Shortcut!

During World War II, the CIA wrote a manual called the Simple Sabotage Field Manual. This manual presented ways that those in German occupied territories could sabotage the Nazi oppressors. There is a section in the document about “General Interference with Organizations and Production.”  The sabotage methods that are shared in this manual are fascinating, not least because I think we see so many instances of these happening in companies today. This is a document outlining the ideas of people who sat down and deliberately thought about how to make things less efficient.  We could do well to learn from it.

Let’s look at the first one.

Never permit short-cuts to be taken in order to expedite decisions.

Sound familiar?

“We can’t release this until we have all the test cases signed off.”

Approvals need to go through your manger who passes to her manager who passes it to the director, who make a decisions and passes it back down the line.

The developer can’t get started until the designs come in.

The tester has a huge backlog of items to get through before we can ship.

Having processes in place is often a good thing, especially as a company gets bigger, but we need to allow for flexibility in the processes.  A process can’t anticipate everything up front, so sometimes producing value requires shortcuts.

So can we rephrase that? “Always permit shortcuts to be taken in order to expedite decisions?”

No, that defeats the entire purpose of having processes in place at all.  If we always permit shortcuts, the shortcuts themselves are the process. How about this?

“Permit shortcuts to be taken in order to expedite decisions”

I put that in a quote, so you know it must be good right? We need to be ok with people short cutting the process sometimes.  If this freaks you out, perhaps your team needs to work on trust.  It is true that there are many times when it would not be helpful to take a shortcut.  For example, if you have legal auditing standards you need to meet, or if the shortcut would add a lot of risk without much benefit. But there are also time when it would be good to take a shortcut.

In order to be comfortable with people taking shortcuts you need at least two things.  You need to trust that those taking shortcuts are competent and are working towards the same goal.  

Competent doesn’t just mean good at their job.  It also means they have the information they need to make those kinds of decisions. If I shortcut a process, I need to know why it is there.  What is the purpose of it?  Will this shortcut violate the intent of it or will it help us?  To make decisions like this we need information.  Part of having a competent team is having a well informed teach

The other important factor is that we are all working towards the same goal. If you want to allow people to take shortcuts you need to know that their shortcut will lead in the right direction. Sometimes, I think we can get lazy and let process be a substitute for vision. As long as people conform to the process we know they are heading in the correct direction right?  Even if it is slower.

To allow people to go outside of the process means to know that they are aligned with what you are trying to do.  This is a harder thing to do.  It is relatively easy to force people to comply with a process.  It is much harder to keep a team of people all rowing in the same direction.

Now let’s connect this all back to testing. Are your testing processes flexible enough to allow for shortcuts? Are you a competent tester? The kind of person people can trust with doing the right thing and getting the job done well. Are you aligning yourself with the business goals of the company?  Do you know what they are?

Sometimes we can complain about how there are processes in place, but if we want to be a part of a company that allows shortcuts in those processes, we need to be the kind of testers that can be trusted with this. Up your skills.  Learn new things. Build relationships. Learn the business.

Take a shortcut.