Ready, Test, Go. brought to you by Applause // Episode 40

Learning from Defects in Software and Life

Transcript

(This transcript has been edited for brevity.)

DAVID CARTY: Alison McGuigan might be a director of enterprise quality assurance, but she embraces an engineering mindset and her hobby: crocheting. She can create one stitch at a time till her heart is content, and she has control over the whole process.

ALISON McGUIGAN: I started crocheting in 2018, and I picked up that after I really failed miserably at knitting because I tried to make myself a sweater and it did not come out at all. But I love cozy things and I decided to try crochet, instead. It was a nice way to feel productive while I was watching TV, because I always need to optimize everything that I’m doing. That’s just my operating system. And I enjoyed making things for people, and I loved the freedom of being able to make it entirely my own, where it was the colors I wanted and the texture I wanted, and the size that fit me and exactly my aesthetic. And that freeing nature of it being a structured process because I love structure in my life, but it also having that element of whimsy where I can make it for myself. Now that I’ve started thinking about the parallels more and more with my writing to emphasize it so much, where it’s like, oh, turns out these are like core things about you, Alison, that show up everywhere and it doesn’t matter. You can’t hide from it behind the job or the hobby. You like a specific amount of structure, as well as the ability to go off the beaten track and find new solutions and be innovative and figure things out for yourself.

CARTY: Alison had tried knitting but found it a bit too intense as she sees it, crocheting is looser. And it has its own set of inside baseball terminology. Some playful terms include–

McGUIGAN: Frogging is the biggest one, and whenever you make a mistake, you have to rip up all the yarn that goes out of it. And so they say, rip it, rip it. It’s frogging. I love that.

I like the random terminology for things like a bauble versus a puff and all of those different kinds of stitches. And what’s the difference between a half double crochet versus a treble crochet, and the different heights and differences of how that all plays out. Behind origami, which is making stuffed animals or creatures or making actual, physical, stuffed animal things.

CARTY: On her Etsy store, she sells everything from swimsuit cover ups to beanies and ponchos, and nothing beats an organic compliment on one of her creations, especially when she’s wearing it.

McGUIGAN: I make everything. I love making everything, so this is a sweater that I made. And one of the things that I love about it is that I can wear it out, and then people go, oh, that’s cool. And I go and I made it. And I feel really accomplished and good about it because everybody goes, oh, wow, that’s cool. And then I will make things that are practical at home, like a scrubbie to make stuff in to wash my dishes. I’m deciding for a birthday present to myself. It’s not fully finished, but I’m going to make myself a forever bouquet. I’m going to buy a fancy vase for myself and have flowers always for my life because I’m a spring baby. So I want that to be there. And the expectation that you can take anything small and make it. I made myself a little bookmark too, just because I wanted to feel accomplished one day. I was feeling low on yourself and you need that quick win. You can take something out, make something amazing, and it’s there for you forever. I have a swimsuit cover up. That’s my biggest seller, and it was the one that I made first out of a random thought of why the hell not can I make a swimsuit cover up. It’s two pieces of panel. I can do that for sure. I have a beanie that’s available and a little cardigan that’s available. Once I get time and energy into it, I have a poncho that I wrote up to sell, and I like a duster jacket that I went up to sell. I try for my patterns that I put up on Etsy to be– here’s how I made it, and all of the instructions and all the instructions for you to be able to make it your own. So I do the math for them of what’s your size. I’m not going to tell you the generic small, medium, large. I’m going to tell you this is how you do the math for it and make it perfectly fit to your body. So whenever I do wearables, I like to make it more inclusive from that perspective of you get to experiment it and make it your own too. But that’s one of the reasons why I tend to do wearables for it. I try to make it for myself and to go, and how would other people be able to do it for themselves. I made my son a baby blanket, and it’s just that you get for everything that I made while you were growing inside me and all the love that into every stitch.

CARTY: Alison describes crocheting as a meditative act, one soothing to the mind and the body, and resulting in something truly beautiful at the finish. That’s probably why you’re likely to see her crocheting just about anywhere she goes.

