Day 9 & 10 of 40: TESTHEAD BOOT CAMP: Money, Mouth, Repeat

So what's the best way to make sure that you will meet a deadline? Loudly announce that you will do it. What's the best way to add even more pressure to the task? Announce it at work and say it will be part of your company's "Geek Friday Happy Hour".

See, here's what we do every Friday. We have someone from the development or test team come in and share a technical topic. Today was my turn and I decided to share a talk I heard at the Pacific Northwest Software Quality Conference about Polarities. At the end of the talk, since everyone knew that it was likely I would only be able to give one more of these (next Friday is Christmas Eve, the Next Friday is New Year's Eve, that left the 7th or the 14th, and since the 14th is my last day, I piped up and said "I will be demonstrating how to automate tests using the Selenium 1.0 Framework for my last Geek Friday Happy Hour!"... and with that, my fate is sealed (LOL!).

Seriously, I am cool with this for a number of reasons. First and foremost, it will give me the perfect excuse to put together my Ruby on Rails test environment and have something built to test against. Second, it will give me the time that I need to work through the book that David Burns published w/ Packt Publishing in the U.K. What's more, it will allow me to hopefully leave a full framework that's been documented that other testers can follow along and build on top of. I can do some basic stuff, but I want to make something more substantial that other can build on top of. that way, I can leave and think that I have something that will "live on" while I am gone. That and the frantic reworking of our company's wiki to include all of my notes, half baked ideas, and context-specific practices... we don't use best practices here when we talk about testing (I hope that change sticks ;) ) so that we can capture all of "that Voodoo that I do".

So yes, I'm a huge fan of putting one's money where one's mouth is, even at the potential of eating a Size 10 Converse All Star. Pressure makes it all seem much more real :).