Photo credit: http://www.filmchronicles.com/star-trek-nemesis/
Tag: humor
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TiP is misunderstood – perhaps DDQ is Better
I spent a long time talking to folks about the merits of a conscientious Testing in Production (TiP) strategy. But I knew TiP had a bad rap. I even shared the story of how some would mischaracterize it as a common and costly technical malpractice
While evangelizing TiP, I and my Microsoft colleagues would happily post this picture wherever we could
Yet I knew the original poster was not so enthused with TiP. Comments on TiP were supposing this was not a conscientious and risk-mitigated strategy, but instead devs behaving badly:Then blame all issues on QA -_-
That’s our motto here. Doesn’t work to well in practice, actually.
Now I have returned to Amazon after spending 6 years at Microsoft. From the following it looks like I have some education to do.
On the other hand, who can argue with Data-Driven Quality (DDQ). (Except maybe a HiPPO). DDQ is also more expansive than TiP, leveraging all data streams whether from production, customer research, or pre-release engineering. So TiP was fun, but DDQ is the future.
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Who is the HiPPO?
HiPPO stands for Highest Paid Person’s Opinion
HiPPO driven decision making is the opposite of data-driven decision making. The highest paid” person may be your boss, or the VP with his eye on the project, or even the CEO. But no matter how many of those big bucks they are pulling down, it turns out that 2/3 of decisions made without the data are the wrong ones.
When promoting data-driven decision making at Microsoft we distributed 1000s of these little hippo squeeze toys. Perhaps by squeezing our hippo toy, we are reminded to constrain our HiPPO from making rash decisions without data (somewhat look a voodoo doll).
But another, kinder way to look at the HiPPO is as the person who has final responsibility for product feature decisions, and as a reminder to get that person the data they need to make the data-driven decisions.
Either way, it reminds us that data trumps intuition.
[and remember the hippo is considered to be the most dangerous animal in Africa (not counting the mosquito)] :-)
