Janet Gregory, Co-Author of Agile Testing Condensed

Len: Hi I'm Len Epp from Leanpub, and in this episode of the Frontmatter podcast I'll be interviewing Janet Gregory.

Based in Calgary, Janet is an agile testing coach and consultant, podcaster and, along with her colleague Lisa Crispin, author of a number of both traditionally-published and self-published books.

You can follow her on Twitter @janetgregoryca and check out her website at janetgregory.ca, as well as at agiletester.ca and at agiletestingfellow.com. You can also find her and Lisa's Donkeys & Dragons podcast on YouTube and wherever you find your podcasts.

Janet is the co-author of the Leanpub book Agile Testing Condensed, in which she and Lisa provide an easy-to-read but comprehensive overview of how to build a quality-based process and team culture in an agile software development context.

In this interview, we’re going to talk about Janet's background and career, professional interests, her book, and at the end we'll talk about her experience in both the traditional book publishing world and in the self-publishing world.

So, thank you Janet for being on the Leanpub Frontmatter Podcast.

Janet: Thank you for having me. That was quite an introduction.

Len: I try to get it all in there. We put links to everything in the transcription. So the transcription page on Leanpub ends up being a bit of a place where people can go to find everything they're looking for.

I always like to start these interviews by asking people for their origin story. So, I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about where you grew up, and how you found your way into a career in programming and technology?

Janet: Oh, that's a long - well, we'll try to keep it short. I've had a lot of years of experience, as people may or may not know. I tend to say I'm semi-retired - but I'm not sure how long that will last, until I actually retire.

I started my career, I guess - and I'm going to call it like a second or a third career. Because I did a very traditional - I worked for a little bit, got married, and then raised my family.

When my children were like young, grade one, grade two - we had the most wonderful experience of being able to move overseas, and lived in Singapore for a year, and in Jakarta for a year - which was really the basis for a lot of other things, like traveling.

Then I come back from that, and I thought, "Now what do I want to do?" Because I didn't want to go back to my old government job that I had way before.

And so I thought, "Time to go to university or college or something." So I started looking at what was available, and I realized the only option I had, because my children were both in competitive sports, was university, because I could choose the courses when I wanted them, and take partial days - versus some college, which goes from 8 to 5.

So I got out the university calendar, and I started looking to see, what could I do? What could I actually take? And what appealed to me.

It was two options I'd come up with. One was Computer Science, the other was Home Economics. I looked at them and I - eh, no money in Home Economics, and I chose to come into Computer Science.

I had to upgrade some of my marks in some of those things. Then I went to university and became a programmer.

I went full time for four years, while trying to raise my kids, and take them to all these things.

When I got out, I did programming for six years. My first job was at the Vancouver Stock Exchange; I did that for about four or five years, and then moved to Calgary. In the next few years, I moved from being a programmer into being a QA manager, because, as my boss at the time said, I was the only programmer that was complaining about process and lack of quality. So I got the job, and never looked back.

The whole testing idea was a better fit for me. I fell into Agile, I guess? I didn't really fall into Agile, it adopted me. Because I became a tester on an Agile team, and I just thought, "Oh, there's no comparison to what I had been doing to what was available." Then from there, it just - the last 20 years, working with Lisa Crispin on so many projects. Books, but also presentations - and all kinds of other things. So that's the progression through there.

Len: Thanks very much for sharing that really great story, I can tell that there - it could go on a lot longer.

Janet: Oh, it could go on a lot longer.

Len: If you wanted to. I'd like to ask a couple of specific things. One is, I think maybe being a fellow Canadian - your code words about competitive sports and the amount of time it takes, probably refers to hockey?

Janet: No.

Len: No? Oh, really?

Janet: Because I have two daughters.

Len: Okay.

Janet: One was in gymnastics.

Len: Oh, right.

Janet: And one was in synchronized swimming, both making it to the national level, so yeah.

