(2021-01-12) Over A Cup Of Tea With Jerry Weinberg

Lalit Bhamare: Over A Cup Of Tea With Jerry Weinberg. I’ve always been interested in helping smart people be happy and productive. To that end, I’ve published books on human behaviour, on leadership, and stories about smart people—how they produce quality work and learn to be happy. As I live in this world and look about me, I see unhappy people everywhere, and I think, “It doesn’t have to be this way.” I perceive that much of this unhappiness arises from ignorance, so when I think I can clear up some of this ignorance, I write.

professional developers will understand that testing does start the instant you first think it might be possible to build something

My book, Perfect Software and Other Illusions about Testing, details many of these questions that will no longer be asked.

In many ways, testing has moved backwards in 50+ years. We have better tools now, but they are not used by the majority of projects, so what good are better tools? In general, the standards for quality have deteriorated

*What differentiates AYE from other conferences?

All our conferences and workshops are based on experiential learning rather than lecturing. To understand this approach, I recommend my Experiential Learning sequence of three books.*

My greatest problem with standardization, in general, is that those who set standards do not start and end with the question, “What will this standard do for us?” Without answering that question, we wind up with standards that are not tested–and even worse, are not testable.

Perhaps we should be working on guidelines, rather than standards that someone hopes will enable us to test without using our brains.

there is no such thing as a “top” secret in consulting. Good consulting is so complex, so nuanced, that no one “top” secret applies everywhere. (I guess this is a meta-secret–a secret about secrets–but I don’t think there’s a “top” meta-secret, either. Perhaps that’s the top meta-meta-secret, or else it’s meta-secrets all the way down.)