Thoughts provoked by the Information Age (ACS magazine)

There were several articles that tweaked my interested and awoken the sleeping grey matter from its weekend slumber! The first was one titled "Investing in careers with SFIA" which describes how Westpac has incorporated the Skills Framework for the Information Age (SFIA) as part of managing the 'whole employment life-cycle'. SFIA has been at the front of my mind recently as it's featured in many discussions I've had with clients and service providers alike. Initially I was drawn into reading this article because of the relevance to my current activities-discussions which centre around the implementation and benefits of the framework but two-thrids of the way through I found the paragraph circled in the picture below. My first thought was of all the skills in SFIA (there are 89 odd skill areas) the Westpac executive choose to highlight testing, not Development, Not BA's and not Project Managers but Testing. The article didn't explain why testing and not the others, but what I liked was that his person understands that testing is a Professional Skill, with a career path just like any other the skills in the Framework. At the recent Test Managers Forum there was lots of discussion surrounding professionalising testing and I am now seeing evidence we are heading in the right direction! My thought is that the next step will be to have the difference streams of testing (Performance, Automation, Functional) recognised as skills in there own right - more too follow on that one.

The article can be found on page 38-39 of the Information Age.

The next article that captured my attention was  'ICT's biggest money wasters' (pg 46-49). Unfortunately in the software testing game we all too often see evidence of the number 1 cited cause of waste: "Dusty Software Licenses". For the most part I've seen this occur in the niche areas of software testing Automation and Performance Testing and they are usually accompanied by/or caused in part by number 1's closest friend, number 6: "ICT projects gone wild". 

All to often I have seen organisations spend Thousands of dollars on tools to make the testing process more efficient and end up delivering far less than was originally specified. There are many reasons for this result, the least of which is that within IT we often attempt upgrades and process improvement activities internally and we don't apply the same level of rigour and governance that we do as when we are delivering project for an external stakeholders. We often put the tool subject matter expert or super user in charge of the project, on top of there other duties and expert that it'll just happen. The lesson here is that all internal projects (upgrades, automation and performance testing) should be run as projects with milestones, reporting, have established baselines and be constantly measured, with individuals held to account for the time & $$ invested. 

Teleworking is a subject that is close to my heart, as I Telework for one of my jobs :o) It works really well for me (and my employer I hope!). I enjoy the flexibility to do what needs to be done in and around the other things in my life (Family & my other job). The part of the article that made me smile, and then ponder was the part were the author said the 'non-productive time' of the Teleworker can be put towards doing the household chores like cleaning, doing the dishes or preparing dinner - the tasks that usually get done during personal time. This made me go hmmmmm..... Initially I was like, well, that's not cool and as an employer and supervisor I'm not sure I agree. But on reflection, and when considering the alternative proposed in the article (surfing the net or chatting) I'm now thinking that if that is the case, well it'll save us some $$ on bandwidth and download fees and potentially stop the disruption to the other employees and causing them to be unproductive so maybe on balance it's not such a outlandish statement. Though, Boss, if your reading this, this is my only 'unproductive time' ;-p