Len: Oh, well fantastic. I mean, that's amazing. I had a cousin who's daughter was training in Calgary actually - on that path, she eventually decided not to go down it. Yeah, gymnastics is an incredible commitment.

Janet: Yeah.

Len: For the parents, it's - but I mean, of course for the kids as well. The reason I brought up hockey, is because I still have nightmares about waking up at like 4:30 in the morning in -30°C to go an hour outside of town to like play on a rink for an hour.

Janet: Yeah, exactly.

Len: That's what it's like.

Janet: I totally understand that - because, yes.

Len: Actually, one specific thing I wanted to ask you about, was - so when you were - I'm just trying to put the timeline together a little bit. When you went to Jakarta, this would have been in the days before you could have gone on a website to see like, what's it like to live in Jakarta, right?

Janet: Yeah.

Len: So what was that like, just moving there?

Janet: Scary. Very, very scary. Because you couldn't hardly even get a phone call out, right? So I was really glad that we went to Singapore first, because it was a really nice transition. We spent a year in Singapore, and then we went to Jakarta - and it was so eye-opening for me - it was really good for my children too, because they went to an international school. I said it was probably the best thing for them - because there was 54 nationalities in that school, and 54 different languages spoken. So the language of the school was English, but my daughters had to learn a little bit of Indonesian - because that's where we lived.

It was fun. It was a great experience for them. For me, it really made me appreciate what we have in Canada a lot.

Len: It's funny, this is a total coincidence. Some friends of mine, a couple - taught at an international school in Jakarta for five years. They'd been to Ammman and Kiev and stuff like that before that, so they were part of that world of traveling around. That experience for their son, it's just like you described. I mean, just really amazing getting to have that experience - and it's something you carry with you your whole life.

Janet: Absolutely. We talk about diversity a lot now. I'm just thinking - just being exposed to the different cultures, makes you realize - especially when you are the outsider, right?

Len: Yeah.

Janet: I remember - we moved to Jakarta, and after we got into our house, my husband left for a month. I had a driver who spoke a little bit of - because you can't drive yourself there - it's impossible. So I had a driver who spoke English fairly well, and I had to take him with me - in to go buy groceries, to go buy - I wanted a lamp. You can't just go into a store and buy a lamp, if you don't speak their language. So, yeah - I felt really sorry for my driver. I was so glad - he was my lifeline, because - you get to know the community really well as well, the people around you. Because you need to. You can't just stay in isolation - it would be a very scary thing otherwise.

Len: That's so interesting. Also the contrast of just such different places like Western Canada and then Singapore and Jakarta.

Janet: Yes.

Len: It's a really interesting mix of experiences. We're not going to go into everything you did - but I did -

Janet: It's okay.

Len: I actually was quite interested when I saw that your first job as a programmer was at a stock exchange. This is all on LinkedIn, so it's in the - I'm not giving anything away, when I say it was in the early '90s.

Janet: Yeah.

Len: What work did a programmer do for a stock exchange at that time?

Janet: I was working on the clearing system actually. There was a trading system that was being worked on at the same time. It was on a mainframe, right? We were programming in COBOL. That was something I did not take in university, so I had to learn to program in COBOL.

I learned a lot about testing, because it was - quality, of course - when you're dealing with a stock exchange, things you're passing in the clearing system, passing through billions of dollars all the time - you can't afford mistakes. So testing and quality was such an important part of what we did.

I tell this story quite often. My supervisor at the time would come in every morning, and he'd sit with me and he'd say, "So Janet, what are you going to work on today?" I would tell him. then he'd say, "How are you going to test that, Janet?" I'd have to walk through my thought processes. Because we didn't have testers, we were only programmers.

At the end of the day, he'd come back, and he'd sit with me, and he'd go, "Janet, walk me through what you did today, and how did you test that?" I think that was probably where I got the basis for quality, and thinking about the processes and how we did things, which is why I ended up in testing in the long run.

