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How To Set Smart(ish) Goals For Testers Part 1

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3 years ago

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Earlier this week I appeared as part of the QA Touch Virtual Series.  I spoke on the topic of goals and setting goals. I used the presentation to bring together a number of ideas of goals and goal setting, and this essay, in turn, is based on the presentation.

We set goals to establish a vision of tomorrow and to provide motivation and feedback for following a path towards those visions. We use goals to decide what knowledge and capabilities we need to acquire and how to line up our resources to reach toward the future.  Goals can be a powerful tool.  As with all powerful tools they can be misused or overused. 

Early in my career, I worked as a sales statistician. It was a great job, I got to analyze data, build mathematical models, carve up sales territories, and set quotas. Quotas are goals with teeth. I rarely had a conversation with the salespeople (their regional directors, yes; but not the people doing the selling), it just was the way things were done. What I did not realize then that I do now is: If I have set your goals for you — they are not your goals, they’re mine!

In many organizations, goals cascade from the top. Prima facie, there is nothing wrong with this approach. Goals set at an organization-wide level inform the lower organizational levels that search for mechanisms to support making them a reality. This approach ensures that the whole organization is moving in the same direction. Issues arise when the higher-level goals lock the lower levels into an implementation structure by telling them how they are to meet the goals. 

In a top-down cascade scenario, the “boss” role tends to have a significant amount of influence on the goal or goals within their span of control. Influence can be exerted by:

Insisting on an activity being done or not done. I recently listened to a team lead insist that a specific story that the Product Owner didn’t want, be done during a sprint. It was their opinion that they knew what the ultimate customer wanted better than the PO. Talking up the need for a specific goal to support a larger goal. I was once pressured to put a goal on my annual objectives so that another director’s initiative could succeed. While I was never told directly to take up the goal, the admonition about being a team player overwhelmed my good senses. Requiring your goals to be built from their goals.  Simply put, you are given your boss’s goals and are told to make sure your goals support theirs.  

Any time there is positional power these types of pressure can be brought to bear. On an individual level, I could have easily substituted a partner or friends for the boss. When you are being told what your goals are, however explicitly, ask what you want for yourself. You need to determine if your ultimate goal and whoever is helping you determine your goal are in alignment. If you find yourself

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By: tcagley
Title: How To Set Smart(ish) Goals For Testers Part 1
Sourced From: tcagley.wordpress.com/2020/06/11/how-to-set-smartish-goals-for-testers-part-1/
Published Date: Thu, 11 Jun 2020 23:58:16 +0000

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NVIDIA GeForce RTX 30 Gaming Laptops Powered Massive Cryptocurrency Mining Farm Spotted in China, Over Hundreds of Ampere Laptops

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2 years ago

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February 11, 2021

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Last week, it was reported how cryptocurrency miners are rushing after NVIDIA GeForce RTX 30 Gaming Laptops to earn that sweet digital currency profits. Well, now a video tour of one of the mining farms has surfaced showcasing several hundred gaming laptops being used to mine the cryptocurrencies.

Several Hundred NVIDIA GeForce RTX 30 Gaming Laptops Spotted In Chinese Cryptocurrency Mining Farm Video Tour

Earlier, we only got to see a glimpse of the cryptocurrency mining farm but a brand new video has surfaced which shows the complete scale of the setup. The setup is based in China but the user has not mentioned the location for obvious reasons. As you can tell, the mining farm is set up with and utilizes NVIDIA GeForce RTX 30 Gaming laptops from the Chinese manufacturer, Hasse.

The Hasse laptop is based on the GeForce RTX 3060 mobility GPU. The GeForce RTX 3060 laptop solution is definitely not similar to the desktop variant which offers much better specifications and doesn’t come at a lower price either. According to NVIDIA themselves, the RTX 3060 laptops start at $999 US & the miners can save a penny by purchasing in bulk but they end up paying at least $600 US more for the laptop variant. Plus, they also end up with unnecessary hardware that the laptops feature. At the same time, the laptop variants do feature reduced TGPs which might save electricity costs & offer higher cryptocurrency mining rates.

pic.twitter.com/XJrfH9Fx7V

— 포시포시 (@harukaze5719) February 9, 2021

What’s interesting here is that the user has bought these laptops in a bulk order which means that either the retailer, distributor, or the manufacturer itself is openly supporting cryptocurrency miners over actual customers such as gamers which these laptops are primarily designed for. The selling party could be taking advantage of crypto miners by selling these at scalped prices to earn a profit.

