Hello everybody.
Today I’d like to write about something I discovered over the years of researching and following certain people and movements in Testing and Programming world.
Let me tell you that there are quite an amazing amount of stuff to be read out there. It’s overwhelming.
Let’s talk about Methodologies first.
There are many out there currently. In programming and in testing too. Many speak of ways how you should or should not do you work. Many of them tend to say that others aren’t the right way. However just as many tend to say that you can share your knowledge or you can only partially use that particular methodology because they realised that if they say others are crap they close themselves from evolving and they create a way of thinking that will say: Ohhh yeah? You can’t tell me what I should do! Who are you to say that that technique is wrong?
So they are in threat of alienating followers through this kind of behaviour. Just as commercials stopped saying they product is 100% awesome. Now they say 8/10 people find it awesome. This gives you the thought that surly they must not be lying if they admit that somebody thinks their product is crap.
How do you know then that a methodology is lying or is right or is “The way to go.” or that it is in fact a valid methodology?
By careful observation and deduction of facts while not leaving out of sight your own ignorance and view points / beliefs.
You have to address something by taking yourself a level above the problem domain. Carefully observe various situations and always approach it with scepticism. Guilty until proven otherwise.
Thought Patterns
If you do this for a while you will realize that most of the people out there are trying to sell their own crap in some way or another. They will put it into nice little packages will tell you neat little success stories and will make you believe in what they think is right. How do you shield yourself against that?
By. drum rolls. learning. You must make your mind to be a weapon of mass destruction. You must hone your skills of thinking you must hone your skills of analysing and understanding complex patterns. In the world there is nothing without a Pattern. Everything follows a greater scheme. You have to find it, grab hold of it and never let it go. You have to understand how people think and how you would exploit that. What there weaknesses are and why are they there in the first place?
When you achieve that you will truly begin to see how the world works and looks like under the hood. Try it on small things first. Try to follow the thought patterns of your coworker. Try to note down his mood changes based on days and current view point. Based on news and knowledge that you can attain from his life. After a while you will be able to predict certain moves and mood changes. You will begin to predict working capacity based on the sun is up or not or if it’s snowing or raining.
All these will bring you to a mind state where you can look beyond words. You will notice the patterns behind blog posts. You will notice the bullshit out of the documentation. You will notice when somebody is just writing for the sake of writing. You will notice.
Lies.
You have to understand the One Truth in life. We all lie! And the we all lie about lying.
If you get that you will start to think more before you approche something. You read a methodology a description a “new found” idea and you realize the lies behind it if there are any big ones. You realize that he / they is / are only trying to be clever or only trying to be famous. They might have something interesting to say, not everything is a lie fortunately, but let’s face it. Most if it is.
You have to shield yourself against that. You have to shield yourself from biases, from lies, from cheats, from make beliefe and from posts that are only posts for the sake of posting.
What are the tell tail signs? Are there any? Of course there are..
Big words, Punctuation and visually carefully constructed blog posts( usually tries to hide something between a facade of good looks), few practical examples, too much of: “.then this will definitely help you improve.”, too much talk without saying anything interesting. and so on ans so forth.
End words
Now think about these things for a second. Think about thinking. Think about how you can improve. Learn Lateral Thinking. General Systems Thinking. Logical Reasoning. Deductive Thinking. Inductive Thinking. Critical Thinking. And if you did all this. And you find yourself wondering around the world with an open eye seeing things for the first time. Noticing things for the first time. Watching, observing, thinking. Come back and read this post again whit THOSE things in mind. 😉
Thanks for reading.
Gergely.