Len: I'm curious - I've got a couple of questions about this. Did you take any testing classes as part of your Computer Science degree or anything like that? Were you introduced to the concept?

Janet: Absolutely not.

Len: Right.

Janet: I don't think testing was - I was very fortunate in university. I went in as a mature student, and I fell into this group of other mature students. I was a little bit more mature than they were - one of my best friends, she was 28 - so quite a bit younger than I was. We both had a very similar mindset, and we worked really well together.

When the professor - when we were doing our exercises and things like that and our programs, we would test each other's programs, just to help each other. We weren't taught how to do it, but I think it's always just been there in my - I often say that if you're a tester, it's almost a calling. It's what you do. I think I fell into it quite naturally. It's the way I thought. No, in university - absolutely not a single one on testing.

Len: Things are obviously a lot different now in the industry. I mean, there's been like - testing is a thing, basically - in a way that it wasn't in the past, and things like that.

This is a version of a question I often ask on the podcast, which is - if you were 28 years old and starting out in a career in technology now, would you go to university and get a full four-year Computer Science degree, or would you choose another path?

Janet: I think I'd probably go back to university. Because it's not the programming that they teach you that is - I could go to any - I could take programming online to teach you the classes. I think what university taught - at least taught me - was it taught me how to learn, how to do research, how to think for myself, how to challenge, how to approach things differently, how to work on my own, how to work in a team.

It was more than just learning how to program. That was really only a very small part of it. I quite enjoyed my university experience, even though I couldn't do all the things that most university students do. I had to make some hard choices.

Len: Thanks very much for sharing that. So, you actually eventually made a move to being a consultant, and being more independent. Which is actually something that a lot of Leanpub authors have done at some point in their careers. It's probably not an accident that they go into self-publishing, if they've got that independent streak in them. What was that transition like from sort of working regular jobs to being a consultant?

Janet: Well, I had my job at the Vancouver Stock Exchange. Then we moved to Calgary, mostly because my husband got transferred. When we moved to Calgary, I took another job in Calgary, and worked for them for five years, which was probably two years too long for that particular thing. I took another job as a QA manager, and then the dotcom bust happened.

That's when I went and became a contractor, and I found that some of my contracting experiences were as long as my full time jobs. I ended up contracting, going back and forth to a full time job, and then contracting. Then, when Lisa and I published our first book - because I'd been working full time and we had been writing our book full time for about a year and a half - I was exhausted. I said, "I need to take three months off."

I did. I took from October to January off. Then in January, I was approached by a company, and they said, "Do you have a course to go with that book?" I went, "No, I don't." They said, "Would you develop one? We will help you."

At that point, I - all of a sudden - become a trainer, as well. That's when I really made the transition into being a full-time consultant. I was not even a contractor anymore. I was consulting and training, and it just went from there. I never looked back.

Len: One segment that we added to the podcast, a year and a half ago now, was asking people about their experience of the pandemic, where they are and - or where they were, and given the work that they do. I was just wondering if for a few minutes you could explain where you are? I said earlier you were normally based in Calgary, but if you could tell us a little bit about where you are, and what it's been like for you?

Janet: Alright, so I also had mentioned that we were semi-retired, right? That I was semi-retired. We like to spend about three months south of the border - January, February and March. We like to escape our Calgary winters. Which is quite normal. That's why we're called "snowbirds," we like to leave.

We were down in Arizona when we got the call from the Prime Minister saying, "Everybody come back. We're closing borders," and so on. We drove back and we crossed the border, went to Calgary - and packed up what we wanted. Then we drove directly here to Windermere, British Columbia - which is a small little village. It's our summer home, is what we usually use it for. Since March of 2020, we have been here in our summer home - and going back and forth to Calgary every once in a while, making a Costco trip, for example.

We've been - I think what's been the most different for me is, I've always worked from home since I've started consulting. We've travelled so many places. All of a sudden, we've been home for over a year and a half. We've not gone anywhere - except to the grocery store, to Calgary - and that's been about it.