McGUIGAN: Oh yeah, I’ll crochet anywhere. I do like the fact that you can do it in Zoom calls. If you’re hiding your hands enough to, you won’t let corporate America be able to see you. I will crochet if I travel, if I’m the passenger in a car or on an airplane, you can see me doing it. I used to commute into San Francisco, and I was always doing it on the BART train and I just doing it in public. The time passed by a lot easier if you have my hands occupied, and it keeps me thinking. It’s one of those mentalities of like a meditative act where I can just keep doing that same repetition movement, and I get something super beautiful in the end and all the time to myself to think. Just everybody should try it. It’s a wonderful activity.

CARTY: This is Ready, Test, Go. brought to you by Applause, the podcast on software quality and digital experiences. I’m David Carty. Today’s guest is textile technician and director of enterprise quality assurance Alison McGuigan. Alison has spent over a decade leading test optimization and quality strategy within the financial services sector. Through her writing on her blog testing and production, she explores the human side of quality engineering, connecting technical principles with personal growth and systems thinking. Testing teaches us to look for hidden assumptions and treat failure as valuable information, rather than something to avoid. But what happens when we apply that logic to our own lives, from boundary testing, personal relationships to refactoring our own daily habits? Alison explores how the testing mindset provides a framework for navigating complex human systems. Let’s learn how to treat every defect as a source of insight with Alison. Alison, your writing often takes a classic testing concept and connects it to everyday experiences. Some examples include your daughter doing boundary testing on you, which I can totally relate to, by the way, and also refactoring yourself to clean up your own dead code. And I thought that was such a cool idea there. What drew you to exploring testing ideas like this through the lens of life?

McGUIGAN: Well, honestly, it was– I was feeling super frustrated and sorry for myself one day after a blowout with my daughter. And to frame it, she was three years old and I was four months postpartum with my son and the fight was over broccoli. And in the aftermath of it, I sat down and I wrote it up like a bug report at work where it was Bug 89, toddler refuses to eat green vegetables, and I went through the escalation of all of the troubleshooting steps to get to the end result of what I wanted. And it instantly made me feel better that I wasn’t failing as a mom. It was a known issue. It was a toddler exerting her independence. It was a mom trying to control the caloric intake of that toddler when you can’t. And it let the objectivity of that distance make me feel less intense and emotional about something that I had no reason to be emotional about. I was making this huge, big thing– bigger than it needed to be when it was just– she just didn’t want to eat broccoli, like stop it. It was no big deal. But that mentality helped me, and I immediately started to log other things that were bothering me. And it made me laugh. And it made me, again, less emotional and resentful for things that were really just known universal issues that people deal with all the time. And me blowing it into this big critical thing was where my problem was. And I looked into this paradox of how I manage these enterprise programs at work, and how I can make sure that those issues and problems, I never take as a personal fault for myself. It’s the way work happens. It’s the way things work through them, as you iterate and improve and get to a better state at the end. And I was realizing that I could take all of those concepts and apply them to my own quality of my life and start improving things for myself. Why not treat myself with the same rigor I apply at work?

CARTY: Yeah, I love that. And it points out how these different parts of yourself exist in these different contexts. And it’s really, really fascinating, especially as it applies to broccoli, the great divider of families, that notoriously controversial topic. So you’ve kind of alluded to this already a little bit. But being a tester certainly provides a unique perspective on systems and behavior. How does thinking like a tester change the way that you see the world outside of software more broadly?

McGUIGAN: I feel like the biggest way is through root cause analysis, where I do not take the first explanation. I try to dive in and figure it out and find the real root cause for the long term gain. Because if you’re always patching symptoms you’re scrambling and you’re overwhelmed and everything breaks with every cycle and everything is this huge critical mass problem. And I definitely take the easy way out in life a lot, where I can just do this hand wave of, I’m not organized, I’m just not fit. I’m just not a good cook. And all of these things that can at surface level be, yeah, you know what, why not? My house is a mess because I have kids and I’m lazy. That’s really the problem of it. But when you sit there and you take that tester perspective and you go, no, but what’s the real root cause of it? And you start looking into, well, you have a lot of crap, so maybe you should declutter and you don’t really have systems built out for your process to work in the right way. You never took the time to think about the integrations of four individuals living in their lives, in their homes, and their own unique needs and different various levels of expertise on how to even clean a house. Maybe you should stop thinking of it being this black and white failure point, or you are or you aren’t messy and then look at it of you just need to iterate and improve and keep moving through the process– find the root. And if that wasn’t the real root, you do it again and analyze and keep looking for improvements.

