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Off with a bang!

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The two sessions I attended today were, for me, the best of the conference.  Storytest-Driven Development with Max Baumann and Gil Broza was the best overview of Fit that I’ve yet encountered.  And, Diana Larsen & Pollyanna Pixton were wonderful on Meeting the Agile Leadership Challenge. 

Fit was a huge part of this conference.  Ward & Rick talked about it on Sunday.  Rick presented a tutorial on Tuesday (see below).  It came up in virtually every single Testing track session I attended.  There was a Fit Fest, where you could try your hand at it on a real project.  All of this was great.  But, today’s session with Max and Gil finally gave me the foundation to really feel comfortable writing my own Fit tests.  More importantly, I finally understand why it is so important to use Fit.  It was a major light bulb moment for me:  Fit tests run directly against the business tier of an application rather than through the user interface.  It does this in order to force the separation of the business logic from the presentation tier.  In other words, Fit is a tool that, by its very nature, drives you toward lower coupling between the model and the view.  (Thank you, Brian Marick, for that insight!)

I also had a huge light bulb moment in Diana & Pollyanna’s session:  I need to reframe how I describe what I do.  All week, I’ve been describing what the patterns & practices group does as “filling the gap” between customers’ immediate needs and product groups’ longer term plans.  After explaining it 50 to 100 times, I was quite good at it.  Unfortunately, I was using language that reinforced negative perceptions.  Basically, if you’re looking for trouble, you’ll find it.  But, if you’re looking for possibilities, you’ll find them, too.

There is a great book on framing called Don’t Think of an Elephant by George Lakoff.  In it, the author describes how important framing is to getting across the message you want to send.  For example, when you read the title of the book, what’s the first thing that comes to mind?  An elephant, of course!  It turns out that the human mind does not process negatives very well.  Instead, it hears “think of an elephant” and immediately does so.  Why?  Because the frame including elephants gets activated in the brain.  Diana had a spooky example of this in the session:  “Don’t Drink and Drive.” 

Note: The book is highly political, so it may not be for everyone. But, whether or not you agree with the author’s political positions, the discussion of framing is well worth the $10.

So, by talking about problems and gaps, I was reinforcing those frames rather than what I really wanted to communicate, which was this:  Imagine what is possible, given the amazing and uniquely talented people on both sides of the patterns & practices group!  Let’s find ways to collaborate – with customers and product teams – to turn those possibilities into reality.

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