So other than the lack of being able to see the world, and I miss that a lot - it's been pretty good. Because I've got a view of the mountains here. We have a lake a kilometer away. It's pretty nice, it's quiet.

Len: I was just curious about the details. Did people start wearing masks a lot early on, or anything like that?

Janet: Well, one of the reasons we came here, to Windermere, rather than stay in Calgary, is because there's so many fewer people. Inside the stores and other things, people would wear masks. I can go for walks for a long time, and hardly see anybody - except somebody else walking on the other side of the road.

We were less vulnerable here, I guess? And, yeah - one of the things that I worry about, is - I have a few - let's say "sensitive lungs." So the whole idea of catching COVID really worried me a lot. Being here and being segregated a little bit, and being able to control our environment - whereas in Calgary, there's just so many people - it's just a lot harder.

Len: Thanks very much for sharing that. It's just been so, I mean, along with - there's a lot of negativity, but there are some positive things that people have found in their experiences as well.

Janet: Absolutely.

Len: Hearing about how it's been different for everybody is actually really good. Because all of our lives changed, but they changed in different ways - depending on what we do, and where we live, and our family connections - and things like that. Here in Victoria - Vancouver Island's a pretty big island - but it's still an island -

Janet: Yes.

Len: Here, at least in my neighborhood in Victoria - one interesting detail I like to say, is that people really never wore masks outside. There was a period of time when it was a little bit more common than usual. People learned how to walk on the correct side of the sidewalk, and more or less keep the distance they probably should have been normally anyway.

Janet: Yeah, exactly.

Len: It does depend on where you live. I interviewed a woman once who was living in London, and she would go to Hyde Park every day, which is a huge, ginormous park - where it's very easy to be healthy and stay away from people. But she had to go through these narrow, winding streets to get there. That was something that she would always keep in mind, so it's just interesting to think about how different -

Janet: Oh, it absolutely is. I think people have handled it differently as well. Sometimes - if you treat it as a really negative thing, I think our minds get to think that way - sometimes, right? What it's made me realize is how important hygiene is again. I think it was a good reminder. At the beginning, I would wash my groceries and Lysol them. Then we realized we probably didn't need to. What I found out was when I was wiping all my groceries down, was how dirty they were. I have continued to do it, only because I know how - because people handle them, they - it's nothing to do with COVID anymore, it's just - it makes me feel better, right?

Len: Yes.

Janet: I'm just much more aware.

Len: That's so interesting, thanks for sharing that. My version of that was realizing that I was actually living like, I don't know? Like, no offence to teenagers - but I was living like a teenager, right? Like, "Oh, I've got one dab of toothpaste left, I'll just make sure to go to the store this evening." Or, “I'm on the last piece of toilet paper, I'll just go down to the store."

Working in the tech sector, I think people in that industry had a little bit more internal advance warning. I never ran out of anything - I sort of started thinking, not to go on too long - but I started thinking about - my parents both grew up on farms, and when I grew up - we were not rich, but there was never an empty shelf in the kitchen.

Janet: Yeah.

Len: Ever, ever. You fill it. An empty shelf was just something you didn't have.

Janet: Well, because you didn't go in for groceries every day.

Len: Because you didn't go in for groceries every day, what could make more sense? So although there might - there was never a shortage, right? Because, again - we didn't have like stockpiles of stuff, but you had - you just had extra. So if you went to the store, and for some reason they were out of tomato sauce – well, you had some at home - and you just made sure to look for it again next time.

So, I now don't have any empty shelves. I definitely have enough toilet paper.

Janet: Yes.

Len: The last question I have for you before we go on to the next part of the interview where you talk about your book, is - so I got to ask - I mentioned earlier that your podcast with Lisa Crispin is called, "Donkeys and Dragons."

Janet: Yeah.

Len: I know you get this question all the time - but I did get to ask Lisa, "What's with, why donkeys?" So my question for you, is - why dragons?

