I care about people
Submitted by Ainars Galvans on Fri, 24/08/2007 - 14:03.
people issues
I welcome Jason Gorman suggestion to sign the pledge I care about software . For those who are not sure I could tell you why I’m not sure, this may help perhaps. And please help me to become clear...
When I saw it some time ago I felt an unnatural (inner) resistance. Although I see no logical reason – I can’t disagree with any statement. Today I realized something. I really care about something beside the quality of testing services I provide (to please the direct stakeholders). But I can’t associate my care with software, with the lines of code compiled into set of computer instructions. My soul resist associating software attributes with something to care about. There is something I care about however – the people, all the people involved.
I care that my and team skills and resources is utilized most effective (that we don’t have to do monkey or “red tape” job a lot). I care that people who will use the software will use their time and skills more effective thanks to our software (I hope software will do some tasks for them so they have more time to do what a software is unable to do for them). I care that people who may need to maintain and reuse the software will use their time and skills effective (I hope they wouldn’t need spend hours investigating null pointer exception reasons… and trying to understand code). Yes it follows that I care about what Gorman suggest us to care. I welcome other signing. But I can’t. I don’t care about software blindly. I care about it in context of people. I don’t give up my context-driven attitude and my care is related to context set by people, not context set by bits of information.
Disclaimer
This is perhaps my most ridiculous blog. I hope you will forgive me being such (there are some personal reasons behind this as well) a direct and defensive
When I saw it some time ago I felt an unnatural (inner) resistance. Although I see no logical reason – I can’t disagree with any statement. Today I realized something. I really care about something beside the quality of testing services I provide (to please the direct stakeholders). But I can’t associate my care with software, with the lines of code compiled into set of computer instructions. My soul resist associating software attributes with something to care about. There is something I care about however – the people, all the people involved.
I care that my and team skills and resources is utilized most effective (that we don’t have to do monkey or “red tape” job a lot). I care that people who will use the software will use their time and skills more effective thanks to our software (I hope software will do some tasks for them so they have more time to do what a software is unable to do for them). I care that people who may need to maintain and reuse the software will use their time and skills effective (I hope they wouldn’t need spend hours investigating null pointer exception reasons… and trying to understand code). Yes it follows that I care about what Gorman suggest us to care. I welcome other signing. But I can’t. I don’t care about software blindly. I care about it in context of people. I don’t give up my context-driven attitude and my care is related to context set by people, not context set by bits of information.
Disclaimer
This is perhaps my most ridiculous blog. I hope you will forgive me being such (there are some personal reasons behind this as well) a direct and defensive