CARTY: Yeah, I was going to ask, how often does that root cause actually reveal itself? And I’m sure, it’s not ever quite that simple. And by the way, it’s like you have a camera in my house, by the way, because it sounds copy and paste exactly the situation in my house. But to your point, I’m sure the opposite is true. We talked about how being a tester changes how you see the world outside of software. I’m sure vice versa is also the case. So how have your life experiences influenced how you approach your work?

McGUIGAN: I’ll say again two major ways for it. One, as a leader, having kids and dealing with sleepless nights in the tantrums and the chaos that involves and the constantly being sick and never being able to really plan the project that you want to launch on schedule, it made me much more appreciative of life happening. And in my youth, I was much more intense and less forgiving of people. I had a very high standard for myself and for those people around me, and I didn’t give much grace. But when you have kids, you need to have grace, you really need it and you need it without it. But parenting taught me that lesson in a much more dramatic way because I can’t solve everything anyways. I can’t control my daughter. I have to accept that she is her own person and will do her things in her own way. And I’m only going to be a problem if I get into it all the time with her. And then secondly, I’m much more empathetic of the end user. My daughter subverting me and running to her dad to get her way isn’t a defect. It’s not even an edge case. It is 100% expected user behavior, and me expecting her to live in my definition of the workflows doesn’t work. Your customers will always do what they want to do, not what you think they should do. And you need to learn to understand them and meet them where they are, and educate them on where you want the product to be, how the product should work instead. So that mentality of, I can’t control it all and I just need to step back sometimes and accept that it is what it is was a big thing for me from life to work.

CARTY: Yeah, and understanding your customers in a very real way, as opposed to trying to fit them into the perceptions that you have of them, which is something we talk a lot about on this podcast. Modern quality practices emphasize that testing is not necessarily owned by one person. It’s supposed to be a shared responsibility across the team. How has working in environments like that shaped the way that you think about delegating work and responsibility in your own life?

McGUIGAN: I feel like in a few ways, one is that work is done on a team, and raising a kid takes a village. That mentality that you can’t really do it all alone. And it honestly starts to be overwhelming and lead to burnout, as well as this like mentality behind that you’re failing all the time. If you can’t handle it all the time that you really need to get away from because it’s supposed to be a shared responsibility, everybody’s in it together. You really are make or break together in the organization, for the company to be success and for your family to survive and move forward and have fun and do things. And I usually fail to accept that advice in my own life. I tend to forget all the time that I am not responsible for everything in my personal life. There are things that are completely out of my control. But I remember all the time at work that it is a team sport. I am not responsible for everything getting done. I have been the micromanaging lead, just like I’ve been the micromanaging mom. And it doesn’t breed confidence. And it doesn’t be trust and it doesn’t even give you quality. It just gives you this false sense of control over something while you’re slowly burning out in the background because you’re doing too much when everybody’s supposed to be there for you and help you along the way. And I’ve really been leaning into the RACI matrix more where it’s a healthy progression. Like right now, I am responsible for my son getting dressed, because he’s one years old and he literally can’t do it for himself, so I’m responsible for him. But eventually, I’ll be accountable for him getting to school on time, not how he dresses or looks or shows up there, just that he’s there. I just need to make sure that he’s accountable in there. And then he’ll eventually consult me on what he wants to do with his life and where he wants to be in his future, to informing me of his life choices after the fact where I’m not going to be responsible or accountable or even consulted and just told about it.

CARTY: So one of the subtle themes in your writing is that testers are constantly learning from failure. This notion of fail fast has taken hold in engineering, it’s not a new concept, but there’s still a little bit of cultural resistance to that idea. So how can cross-functional teams get more comfortable testing defects and treating defects as failures and as insight, rather than as sources of blame?