Janet: So you know why the donkeys - because Lisa's a donkey person. I've always had an interest in fantasy books, and one of my favorite series is the Dragonriders of Pern, where the riders - they become one with the dragon, they can hear each other's thoughts and things. I just think that that's such a fantastic - I just really, really - I can't even have the words here. Anyhow, it really feels good to me. So, combining the idea of fantasy and dragons and things, I called my company DragonFire. I actually do have a dragon tattoo, little bit - something personal. So hence the donkeys and dragons.

Len: Oh, that's just fantastic. Thanks so much for sharing that.

Moving on to talk about your book, Agile Testing Condensed. For those listening who aren't aware of what those words mean - I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about what Agile testing is, and maybe contrast that with some other form of software testing - or process testing, I should say.

Janet: When Lisa and I started talking about testing and Agile methods, when we went to go write our first book, we thought, "Well, what are we going to call this?" We had been calling it "Agile Testing," just because it was easier to say than, "Testing in Agile teams." Once we got that brand, it just stuck.

The difference between what we would call traditional - say testing on a waterfall project, or something like that - where you get requirements and specs and all of those things, test cases - testing within an Agile realm or devops - or any of these things - means working very closely, collaborating. Being part of, we call it "early testing." Testing the ideas right from the beginning, trying to prevent defects in the code. That's what we're trying to do.

Of course, we have to do exploratory testing, and everything else. It's a collaborative approach to building quality in, and that's really what we mean.

Whereas traditional testing is a testing afterwards, focused on, "Let's find the bugs that exist." We think that that's very expensive, so let's not put them in in the first place.

Len: That's so interesting, that's an interesting way of putting it. Because a lot of people would normally think, "You build it and then you test it." The way that would work is that you'd then probably have the people who do the building, and then you'd hand it off to the people who do the testing.

In the product or process testing that you're talking about, the concept of testing is built in from the beginning.

Janet: Right.

Len: It's sort of integral to the whole team.

Janet: That's absolutely, absolutely correct.

Len: So, building quality in would mean that you make sure that you are - it's not exactly just checking what you do all the time, but it's a little deeper than that. I was wondering if you could talk a little bit more about that concept of building quality in?

Janet: Okay. Let's go back to my first story about, at the stock exchange, where I said my supervisor came in and said, "Janet, how are you going to test that?" Just think, the difference - if you think about if you were going to build something, if you first thought about, "How am I going to test it?" Right? It changes your whole mentality, it changes how you're going to build it, because you are building testability in - and you're going to start testing it in smaller chunks. That's really how you're building quality in. Just thinking about, "How am I going to test that? What does that mean?" Right?

Len: One question I've got is - so for example, if there's a team that's doing waterfall type processes - which we've spoken about on the podcast before, I'm sure most of our listeners know what that is. It's like, basically you can think of it as like - something very planned, step by step, and that plan is handed off to people to go through the tasks. It's a crude and uncharitable way of putting it, but you can think of it that way.

So if you're brought into a team to try and say, "Hey, let's do things differently. There's this Agile thing where it's maybe less hierarchical, and less like a getting from point A to point B thing." How do you first introduce them to what they can change in the way that they work together, to achieve this culture?

Janet: Yeah. It's a hard one, and it will depend on the different teams. Sometimes it's just starting at the very beginning, to show people how they can start asking questions, and challenge each other on a little bit, right? By saying, "Hey, what if?"

You start by saying, "It's okay to ask questions." Because I've been with a lot of teams - some teams have testers, some don't. I'm a firm believer of testers on a team, I think they play a valuable role - but that role is changing.

A lot of times, testers haven't felt the ability to challenge programmers, right? They've just tested whatever they got. So for them to be able to have that ability - to ask those questions early, to challenge the ideas - takes a lot of courage. Because they've not been used to it, and it's a completely different way of thinking. So I think that is part of the challenge to moving, right?

