Matt Heusser
ABOUT ME:
I am a former AST board member (2011-2013) who attended every CAST from 2010-2019. Along the way I won a few awards, acted as lead editor for a book that is a collection of essays on testing, wrote a testing textbook, because a consultant, and organized the initial Great Lakes Software Excellence Conference. The company I founded, Excelon Development, is to my knowledge the only company to make the Inc 5000 list of fastest growing private companies in the United States that is consistently publicly marketed as Context-Driven.
I'm probably most proud of the peer conferences I helped organize, including Test Coach Camp, a half-dozen Test Retreats, the Workshop on Self-Education in Software Testing (WHoSE) and the WorksHop on teAching Test Design (WhatDa), and the first ever workshop the technical debt.
About twenty years ago, when I had "software developer" on my business card, I began to identify as a tester. About ten years, when people started to say "test is dead", I made a professional commitment to the field.
I'm not done yet.
I'd like to ask your permission to continue to contribute in this way.
Let's go!
WHY QUALITY? In 2 paragraphs give us an overview of your philosophy on Quality and how you approach testing in support of achieving quality outcomes… Please provide (non-confidential) real world examples:
I'm with Jerry Weinberg that Quality is value to some person (that matters). I also like Juran's definition that Quality is fitness for use. That is /different/ than conformance to requirements.
I once worked with a small team, when Google maps was young, at an insurance company. They had an idea for you to type in your address, then get a list of in-network doctors. This was called "find a doctor." The math was pretty simple - we used an outsourced API to find distance between two street addresses and sorted by distance. One of the programmers suggested that he could tie it in to google maps, to shop little pin-dots and a visual map of the area. He was told by everyone in management to not do that, that there was no time in the schedule.
He did it anyway, in his spare nights and weekends, and hit the original date.
Boy howdy were some people peeved at him.
Eight months later, the company won an award for most innovative new web feature at an awards show. People wore tuxedos to accept the award; there was a lot of talk of filing a patent. As I recall, one of the people whose name was on the patent was the one who told Ben the programmer he was "not allowed" to program it.
Of that entire group of people, the one who cared about quality was the programmer. What made him defy orders? What made him refuse? I'd like to explore that, because I want more of it.
This board role will require 10 - 20 hours per month of often self driven activities and the ideal candidate is someone who is willing to own an initiative and drive it through to completion... Is this something you are willing to commit to, and in your most honest moment, what will keep you motivated when the work gets hard and progress feels slow?
I'm at a place in my life where my time is self-directed and self-managed. I can make this kind of commitment.
My primary motivation at this point in my life are my daughter - can she see me doing work that is visible and makes a difference? I think the AST board could be something she could learn about and take pride in.
It's 2030. AST just won 'Global Nonprofit of the Year' for transforming testing careers worldwide. What three bold moves did we make between 2025-2030 that nobody saw coming?
Follow-up: Which of these moves would you personally champion, and how would you convince skeptics on the board?
We reframed CAST to have an online presence and a multi-local-miniconf presence.
We developed a new training curricula, like BBST, but for the current generation of technology.
We partnered in education with the devOps-y people so they could actually understand how testing can be differentiated and value add.
What's one thing AST is doing right now that we should stop doing immediately, even if it's popular? And what's one bold experiment we should try, even if it might fail spectacularly?
That's a big question! One thing we could do is take a look at how CAST is differentiated compared to other conferences. A tutorial day, two conference days, people can fly in Monday and Fly out Friday - it is "easy." But that means a company has to give up a week of a worker's time, four nights of hotel, airfare ... one thing we could do is several small mini-conferences in different parts of the midwest, where everyone is a speaker, at a "cheap" conference venue, possibly even on a saturday. I've done a half-dozen of these "test retreats", from stand alone to before a conference. These events have an agenda set by the attendees, much smaller infrastructure costs, you are more likely to meet someone you could have a
What is your history with AST? Describe why you are interested in serving on the AST Board and what personal / professional strengths make you an ideal board member for the organization?
Follow Up: Are there any particular initiatives or areas you are especially interested in driving / leading?
I attended every CAST from 2010 to 2019. During that time I took on most of the jobs (Logistics for the facility, Program Committee, I organized a track in 2011, ran a panel, gave talks, participated in the test competition, ran a mini-conference before CAST called TestRetreat that was folded into the conference for 2018-2019, and so on). In 2011 CAST ran without a formal call for papers. Instead of complaining, I helped organize an "emerging topics" stage with 20-minute talks throughout the event based on applications. That same year I ran for the board and was elected. While on the board, I defined and led the initial grant program as well as organized the Workshop On Self-Education in Software Testing (WHoSE), which became the self-education wiki.
Recently I co-wrote "Software Testing Strategies" and I'm the lead subject matter expert for Southern New Hampshire University's CS 630, graduate course on Software Testing and Quality - where I also teach.
When my ability to travel was limited I took a break from AST and let others have the reins. As we've come out of covid, I find the opportunities to collaborate remotely have increased - and I have a little more time to travel.
I am humbly asking you to let me back in the saddle again.
When you step down from this board, what do you want your Wikipedia entry to say about your contribution to AST and the testing profession? What impact are you personally committed to creating?
Well, if you don't mind, I'll write it in my folksy, informal way. Here goes:
Matt Heusser wrote a bunch of articles that were easily accessible. He worked with people to develop them, and he created self-sustaining programs in AST that reached more. His efforts reinvigorated the importance of test as a separate skill and discipline, while helping to create a more humanistic and fair workplace.
That's what I've been doing for a dozen years at Excelon Development, and nearly as many before that as an employee. I realize that working with AST may be giving away some of my time or intellectual property to help advance the profession. It is something I'm happy to do.
You're on a board committee with members from Japan, Brazil, Nigeria, Germany, and the US. The group is stuck on a decision because cultural communication styles are clashing and creating misunderstandings. What is your strategy for facilitating breakthrough and building genuine consensus?
Follow-up: Provide an example of how you've successfully worked across significant cultural or professional differences.
Having been on the board before, I'd say it's worse than that. Board members are voted in as most likely to be good at tearing down ideas - not building them! Throw in some other cultures and now you've got a fine kettle of fish.
My basic strategy for building a coalition is to start with relationships. Figure out what other people want, and how I can get it for them, before I ask for things. Eventually that turns into a coalition - an alliance. From there we have to get a vision - where are we going? Again, you want to let other people tell you where they want to go, and see if you can go along. Occasionally you can throw out an idea and see if anyone bites.
That's all on a good day. I've got enough experience to feel when I am pushing too hard now, so I can stop, zoom out, and ask "what's going on?", restarting the meeting from first principles. I do like idea of quick wins to build acceleration - try to get people to agree on one thing, even if it is just an ice breaking game. I like decisions; my predisposition is for action. Perfect, as they say, is the enemy of done. So let's get the coalition and actually do something, then we can take pride in work and do something a little bigger. This is an iterative strategy that has served me well.
These ideas come from a lot of places, mostly I am leaning on John Kotter, who wrote "On what leaders really do"; that little book made a big impact on me as well.