McGUIGAN: I will say it’s just accepting the truth. I mean, failures are inevitable. It’s not if, it’s when and it’s how bad. And they’re happening no matter what, though. Playing the blame game, though, ends up making it that people don’t want to speak up and it doesn’t stop the next issue coming. It just makes it harder to find. And the issues that are hard to fix are the ones that you don’t know about. People aren’t incentivized, and if they’re actively hurt for bringing it up, they won’t look. They won’t go out of their way to call it out, and you will end up with everything being a surprise and a problem, because the defects are inevitable. Waiting for them to stop isn’t true. It’s just delays them. And now you have less time to fix it, because let’s be honest, deadlines exist no matter what. There’s always that end milestone that’s looming over your head. And I’ll also ask people to question why they feel uncomfortable. And what about their environment makes them feel like software doing what software does because they will always have defects is a character flaw or something. A moment that you need to point out and be like, this is a problem and everybody is the reason why it’s the fix, that’s not it. Anything with any amount of complexity. So literally all modern software has issues no matter what. And not all of them are critical. But everything feels super urgent when it’s a surprise and you have no time to review it. And when you delay finding them because you’re feeling like there’s this mentality behind it that you’re not supposed to bring up problems, you’re a problem for bringing up a problem, just delays it, and everything ends up being this whole big mess when it could have been, no, guys, it’s really not that critical. It’s just a little minor thing. But we brought it up when we needed to bring it up, and now we can all move on with our lives.

CARTY: Right. If transparency is threatening to you, it’s probably a you problem in the end.

McGUIGAN: Yes.

CARTY: So quality engineers often zoom out to understand how different components interact across a system. How has systems level thinking shaped the way you view or approach complex problems maybe in your work and in your own life?

McGUIGAN: Yeah. Well, I’ll be honest, I ignored that basic tenet in my personal life for a while, and I failed to acknowledge the superpower that system thinking is. And I would try to optimize my expectations and my needs and everything in this isolated thing of me and myself and my own, and not recognizing the contributing factors that all feed into it. One of my experiments on my blog was treating my housework like a QA project, and it wasn’t until the end that I realized that I completely neglected dependency management. And I was treating my partner and my daughter and my son as variables to contain and constrain into my system and not looking at them as no, they need to be brought into the acceptance criteria. They need to understand what’s supposed to be done and how to keep my CI/CD pipeline of clean green. They have to have that whole contributions part of it. I was dependent on them for my house to be clean, because no matter what, they were going to be making messes. But if they didn’t understand where I was coming from, it was always going to be this whole big problem. So I had to start looking at it as I am a part of a system and not myself. And that process of using my work brain on my personal life really showed me that system thinking is really powerful. If you take the time to assess and address problems from that larger lens of it’s not that, again, it’s not that symptom and that one little thing, it’s that root cause that you have to get to and look to and all of the things that feed into it that matter.

CARTY: Along the same lines as the topic on embracing failure before being that quite a few of your posts are inspired by your children and your daughter, in particular, I imagine you’ve put more thought into that child-like sense of curiosity, right? A lot of testers lean into this sense of curiosity, but that might not be the case for other teams across the SDLC. So how can organizations create space for that kind of curiosity rather than resisting it or neglecting it?

McGUIGAN: I do love that being a parent has brought more wonder and magic to my life. I can see unicorns all the time now and it’s lovely in terms of that. But I did learn this lesson from my daughter, and it was because of her frequent requests for spaghetti for breakfast. And for a while, I said no, and I would not do it. And then she got into the classic four-year-old why loop of questioning it. Why not? Why can’t I have spaghetti for breakfast? And I would respond, well, spaghetti isn’t breakfast food. But why not? Why isn’t it? Who decided that food should be regulated to a specific time of day. And I was like, all right, sure, you got me there, but I don’t want to make it because it’s going to be too much work. But why? Because it’s boiling water and heating up sauce. She’s not asking for a gourmet meal or anything like that. She’s really very simplistic on what she wants. And I started to recognize that I was forcing myself to stay in these constrained mentalities when curiosity was the answer. Because once I made the spaghetti, she was happy, I was happy. We both operated better for it, and I saw an immediate impact in my life of it being not this problem. I feel like people do more work when they feel like it’s not work. And part of that is going to be where is the curiosity and how can you make it more fun and more delightful for yourself and looking for that. And asking yourself of why curiosity can feel like an annoyance sometimes when it’s really an invitation to think of things in a different way that moment of, but there’s got to be a better way. And the innovation that comes from you going, but why not? And for a short time, you have to accept it being a little longer and a little less efficient. But the output after the learning curve is super worth it, because people feel more empowered to be themselves and to show up in new ways that make a real impact to your organization.

