Real Life Examples: the Anti-Innovation Development company

Real Life Examples:  the Anti-Innovation  Development company 

For a period of time I worked in a Norwegian development company in the customer services department. Now, this was the R&D division of a government orientated software. I joined as a Quality Consultant, with the goal of collaborating in the controlling the Quality of the Software. I reported to the Release Manager, who in turn Reported to the Director. When I started, there was a colleague there from before. She was Brazilian and had an eye for Quality. Her focus was more on User Experience and finding details on the screen. 

Very early on, my Manager asked me what was my view on things. Even if she was the Release Manager, she did not have a clue on how to structure a Testing Department. I found this bizarre, but then, she was a translator who had a good relationship with the Director which secured her position. Since I am a long term thinker, my view was that the best was to develop a strategy for the department. Being in customer support, we should not focus on the details of the screen and the user friendliness (that was the goal of the product development department), but on making sure that the basic functionality actually worked.  

Immediately, I collided with my Brazilian colleague. Our views were opposite. She wanted to focus on the details of the screen, whereas I proposed to increase the scope of automation. Now, I understood both sides of the story, and even if I did not agree with her views (nor did she with mine), thought we could achieve some sort of balance. My boss did not seem to agree with this and “chose” a view. She chose mine. My Brazilian colleague decided not to continue on board and switched departments. 

I prepared test sets to increase the coverage of the automation department. I had several meetings with the auto-testers, and they prepared the tests, but they took too long. The automation tool that they were using was very old, and the tests were done in hard code. Nothing friendly about their automation tool. I proposed purchasing a much more advanced and user friendly automation tool I had previously used. This never went through and they did not have budget for it. Consider resistance from the automation team as well. A new, more sophisticated tool would imply being more efficient. That means: a. there will be a need of fewer auto-testers or b. the auto-testers will produce more efficiently and get more tests going. In any case, it means more work. And the auto-testers would not see any benefit in this, only the corporation. Consider again Taylor’s theory. If we introduce a change (for example better tools) to do a job, workers will still get paid the daily (in this case yearly) wages regardless of productivity. Chances are there will be resistance. They will fear change since it puts their own positions at jeopardy, and they will try to keep things as they are. Incentives must be introduced in order to drive organizational change. The workers need to feel that their jobs are secured, and that they will get something out of it.   

Slowly but relentlessly the automation coverage was increased. A Swedish colleague was hired, with some years of experience in the technology. Shortly, the Director approached us saying that he got a report were it showed that the Quality of the Software had not improved, not so many bugs had been found. Now my strategy discounted that by increasing the coverage of automation the Quality was going to improve. I focused on finding the most important bugs in the Software, which should come up in the basic processes. This never happened. The reason was that the automation tool was so old that it was not really doing a good job at sweeping the system. I then engaged in random testing and found around 20 bugs, but the people from the corresponding area did not want to fix them as they were not Top Priority. They did have time to do this but would not since they chose to leave the office at 3 pm. Again, look at the lack of incentive. And since in Norway it is difficult to lay off people on an individual basis, “soldierism” is actually a very common practice. Due to this, companies are not able to compete internationally and restructurings to be cost effective have become common practice.   

In the end, the Director chose to close our area and both my Swedish colleague and I were reassigned. Consider now the consequences for the company as a whole. There is no incentive to innovate, to do new stuff, to create. I will come to that in a later chapter.