Modern testing for modern stacks

At Qxf2 the culture is not to measure people by efficiency. I like this kind of management style. It would also depend on what kind of company or service you are providing. In companies where we don't need to be creative, being efficient and keeping people busy may be important. But in a creative, atmosphere you need some free time to think about the work you do, the product you test. Actually, it is also easy to keep yourself busy or show you are busy by creating some outputs which may not be so important. We can be efficient and busy and do some testing which may not be important. Like is some clients the stress on showing progress and reporting work was more important than actual work. Again keeping people free also may have a negative impact. They may misuse their free time. There should be some way to measure your creative work too.

I want to start with Tom Demarco's observation that knowledge workers spend a significant amount of time on tasks with low complexity instead of spending that valuable time on strategic planning and continuous improvement. Many organizations focus more on productivity and efficiency which drives their employees to be always busy or to look busy. They don't have time for anything or anybody apart from their tasks. People don't have time to look around to see what is changing or how to improve. They are always running which could be dangerous at times if they are running in a wrong direction. We should spend a time to plan, reflect on the mistakes we have done, learn lessons from it and change the direction and then move on. We also should spend time on innovation to make the job simpler and better for everyone. This is what has happened in my previous job as a professor. All the faculties had around 20% of admin tasks to do apart from teaching and mentoring. We were always busy doing some tasks and never had time to communicate, brainstorm or think about innovative ways teaching. This environment didn't give space for people to be creative and come up with new techniques. I actually proposed to take away this admin tasks from the professors but the management view was different. In summary, its good to be busy but we need to ask ourselves if we are always busy and don't have time for anything else. In this case, we should re-look at our daily tasks and routines and find some time to SLACK which will allow us to reinvent and innovate.

I like the way he's described efficiency. Generally, Managers takes more responsibilities and pass onto the others so that they get new duties.I have seen bad management at my end when I was unable to do certain tasks as I took much more. I like the way he has explained time fragmentation. I agree that Jim's example works well. Slack is essential, 20% I would say. I have taken slack into account even while doing estimates too.

I can relate my personal experience to certain aspects mentioned in the article. When i started at Qxf2 i tried to keep myself fully occupied and would be hard on myself when it took me longer time to solve a problem, it did not workout very well for me a few months later. I started keeping myself 80% occupied every week. I utilized the remaining 20% of my time to recollect what i have done through the week,it has worked out well so far. I agree that companies at times overwork their employees trying to maintain efficiency. I also felt that the article explains things in a managers perspective.