CARTY: Spaghetti for breakfast, there is your parenting book title if you ever get to that stage, so feel free to run with that one. Along that same line, what would the impact be if more engineering and product leaders also leaned into that sense of curiosity and how the team approaches designing, building, and releasing software?

McGUIGAN: How would you say there would be so much more joy in the world? I mean, can you imagine what could be built with people who are happy and engaged with what they’re doing? It’s a game changer. If you’re not just checking off a box, like doing the motions and just being there, but you really want it to be something better and bigger than what it was. Curiosity keeps you hungry to try things, and it stops you from that fear of failure because it’s not a make or break. It doesn’t have to work. You’re curious. What happens? What could be? Maybe this is a better solution. And if it’s not, why not? Why didn’t it work? What were the things that could have been different from it, and that mentality of always cycling through it and iterating through it? And honestly, the higher value outcomes, I think, come from people who are curious and experimenting because they’re not doing the same old, same old. They’re saying, I’m going to try and make it better, faster, newer, whatever adjective they seem to want to have it that day. But spaghetti, I mean, avoided a power struggle for me, and it allowed my daughter this sense of control. And so she got to have this huge smile on her face for feeling good about making a choice that she had ownership of. I got to feed the whole family. And it gave me a smile that toast or cereal never would. And I did more work that day for being happier for it.

CARTY: Yeah, and it’s great to think about the outcome like that. As you just mentioned, great testers. They pay attention to the little things, those little details, whether that’s data and logs, unexpected user behavior, subtle changes in systems, et cetera, et cetera. Have you found that testing sharpens your ability to notice patterns or warning signs in everyday situations, or do you have some limitation to that? Can that test your brain shut off to limit overwhelm?

McGUIGAN: I mean, it definitely helps me see patterns better and warning signs better, but it is absolutely a double edged sword. And my tester brain did have to shut down for a spell, especially during my latest postpartum phase where you’re depleted and you can’t do the things that you wanted to do the same way because you have a brand new baby and mentality that you have to integrate into your life. Writing helped me re-engage that pattern recognition in my mind, so I recommend it to people all the time. Don’t hide from the patterns. But there is a part of you that needs to recognize that if you just stay there in that tester side where you’re logging everything, notice everything, tracking everything, documenting everything. It can start to feel like this endless backlog that just makes you feel like you’re failing because all of these standards that you have in your head aren’t being reached. And all of these things that could go wrong and all of these problems and that risk of but what if, what if, what if starts to get you bogged down and stuck because you’re sitting there finding all of the things, but you’re not fixing all of the things and that mentality behind it. And I feel like there’s obviously this mentality in quality engineering between you just track it and flag it versus you don’t fix it. That can be kind of a challenge– like kind of a challenge in my own mind because I always want to fix everything. But postpartum was definitely the time where I had to keep my tester brain in check, and it was more of an adversary than it otherwise could be because it should be look at all these opportunities for ways you can improve and make things better, because these are the things that are bothering you. And it turned into this, no, all of these things are terrible, and it’s always going to be a problem. And everything’s worse and worse and worse because I’m just keep tracking everything in my head.

CARTY: Continuing on that thread, quality engineering is rarely about one big fix. We often see teams prioritizing continuous incremental improvement over time. So how has that philosophy influenced the way that you think about personal growth or about building better life habits?

McGUIGAN: It’s a game changer. So if anybody hasn’t done it yet, I highly recommend it. But I personally can get super stuck in analysis, paralysis and research mode and obsessing over everything being ready, being perfect, being defined, wanting it overnight and being that vague instant fix. And that’s just not how life works because you don’t learn to walk overnight. You roll over and then you sit up, and then you stand up, and then you face plant multiple times over and over again. And then you finally take that first step and life compounds into being that moment. Then you run and you can do marathons, and you can walk thousands of miles in a day kind of thing. That iteration stopped my perfectionist spiral. It makes me confront that voice that says it needs to all be done immediately and work immediately and be successful immediately because no one doesn’t. And absolutely can be small little things that build to become something unrecognizable at the end. And the beauty isn’t being overnight. It’s actually that you don’t lose yourself, and you build yourself up bit by bit, sprint by sprint as you get to that end goal wherever it was. And quality doesn’t really have an end, in my opinion, because when you fix that one thing that was staring at you in the face, and that crash app stops being a crash app, now you’re confronted with all the things that didn’t feel urgent before, but still need your attention and your bandwidth to solve. And if you’re sitting there thinking that one bonus and one job and one moment will fix everything, you’re going to be disappointed because yet again, inevitably, issues will happen. They always do. It’s just a matter of time. And the mentality of it being– as long as it’s better than it was yesterday is achievable where one big fix never is.

