Life is a continuous stream of interactions. These interactions in one way or other define our world view. This includes the people we come across, the books we read or the tools we use. At least that's what I thought till I started working remotely.
You see I was missing a very unique piece of the puzzle.
Context
This includes
Physical,
Virtual, and
Mental contexts.
Virtual context is not something under our control. Since, It's a black box of sorts that directly arrive at its consumers through the mediums of APIs, Websites, or packaged software. Only exposing its design decisions but not the underlying functions (Abstraction to the rescue).
Physical context is completely under our control. Because we decide when to work and where to work. I am not sure if there are other parameters but these are the two primary ones that I could observe.
Mental context is sort of a hidden layer. It's made up of your past experiences stored in your brain in some sort of a random associative map.
Okay. I already know this. What's new?
Time
Consider time as a hyper parameter. Its effect on the weights of random associative maps in our brain. So, If I have spent more time in office let's say 15 years, It will be bit difficult for me to fine-tune these three contexts compared to someone who have spent only 3 years working in office.
Apart from this there are more things like Culture and language which could include confusion and biases to the mix.
Because who doesn't have biases.
So, when I was tasked to create a Culture of Quality at my previous company, I thought of targeting the tools first. Because they are the medium that connects the whole team and their settings are what should be the underlying API understood by all.
So, After building a QA team that could take care of existing QA responsibilities, I wanted to investigate these things better and fine-tune the teams around tools that we used. Through means of documentation.
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