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By: Hassan Mujtaba
Title: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 30 Gaming Laptops Powered Massive Cryptocurrency Mining Farm Spotted in China, Over Hundreds of Ampere Laptops
Sourced From: wccftech.com/nvidia-geforce-rtx-30-gaming-laptops-powered-massive-cryptocurrency-mining-farm-spotted-in-china-over-hundreds-of-ampere-laptops/
Published Date: Thu, 11 Feb 2021 04:17:52 +0000

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Intel 3rd Gen Xeon Ice Lake-SP CPU Rumors – 10nm With Up To 40 Cores, 8-Channel DDR4-3200, 64 PCIe Gen 4.0 Lanes, Max 270W TDP

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2 years ago

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February 11, 2021

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A couple of rumors regarding Intel’s Ice Lake-SP Xeon server CPUs have surfaced over the web, mostly from known leaker, Momomo_US. The information consists of specifications, configs & power ratings of several SKUs that will be part of the 3rd Gen Xeon Scalable processor family.

Intel 3rd Gen Ice Lake-SP Xeon CPU Rumors Point Out Up To 40 Cores, 270W TDPs & Brand New Core Architecture

Starting off with the details, Intel’s 3rd Gen Ice Lake-SP Xeon CPUs will be based on the 10nm+ process node and utilize the Sunny Cove core architecture. The Intel Sunny Cove x86 architecture has been around since 2019 and was first featured on Intel’s 10th Gen Ice Lake processors for the notebook segment. Intel has since moved over to Tiger Lake which is based on the Willow Cove x86 architecture and makes use of the 10nm SuperFin process node.

Some of the major upgrades that Intel’s 10nm+ for Ice Lake-SP Xeon CPU will deliver include:

2.7x density scaling vs 14nmSelf-aligned Quad-PatterningContact Over Active GateCobalt

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By: Hassan Mujtaba
Title: Intel 3rd Gen Xeon Ice Lake-SP CPU Rumors – 10nm With Up To 40 Cores, 8-Channel DDR4-3200, 64 PCIe Gen 4.0 Lanes, Max 270W TDP
Sourced From: wccftech.com/intel-3rd-gen-xeon-ice-lake-sp-cpu-rumors-10nm-up-to-40-cores-270w-tdp/
Published Date: Thu, 11 Feb 2021 10:02:51 +0000

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Intel’s Raja Koduri Teases Xe HPG Enthusiast Gaming Graphics Cards In Action Within 3DMark Mesh Shader Test, Launch Imminent?

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2 years ago

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February 11, 2021

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Intel’s Senior Vice President, Raja Koduri, has been dropping some major bombs on his Twitter feed for a while now. The most recent one being the Xe HPC chip shot which is an engineering marvel but it looks like Raja has switched gears and now dropped a teaser of Intel’s first gaming discrete graphics cards, the Xe HPG.

Intel Teases Xe HPG Enthusiast Gaming Graphics Cards, Running 3DMark’s Upcoming Mash Shader Feature

It’s been some time since we last heard about Intel’s Xe HPG (High-Performance Gaming) discrete GPUs or graphics cards. Intel’s main focus has been Xe-LP and they also dive in deeper within the tech that Xe HPC has to offer considering it’s their biggest chip design to date and the flagship Xe product. But the Xe HPG is where the gaming community is more focused at and we have got the first teaser of Intel’s discrete graphics cards based on the HPG GPUs running in action.

Xe HPG mesh shading in action, with the UL 3DMark Mesh Shader Feature test that is coming out soon pic.twitter.com/fnYeWoM08c

— Raja Koduri (@Rajaontheedge) February 10, 2021

The teaser from Raja shows an undisclosed Intel Xe HPG GPU based discrete graphics card running the UL 3DMark Mesh Shader Feature test. This test is coming out soon and will be integrated within the 3DMark test suite. Mesh Shader is one of the major features introduced within DirectX 12 Ultimate API back in 2020. The feature is supported by NVIDIA’s Turing, Ampere, and AMD’s RDNA 2 graphics architectures. Based on this tweet, Intel will also be adding Mesh Shaders support on its Xe-HPG class discrete GPUs.

The technology helps to dramatically improve performance and image quality when rendering a scene with a substantial number of very complex objects. Take for instance a very complex & triangle-heavy mesh and what Mesh Shaders would essentially do is segment it into smaller meshlets. Each meshlet ideally optimizes the vertex re-use within it. Using the new hardware stages and this segmentation scheme, devs can render more geometry

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By: Hassan Mujtaba
Title: Intel’s Raja Koduri Teases Xe HPG Enthusiast Gaming Graphics Cards In Action Within 3DMark Mesh Shader Test, Launch Imminent?
Sourced From: wccftech.com/intels-raja-koduri-teases-xe-hpg-enthusiast-gaming-graphics-cards-in-action-3dmark-mesh-shader-test/
Published Date: Wed, 10 Feb 2021 07:21:19 +0000

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