CARTY: Yeah, that’s a great way of putting it. It feels like we’ve come a long way in the last few decades on protecting and promoting mental health, limiting burnout and promoting inclusivity in the workplace. And these are things that are often brought up in conference sessions and things like that. It’s been a really deliberate effort over that time. As a QA leader yourself, how do you strike a balance with your teams when it comes to hitting your benchmarks, but also being mindful of the individuals doing the work and what they need in their lives?

McGUIGAN: I try to be open. If you can’t gather that from me using my life always as examples to things, I think it helps when people know you’re human and you expect them to be human. And I smile a lot and I don’t dump things on them, obviously, but I own up to the fact that some days are harder than others, and sometimes you just need a day off and sometimes you miss that issue, and it’s not anything to do with you. It’s just because life happens and no matter what, it will always happen. And the thing is, when everything is OK, it’s really a signal that you’re not monitoring something. And when everything passes, it makes me nervous because I feel like people are hiding the bad news, or they’re avoiding to look at the real issues. They’re trying to stay looking green to make themselves feel good about it when it’s not real quality at that point. You’re not doing anything at that point. If you’re hiding the cracks instead of exposing them, you can’t fill them up and your foundation will crumble eventually. And it’s not confidence if it’s not based on truth and you’re just hiding behind the metrics. And metrics are quantifiable for people. I get why people look at them. It’s really easy to point to and say, look at that. I did something really exciting and accomplished and all of that stuff. But if you don’t feel safe to say you’re off track, people can’t trust you when it is on track. There’s no trust if you can’t actually own up to the problems that are there for you, too. And if you’re just lying all the time, it’s going to be a problem for everybody. And I like to lean into that the mean time to recovery on that side of the house, where you can only recover if you’re honest that it’s a problem in the first place. The first step is detecting it. And if you avoid it, it’s just going to be a problem for longer. The green board doesn’t mean it’s not there lurking, and eventually it’s going to be a big scary red board instead of it being a yellow one that was like, maybe this is a problem instead of it actually being a real problem, and it’s because you hit it instead.

CARTY: That psychological safety is so, so important in any work environment, really. If you could encourage our listeners to take one idea from testing and apply it to their home lives, or the opposite, one idea from their home lives and apply it to their testing and their work in digital quality, what would it be?

McGUIGAN: I’ll say my most practical advice is definitely going to be understanding the value of testing for clear and consistent error handling. I’m not saying go out and push everybody to their limits in your quest to do boundary testing on people. But remember the power of being consistent with your values and knowing what your acceptable inputs are and your response for what any invalid one is. It saves the most headaches in life and in work if you are just very practical about what you really can handle in your own boundaries.

CARTY: All right, Alison, lightning round questions. First question for you. What is the most important characteristic of a high quality application?

McGUIGAN: I’m going to say consistency. I think that users will put up with a lot as long as it’s predictable, but the second you’re not and you lose that trust. It’s hard to come back from.

CARTY: What should software development organizations be doing more of?

McGUIGAN: It’s cliche, but involving QA earlier in the projects, because it’s easier to challenge assumptions than it is to fix it after it’s already built.

CARTY: And what should software development organizations be doing less of?

McGUIGAN: Expecting that QA is just a testing round at the end, and it shouldn’t be something baked into the entire process.

CARTY: Absolutely. And finally, what is something that you are hopeful for?

McGUIGAN: I am hopeful that AI lets people understand that they have a duty to be curious. Stop doing the mundane tasks that a computer can do much faster than you, and look into the thing that makes you human, which is your brain. You can think. It can compute.

CARTY: That’s great. Always lean into your humanity and your going in the right direction, right?

McGUIGAN: Uhm-mm.

CARTY: I love that. Alison, thank you so much. We appreciate you joining us.

McGUIGAN: Yeah, thank you. I love talking quality with quality people. So I appreciate you having me.