Len: Yeah, it's so interesting how people often think of software programming and digital product creation and maintenance, as this sort of dry thing that's sort of almost like the stereotype of accounting - or something like that, right?

It's so interpersonal. When it comes to testing, there's inherently - in certain cultures, especially if they're very hierarchical, and sort of there's very formal or bureaucratic - the idea of questioning what someone has done, right? They might take it personally, they might take it as a threat to their career. Things like that.

One person I interviewed a long time ago was working on a car manufacturing floor. He had this great story about how there was this one part of the process where there was some, I don't know? Conveyor belt that took some parts from one thing to another. Sometimes parts would fall off. If they fell off, they would fall into a trough of oil and other parts. At one point, they ran out of a certain part - and his immediate superior told him to go fish out the parts from this trough.

Janet: Oh.

Len: They'd fallen off - they'd been there for who knows how long, and they'd been in this oil. Of course he's thinking, "These are going to end up in cars that people are driving around other people. We can't put these things in there, that's wrong." So he went to that guy's immediate superior - they were all guys, this was a while ago.

Janet: It's a while ago.

Len: And that person said, "Oh, yeah. We can't do that." So they had to stop production. Which is - that's a big deal in any manufacturing process.

Janet: Yes, yeah.

Len: His immediate superior found him later, and started choking him - his face just burning red with fury.

Janet: Wow.

Len: It was because - to that guy - like what mattered was him, himself, his career. It wasn't exactly that he was like crudely selfish, or anything like that. He was probably thinking about his kids in college, or his mortgage or something like that.

So if you go into - as a consultant, as you do - if you go into an environment where there's actually a formal structure that makes questioning threatening, is there anything you can do, other than introduce people to like a guidepost or something like that?

Janet: Yeah. If the environment - a lot of times when I do talks and things, I talk about the environment, and talk about safety, right? Because nothing will change.

I was in one company a while ago, and they wanted me to - quite often I get called in to fix the testers. "Testing is behind, testing's a bottleneck, come and fix them." Most of the time when I go in, it is not the tester's problem, it's the process, right?

We can make a few adjustments, and we can work with them to get better. In this one case, I walked in, and I was working with them. I went and I said, "Alright, we have a bigger problem." I said, "I can't even work with your teams." I said, "We need a workshop with the management first."

I went in, and I was very blunt and very open, and said, "Unless you fix this part of it - the environment, the culture - nothing I do with your teams is going to help them. Either we have to work on this first, or just tell me to go away, and you'll be happy the way you are. Find another consultant who will do what you want them to do," right?

Sometimes, as a consultant, you have to make those hard choices. I firmly believe in really solving what the real problem is. Safety - if you think you're going to get blamed for something, you will never change. You can't ask your team to change, right? You can't ask them to experiment if they fail and they get blamed.

Len: It's so interesting the concept of a team, often - it's a word that we use all the time, that's actually a great metaphor. It's often used to mean just like a group of people.

Janet: Right.

Len: That's the team - but they're not always acting like teams, right? In Leanpub, we're pretty small and we've been around for a while, but we've still got a startup culture. I've naturally got a like "worst case scenario" mindset, that's where I go to with any idea right away, right? In our environment, if someone proposes something, and someone else finds a problem - sees right away that there's a problem with it, the response is, "Oh, good catch." Not shame or a fear of being fired or something like that. It's, "Oh, well -" Because we're a team, we're all trying to succeed together. That's really hard to do in bigger organizations, in particular.

Janet: Oh, it is. It's because their culture has been around for so long, and it grows, right? It grows organically. Sometimes they will change one person at the top, and you can see the whole culture of a company change along with it - depending how that one person acts, right?

Len: Oh, yeah. That reminds me, I remember I was once working in investment banking, and our company was notorious for not wearing ties - unless we went into meetings. The loose collar thing, in a normally very staid environment. We got a new CEO, and there was a companywide email -

Janet: Oh, no.

