Sharing success is very important and motivating. On the other hand, sharing failures is also crucial for quality issues. Failures remind us that no one is perfect. Every failure can be a step toward success if we learn. Ever since the first animal emerged from the sea to the land, our curiosity and ability to learn led us to the incredible technology we have today.
Learning from mistakes is one of the biggest fuels that take us to the next step.
Serkan presents real testing cases/stories where he was the man of failure or the witness of the failure. The root cause of some cases was purely technical(SW or HW). For some, it was the problem of requirement engineering, documentation, management, or tooling.
A small spoiler of some stories:
A very expensive GPS system that works during acceptance tests at the vendor's facility and decides to stop working at your facility (while it still works when you return to the vendor)
A forgotten tolerance on the test document leads to a mini-international crisis.
A cup holder that almost stops the acceptance tests of a multimillion-dollar project.
A counterfeit IC issue leads to the failure of a system.
... and more.
Biography
Serkan's story began in a small city in eastern Turkey called Erzincan. The widest reason people know about this small town is that it hosted one of the top 10 earthquakes in history (1939).
On a day when I was 10, my dad came home with a computer with a DX4 processor, which cost a fortune at that time. That is when I started coding.
The first code I wrote was a 2-page code I read from a computer magazine and entered by hand. If you typed everything correctly, the result would be a flag :)
Aged 18, I moved to Ankara, the capital of Turkey, to attend a university. Thus, the second part of my story began: I graduated from EEE at the Middle East Technical University.
Afterward, I started working in one of the largest defense companies in Turkey.
I had the opportunity to work at every stage of the acceptance-verification-validation processes of military systems for 12 years, first in the quality and then in the system testing departments.
I had been part of hundreds of different testing-acceptance-verification-validation processes of various materials-units-systems, from single-cent resistors to 100s-of-million-dollar systems.
I had the chance to plan and lead many testing events.
The second part of the story ended in 2022, when we decided to move to the Netherlands.
I have been a senior test designer at Sioux Technologies for 1.5 years. Since I started, I have been working on a Sioux team designing calibration software for ASML.
I am married, and we have a 5-year-old son.
By: Serkan Sahin