It contains only 60 pages which I assume you can read in under one hour.

Nevertheless if you haven’t encountered the work of Peter Drucker yet, this is the place to start.

The Author

Peter Drucker is best known for his concept of “Management by Objectives” (MbO).

He also coined the term “knowledge worker” and “core competency”.

Main Takeaways

Drucker elaborates on three major questions:

• What are my strengths?
• How do I perform?
• What are my values?

These are the basic questions to ask yourself to answer the bigger questions:

• Where do I belong?
• What can I contribute?

The rest of the book ponders on developing relationships and a second career for later in life.

The bottom line

I will stop writing so my review won’t be longer than the book itself.

Managing yourself is a big factor in personal success.

If you cannot manage yourself how can you manage others?

As I already mentioned this one is a good entry into the works of Peter Drucker. It’s also perfect as a gift, so buy a bunch of them.

Managing Oneself on Amazon

Further Reading on Self-Management

Thoughts on building a library

Bullet Journal

Time Blocking / Time Boxing as Productivity Boost

Review – The Passionate Programmer

Useful tips to stay ahead of chaos

The post Review “Managing Oneself” by Peter Drucker appeared first on Creatronix.

Chad Fowler is best know for being CTO of 6Wunderkinder after its exit to Microsoft. Before he was Senior Vice President of Technology at LivingSocial.

The Book

Fun fact: the first edition of this book was titled “My Job Went to India: 52 Ways To Save Your Job”

Fowler found this title misleading: instead of improving from mediocrity to keep your job, he wants you to focus on becoming exceptional and staying ahead of the pack. On 199 pages he shares his expertise in 5 key areas:

Market, Product, Executing, Marketing and Maintaining your edge.

Every chapter is written as a two to four page “tip of the day”-like essay.

That’s right down my alley because you can digest every tip piece by piece as loo-reading.

When You read a chapter in the morning before getting to work you can easily ponder upon its content all day long.

The best part is the “Act on it” section at the end of a tip which should lead you to applying the things you’ve just read about.

For example drawing a map of technologies on today’s market and segmenting them into early, middle and late adoption stages.

This is what I drew:

Main Takeaways

The author seems to know the concept of P.I.E, that career success is based on the 3 key elements of Performance, Image and Exposure.

Fowler is trying to help you creating your personal brand and communicating your skills to others.

Many tips come from the background of software craftsmanship and agile mindsets like “Practice, practice, practice” and “Eight-Hour Burn” and concentrate on improving your coding skills.

E.g Act on It from Tip 5 “Learning a new programming language” let me to put Rust as a language on my resolutions list.

But the bigger chunks are definitely not about coding but deal with learning domain specific knowledge, structuring your know how gathering and growing you personally to be a better developer.

All tips are so diverse that it isn’t possible to shrink the message of these 53 chapters down to 7 +/- 2 bullet points so perhaps it’s a good idea to read this book a couple of times.

The whole book was fun to read and definitely got me started to think about not accepting the status quo but improving on a day to day basis.

What actions did I take?

Besides renewing this weblog I visited the SWEC16 conference and started to learn Rust. I also bought a whole bunch of books to widen my expertise in different areas and I subscribed to the printed magazine of http://t3n.de

Buy Passionate Programmer on Amazon (Affiliate Link)

The post Review “The Passionate Programmer” appeared first on Creatronix.

In this book Bach presents with his colleagues Cem Kaner and Bret Pettichord 293 tips and tricks (“lessons”) from the test practice.

Divided into 10 chapters, this book covers almost every aspect that can be encountered in daily SW test work.

Similar to Rework, the strength of this book lies in the small, self-contained chapters. You can individually rate and apply each tip individually or not. The authors are advocates of the context-based test strategy; So there is no all-encompassing concept / strategy that works for every kind of SW product.

Therefore, the recommendations are sometimes deliberately contradictory, e.g. whether SW tests according to IEEE 829 should be documented or not. Just as a doctor only makes a diagnosis after a detailed medical history and then treats the patient, “lessons” are tools that are only to be used after a detailed analysis of the situation (industry, company, team, project, product).

At the beginning of this analysis, the tester must scrutinize himself and his mission in the development process. Insights such as that you can never find all the mistakes and therefore never completely test, sound obvious, but should always be kept in mind to get your own motivation.

The tester does not verify that the product is working, but shows that the product has a defect at a certain point. Word!

The fact that the tester primarily supports or relieves the developers is an idea that is far too rarely taken into account in practice. Test departments are often perceived as opponents rather than as partners.

The following chapters cover the handling of test techniques, bug reports, automated tests, test documentation, the exchange with the developers, as well as the management of the own test team.

The conclusion of the book are the two topics career in SW-test and creation of a test strategy.

Conclusion

If you are looking for a strict roadmap that simply has to be implemented one-to-one to ensure software quality, you will not find it here. On the other hand, if you are looking for suggestions and critical questions to continuously improve yourself and your work, you will find enough material in this book to deal with it for several weeks to months.

Buy Lessons learned in Software Testing on Amazon

The post Review “Lessons learned in Software Testing” appeared first on Creatronix.