We don’t want Moolya to be a black hole and we don’t want our testers to see the world as a black hole once they join Moolya. We want the world to know which of our testers are adding what kind of value and the kind of brainual testing they do.
If there is one decision that we took that was important to testers we hire, it is to tell the world about the good work they do. We want to help our testers have the visibility for their good work. As the first part of that, here is what our testers have done:
Dhanasekar works for one of our client leading a test team. He has cracked quite a number of puzzles for our client with a weapon called, “Developers and testers are friends working together”. A legacy product and no documentation whatsoever. “So what?” says Dhanasekar. He is helping our client achieve “Check Automation” and before the client could ask “What beyond this?”, he had started with Session Based Test Management & Exploratory Testing. The first reaction from the client was, “What is this SBTM?” and after a while they get back to Dhanasekar asking, “Can you do your ET-SBTM on this?”
The importance of an element in the system is known when it is taken outside of it. We tried positioning Dhanasekar for a different project and it turned out that our client called me on my mobile and said, “Dhanasekar is my man. I want him to help us. If you are wanting to get him out of this, I am not sure if I want to continue to engage Moolya”.
Sweet! Note that this client didn’t come to us initially because we had Dhanasekar with us but because we appeared to have the passion to solve their problems. Now, DS (as we call him) is our hero with this client.
Now to Parimala. Many know her through her blogs. Some think of her as a role model. She was our colleague already through many activities we did together ranging from Bangalore Testers Meet, WeekendTesting, Exploratory Testing Discussions, being a friend…
We got an enquiry to coach and mentor for a batch of graduates from Edista Testing Institute. When Parimala joined Moolya she wanted to be able to get opportunities to mentor a lot of testers. She coached entry-level testers to an extent that the 40+ testers she coached are excited to be a tester now. They gave her a lot of gifts after the training was over and said in unison, “You have inspired us”. She made a few changes to the way entry-level testers are taught with role play-based experiential learning. Some of them may even want to work for Moolya. See how we created opportunities to get great talent in. Kudos to Parimala for the great job she has done. Having been in consulting and training, I know this is a great honor and a happy moment for Parimala.
You know Santhosh Tuppad right? He is the co-founder of Moolya. His testing skills is kinda already known to the world but our client had little clue who they were getting when Santhosh started testing their web applications. He did the kind of brainual testing that our client is gaga over it. They have asked Santhosh to help their testers do the kind of testing he does. I thought it is important for Santhosh to not work on a project and he partners with me on some *secret project* code named – Tipper and tried getting him out of the project. Another client called, “We can’t afford to lose Santhosh on this project right now. There is more work coming to Moolya so we better have Santhosh. As a result of that our contract has been renewed to re-assure, we are on the track of business with them. This is fantastic.
I am going to talk about another tester we have hired who brings in great energy to our team. He is Sunil Kumar. He was inspired to join Moolya and work with us because he wanted to achieve things beyond what he was allowed to in his previous organization.
We announced recently that we added our 5th customer. Sunil started to lead a test team for that customer a week back. We couldn’t take the relationship ahead with that customer because of some issues in the contract document that was ambiguous. We don’t blame them, we blame ourselves because we don’t yet have a legal consultant to advice us what some words mean. We felt it safer to put our engagement on hold. What this fella did in one week was totally awesome for them. He had built his credibility with the teams and the team loved him and was looking forward to him being their lead. That’s the kind of leadership I want to build in Moolya and spread out, maybe.
As the team loved him, he could get across a few ideas about good testing in a short span. Wow! Be loved first and then people would take your ideas. Nice re-iteration of what I have learnt in hard and soft ways. The client tells Sunil, “If you ever happen to quit Moolya, you know our email ids?”. Sweet!
Kudos to him. He is one of the unsung heroes of the Indian software testing industry.
If this is the beginning…
How do we hire testers? This is how we do it. No, it is not computer science! It is a social science.
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