Deepak Koul
The 9th edition of the Global Testing Retreat 2024!
About Speaker
As a Senior Engineering Manager at Red Hat, I lead the teams that deliver digital experiences for our partner ecosystem, including certification workflows on the connect.redhat.com site. With over 17 years of software product delivery experience in agile and iterative models, I have developed a strong expertise in engineering, quality and customer advocacy. I am passionate about creating a culture of excellence, collaboration, and innovation within and beyond my organization. I am a chapter lead for Culture First in Pune, where I engage with HR and people leaders on topics such as women in tech, diversity and inclusion, and community building. Additionally, I have spoken at 30+ international conferences on quality engineering, agile, and organisational behaviour.
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The Prisoner’s Dilemma is a game theory concept where cooperation seems rational but often leads to betrayal. It is a thought experiment that involves two rational agents, each of whom can cooperate for mutual benefit or betray their partner for individual reward.
Based on my decade long experience as an test engineering manager, I have come to realize that this concept models a lot of situations of strategic decision making in a tester’s life too. For example:
Individual vs collective benefit : Consistently picking test infrastructure related tasks over actual testing because that might make your CV well rounded in terms of skills and tooling. Focusing more on ‘how’ to test as opposed to ‘what’ to test.
Short-term gain vs long-term consequences : Adding a hardcoded wait in a test to get the test to pass but making the code unmaintainable in the long run.
Collaboration and trust within an organization : Based on how teams are organized, testing,UI, backend and ops might have their own group goals and will most likely prioritize them over the common goal that benefits the product or company. For example, in a lot of organizations that have a full fledged testing department upto director/VP level, a tester might focus more on their department’s goals that the product success goals because the incentives and rewards come from department.
Competition and market pressures : As a tester, you might strategically pick up a tool or technology for use just because it is a sought after thing in the job market as opposed to picking up something that would be a better fit for the team.
In this thought provoking critique, I am going to talk about the factors that often tip the scales towards one choice or the other. I believe understanding these dynamics better could be valuable for testers navigating these dilemmas and potentially even fostering a more collaborative and trusting environment within teams. Lastly, I am also going to share my tips for overcoming this behavior.
Key takeaways of this presentation would be –
- Reflection – As a tester, am I doing practising all of these behaviours.
- Realisation – How thinking about the product and people who build and use it should be the true purpose of one’s job.
Overall goal of the session is unveiling the psychology behind the phenomenon that stops testers from being team players and thinking for the greater good of the product and the team.