Len: "You've got to wear your ties."

Janet: Oh.

Len: Tt was really interesting. Because he was clearly partly doing it, just to show who's boss.

Janet: Yeah.

Len: Which was an interesting culture change; the former boss didn't feel like he needed to show people who was boss. It was also an indication that like -

Janet: Things are changing.

Len: Things are changing, and also that, in my view anyway - now I'm going off on a total digression, but that he didn't understand what the value was in us being a little bit different - that we were more realistic than performative, was actually something that made us really competitive in a very competitive space.

Janet: Right.

Len: Right? That you can dispense with the formality when it's not needed.

Janet: Yes.

Len: Put it on when you need to, but don't do it when you don't need it.

Anyway, it's just another example of how complicated and personal and interpersonal these kinds of things can be, even in very large organizations, that are doing very serious things.

Moving on to the next part of the interview, I wanted to ask you a little bit about your experience writing. You said your first book with Lisa, you worked together for a year and a half. It was published with a conventional publisher.

Janet: Yes.

Len: I was just wondering, you published I think two books with them?

Janet: We did.

Len: What was your experience like being a conventionally-published author?

Janet: Well, it was - the first book was my first time doing it. They owned the timeline. They owned what we could and couldn't do, to a certain extent. We had a fair bit of leeway with it, especially the second book - because the first one was such a success. We actually had more leeway, and they had more trust in us, I guess? So a little bit different.

Our first book - it was a learning experience, all the way around for us. Because they asked us to do it, they asked us to do 300 pages. We said, "Oh, we can't write 300 pages." It turned out to be 500 pages. Totally ridiculous.

Anyhow - we had lots to say, I guess? They asked us if we could reduce our timeline, because it was urgently needed - Lisa and I were actually quite responsive, and we did. We didn't have the control, right? It turned out to be a great book, so it's okay. It was very stressful.

The second book was less stressful, because both Lisa and I had a better idea what was coming, what was going on. We could challenge a little bit more, we knew a little bit more. Yes, it was stressful. Mostly because both Lisa and I are - if we say we're going to do something, we will do it. It wasn't that we wanted to push out the time, or do anything else. We stressed ourselves a little bit more to get it done.

Len: You decided to self-publish this latest book -

Janet: The third book.

Len: Agile Testing Condensed

Janet: Yeah.

Len: What was that experience like?

Janet: Well, we actually thought about it for our second book. Then we decided that neither of us had the time or the inclination to figure it out.

By this third book, we decided we - well, we wanted to, because we were lacking a small book - so we thought, "We can self-publish a small book." We don't need to go through all of that, because one of the things is you, don't have control when you have a publisher, right? Of things like translations.

Yes, we decided to go through Leanpub. Because we had a lot of friends that had done it, and recommended it.

It was some learning. I did the - I'm going to say, "the technical part," getting it into the Leanpub format. That was my area that I worked with. There was asking questions - you were very responsive, by the way.

Len: Oh, thanks.

Janet: The forum was pretty good, and everything else. My questions pretty much got answered as we went. It was a learning experience - again - because, something different. I think because it was a small book, it was much simpler than trying to tackle a great big 500 page book. I'm not sure if I would have been willing to do that, at least for the first time.

Len: Thanks very much for sharing that. It's interesting, one of the - insofar as Leanpub works, it works partly because we listen very closely, or we try to. Every time we hear from an author or someone working on a book, what issues or questions that they have - because if you've got to reach out to us, that means there's either something we need to do that we haven't done, or there's something we need to do better, or at least not as badly as we're doing it.

Janet: That's a good way to look at it, yeah.

Len: Every interaction, we take seriously. Like, "What do we need to do here, so that we're not making people uncomfortable, or wasting their time, or anything like that?"

On that note, actually - the last question I always ask on this podcast, if the guest is a Leanpub author, is - if there was one thing we could fix for you that really bugged you about Leanpub, or if there was one feature we could build for you ,what would you ask us to do?

