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management
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Practise
Posted by Rich Crowley on Feb 28, 2012 in Personal Improvement, Training | 0 comments
Baseball great Pete Rose was once asked what part of his game preparation set him apart from other players. His response was that he practiced much different than other players. He observed that good hitters tended to practice hitting more than other elements of their game. Good outfielders liked to have fly balls hit to them for long periods so they could hone their abilities taking fungos off the wall. He viewed this as flawed because these were the skills these players were already good at. Improving on those only provided marginal extra...
read morePeople Aren’t Resistant To Change…
Posted by Rich Crowley on Feb 21, 2012 in Change, emotions, psychology, teams | 0 comments
I was thinking today of a seminar I attended several years ago by Tim Daniels of Knoll and Associates. It was really exceptional and I couldn’t remember if I blogged about it or not. As it happens, I did (you can read about it here) but this post was pretty light on detail and I thought I would expand on one of the more interesting tidbits I took from that seminar. Early on, Mr. Daniels asked the audience to raise their hands if they believed, in general, that people are resistant to change. Predictably, a fair number of people in the...
read moreHow Much Info Does One Need To Make A Judgement or Decision?
Posted by Rich Crowley on Dec 22, 2011 in management, psychology | 0 comments
It’s been said that one of the main differences between entrepreneurs and corporate managers is that the former are much more comfortable making decisions with relatively fewer facts than are the latter. I’m one who is more comfortable making decisions or forming judgments with less information than more. I do find it frustrating sometimes that corporate environments require more facts than I believe are necessary to justify decisions or courses of action. I think one of the drivers behind those who need less information is that they...
read moreSoftware Test Automation
Posted by Rich Crowley on Nov 20, 2011 in books, Test Automation | 0 comments
Of the three testing books I read over the past few months, this one was the one that gave me the best overview of test automation as a discipline of its own. What was interesting to me is that the book was written some time ago (1999) and in some places it feels “old”. However, the authors have spent considerable time in this area and are very articulate about the principles that govern automation and these principles seem to me to still apply today based on projects I manage. While the high level principles are what guides...
read more.NET Test Automation Recipes
Posted by Rich Crowley on Nov 20, 2011 in books, Test Automation | 0 comments
This book is for developers. It is well named because it’s a cookbook of code that illustrates how to test using various different automation approaches. I like the variety of different coding examples it showed and how widely the test automation approaches vary across these different types of code. The code samples are easy to try out and while you may only find a handful that help you on any given project, I suspect for the developer who is new to .net and is looking to learn a bit about how to effectively test new code they have...
read moreImplementing Automated Software Testing
Posted by Rich Crowley on Nov 20, 2011 in books, Test Automation | 0 comments
This was one of three books I read recently on test automation. The focus of this book is on how to make a case that test automation is a worthwhile initiative to pursue, how to build the business case for automation and assuming you are able to build that case, how to take the necessary initial steps to get an automation regime in place. What I liked most about this book was how it emphasized the need to separate the automation needs of a given project or projects from the need to get an automation framework or regime in place as a...
read moreFault Lines
Posted by Rich Crowley on Nov 20, 2011 in books | 0 comments
A great read, although the author is an academic in the dismal science so it’s a bit dry. With all the bluster in the popular press documenting the finger pointing from the political right and financial types that it was bad policy and regulatory lapses that caused the meltdown, and finger pointing from the political left and socialist types that it was capitalistic greed (led by the dark cabal that is big finance) that caused the crisis, this was a really well grounded essay explaining that there were many factors that influenced how...
read moreThe Mask
Posted by Rich Crowley on Nov 5, 2011 in people | 0 comments
Most of my working life, I have found that people in the workplace come in two flavours: those that wear a mask and those that don’t. Those that don’t wear a mask are the classic “what you see is what you get”. I believe these are in the small minority. I believe most of us do wear some form of mask. I’m certainly in this latter camp. We put on our work mask before we enter our place of work because there are elements of our personalities that we either don’t want to show at work or that we perceive would...
read moreThe Street-Fighter Element of Leadership
Posted by Rich Crowley on Aug 7, 2011 in leadership | 0 comments
I had an interesting conversation with a good friend yesterday on the US political situation. We are both fans of Obama (though this doesn’t suggest my political ties are necessarily to the right or left) and we had high hopes for him to make a big, positive difference in the world. However, my friend is very disillusioned at this point based on Obama’s performance as a negotiator during the recent debt talks. While we both agree he got taken to the cleaners by the Republicans, I argued he campaigned as someone who could make a...
read moreArchitecture – A Definition I Like
Posted by Rich Crowley on Mar 10, 2011 in Architecture, Design, IT Architecture | 0 comments
My father was a draftsman by trade. His old school skills were beautiful to behold. “Lettering” was the name given to the printing of labels on drawings done on those old drafting boards with sliding arms that allowed lines to be drawn anywhere. He could letter clearer than a typewriter could type. He took his trade to the classroom in later years and I would often practice drawing stuff out of books that he provided – funny shapes, blocks, etc. It was this stuff that first stoked the fires in me about what I wanted to...
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