Leadership: Key elements of Judgement

As a leader, everyone has to take a lot of decisions (based on judgemental calls) and then claim your experience whether it could be success or failures. You see yourself that you are part of that journey... Always, good judgments are the best for you like success stories! So, what are the key elements of judgment, how one can practice making a good judgment methodologically?

• The first step, Learning the problem - Listen attentively, and Read critically
• Have Trust - Seek diversity, and not validation here
• Mix up your experience - Make it relevant, and don't narrow it down
• Detach the clutter, and then Challenge - detaching your own biases, and accept more viewpoints from various advisers, role-playing, etc while challenging
• Look for Options - Question the solution set offered, and challenges; see if any risks here, and how to mitigate them
• Finally the Delivery - always factor in the feasibility of execution by how and by whom

In Summary,

Leaders need many qualities, but underlying them all is good judgment. Those with ambition but no judgment run out of money. Those with charisma but no judgment lead their followers in the wrong direction. Those with passion but no judgment hurl themselves down the wrong paths. Those with drive but no judgment get up very early to do the wrong things. Sheer luck and factors beyond your control may determine your eventual success, but good judgment will stack the cards in your favor.

Reference: https://hbr.org/2020/01/the-elements-of-good-judgment?utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter_weekly&utm_campaign=weeklyhotlist_not_activesubs&referral=00202&deliveryName=DM62721#comment-section

I know, you know about Pyramid; but what is "Test Pyramid" then :)

A happy new year to all the readers out there, and yet another new decade with the 20s, and wish you all be happy, peaceful and healthier than ever before to take up challenges that are waiting for you in this decade. I started blogging a decade back and when I reflect on this irregular hobby, I feel great about it as time passes away so fast and this blog is of 10 years old now:)

Okay, I know, you know about Pyramid; but what is "Test Pyramid" then :)

You would be getting to know about the Test Pyramid only if you are serious about the Test Automation and how much you can actually do the test coverage with your automated testing for the developed software.

If a developer is writing the tests by himself for the piece of code/software that he has built: those are the unit tests as part of the Unit Testing. And if he is thinking about doing some sort of automated tests for testing the integrations with other services, then that would be the integration testing or services testing. If he is looking for even broader testing scope of the overall system, then that would be the End to Eng System Integration Testing. Even after all these, sometimes, he has to manually test the system to how it is working and those are nothing but the Manual Testing.

With the above in mind, Let's see what is the Test Pyramid and how it would look like in the below picture, and keep in mind that the time spent and the costs involved are more from bottom to top, and the tip of the peak at the pyramid comes with the manual testing(that we have not discussed above while providing the context).

So, what is your take on how much we can cover from the test pyramid? It is completely up to you and your engineering team on what are your priorities and how you wanted to see the return for the time and cost that you have spent on all the layers of your test pyramid.

Reference articles:
https://martinfowler.com/articles/practical-test-pyramid.html#TheTestPyramid