Janet: Oh, I'm trying to think of what the one was. Right now, I'm struggling how to import Word docs back in. I've done it once, I know it's there, and it's not that hard. I'm starting on another idea. that's not it. It would be something around - because we have lots of translations now.

So a better understanding, I think - from somebody else translating, how they can be a translator. For example, to be a translation - I have to be the primary author, so that they can do it. They can't be the primary authors and be a translation of our book. I'm always asking our translation people, "Can you please make me a primary author?"

Len: Thanks very much for bringing that up. We actually - it's pretty new, but we actually do have [an article in the Help Center](http://help.leanpub.com/en/articles/117487-i-would-like-to-translate-a-leanpub-book-what-should-i-do now about how to do that process.

Janet: Okay.

Len: Just for people listening, we do have a special translation feature, which means that you can say a book is a translation of another Leanpub book. On the book that's the original book, it'll say, "This book has been translated into blah, blah, blah," and you can have helpful links. The book that is a translation, if people come across that, it will say, "This is a translation of such and such." Now in order to establish that chain, what we call the "primary author" needs to be the same -

Janet: Author all the way through, yeah.

Len: On all the books. There's another reason for that, which I'll get into a moment. How do you become a primary author?

Here's the process we recommend basically, if you're going to have a Leanpub book translated. The person who wrote the original book creates a new book in the language that the book is going to be translated into. Then they add the translator as a co-author on the book. Then, the co-author has full access to everything that they need, everything provided to them basically by being added as a co-author by the primary author.

Janet: Ah.

Len: One thing I'm trying to get across, is that, as the original author, you don't have to do a lot of work. You just set up the book, you add the co-author, and then off they go to the races on their own.

The other very key thing - in addition to being able to use the, "This is a translation of," or, "This book has been translated into" feature - the other thing about being the primary author, is that you're the one who sets the royalty split, which makes sense if the book is a translation of your book, typically. I mean, you probably haven't like sold the rights to anybody or anything like that, right?

Janet: No. Okay.

Len: That way - so basically what it means, is the person who's the primary author sets the royalty split. The co-authors can't change it, basically.

Janet: Alright. This is very interesting, I wish I would have asked you this question a long time ago.

Len: Oh no, that's = and we should have had an article about it a long time ago. And you can change, as the primary author, you can change that royalty split anytime. If they're like, "Oh, I'm bringing -" If they want to bring on a co-translator, you can just deal with that.

Janet: Add them.

Len: Add them. You can't retroactively change royalties that have been like allocated already, but you can change it at any particular moment in time going forward.

Also, one thing you mentioned is - we do have a feature that lets you, as the primary author - set someone else as the primary author. If you're a translator, if you're an eager translator, and you've gone ahead and created a book, and then you hear this episode or you come across our article - you can easily rectify this situation by just going onto the author's page in your Leanpub admin area, and then the change the primary author to the - what you do is you add the -

Janet: That's normal - yeah, that's normally what they've been doing now.

Len: Yeah.

Janet: Okay.

Len: You add the original author as a co-author, and then right away - you can just switch them to be the primary author, and then it's all done. That's how that works.

Janet: Oh, that's really good to know. Now I know going forward.

Len: We'll make sure to find ways to make that more prominent, so you don't have to operate in the dark like that.

Janet: A lot of it is learning by doing.

Len: Oh yeah, of course. Yeah.

Janet: Yeah.

Len: Well, Janet, thank you very much for taking some time out of your day to be a guest on the Frontmatter podcast, and thank you very much for using Leanpub as a platform for your book, Agile Testing Condensed.

Janet: Thank you very much.

Len: Thanks.

And as always, thanks to all of you for listening to this episode of the Frontmatter podcast. If you like what you heard, please rate and review it wherever you found it, and if you'd like to be a Leanpub author, please visit our website at leanpub.com.