thought and experience from across our diverse backgrounds which included a great deal of knowledge about hardware and performance testing – two of my very weakest areas. We also got into the tricky area of how to shape and prioritise testing and of course this led to a session on the basics of Risk Based Testing.

2.5 hours well spent. Our ‘AA’ style of ‘Hi, my name is Stew and I’m a tester!’ (followed by a resounding: Hi Stew !) really worked and everyone was like old friends by the time we finished up.

‘So’, I hear you ask! What did you come out with, other than a nice bar tab?

Well:
That testing problems in the UK (such as deadlines and code that doesn’t work and environments that don’t support a basic smoke test etc) are the same in the US
That Risk Based Testing really can help shape things
Not all testers think about the business, or the value of the product they are helping to bring to market
Static testing really can bring down the cost of the overall project
Offshore resourcing doesn’t always get a positive response in the US
There really are 60,000 ways to present statistics including defect detection profiles that are normalised for tester hours e.g. defect number per tester hour
PEST really is a good format
When you are in charge of marketing you really should take a camera with you everywhere so that you can take pictures of things like groups of people at the first PEST Boston.
That beer and good conversation go together well.

We agreed to do it again next quarter, and I think everyone who attended this time will be back. They are all going to look around the office for a buddy to bring with them. That should make for a bigger group – and we’ll have to think about where we hold the next session as the Pub 99 won't cope well with many more people than we had this time (noisy, hard to always hear).

Most rewarding of all for me from this session is that people went back to work and started talking with their teams about Risk Based Testing, and looking at how to make it work for them. Now that is a result!

Over Q2 there will be PESTS run in:
London – Tony Prosser (Tony.Prosser@TransitionConsulting.co.uk)
Bristol – Richard Morgan (Richard.Morgan@TransitionConsulting.co.uk)
Boston – Don St Pierre (Don.St.Pierre@TCL.US.COM)
Bangalore – Grant Obermaier. (Grant.Obermaier@TransitionConsulting.co.uk)

If you want to get involved with any of these then please speak with the organiser to get a place reserved. I think the theme in Q2 will be: How to improve Defect Removal Efficiency, however it is pretty much the way of these things that anything goes and experience – and particularly experience reports – count for everything. If you have an idea, or a war story to share, then don’t hesitate to get involved. Who knows, you might help someone to do stuff better. You might even learning something yourself!

Remember the point of PEST: None of us is as smart as all of us.

Stew

What is ASTQB?
Since I attended the class and passed the ASTQB Certified Tester, Foundation Level, I received several emails asking me what ASTQB is.ASTQB was founded in 2003 as the American Testing Board.
In April 2005, the name was changed to the American Software Testing Qualifications Board. This program has been developed by some of the world's foremost experts in software testing. The program is intended for software professionals who want to prepare for today's testing challenges as well as anticipating tomorrow's software testing demands. This program has been developed in cooperation with the International Software Testing Qualifications Board (ISTQB), organized by ASQF and International Software Quality Institute (ISQI), introducing a truly international standard for software. Cool! Now I am certified world wide!!

Ok why am I telling you this? TCL-US will be offering the class at a substantial discount. The class will run from March 7th through March 9th. If interested please send email to don.st.pierre@tcl.us.com. The class will be held in our corporate headquarters in Burlington, Mass. The class will be delivered by a seasoned trainer who has trained many certified testers and has a high pass rate. Don't delay; this class will fill up quick

STARWest 2006 iPOD Winners

The StarWEST 2006 Survey iPOD winners are Dan Downing of Mentora and Jamie Wetzel of Opnet as the winners. Check back soon for results of the survey which you will find very interesting.