
Push your own flywheel
incremental improvements, leaders, leadership, management, psychological safety, talksToday marks my 20 years working in the software industry. I was going to write a post about what I've done over that time and my takeaways from all the weird and beautiful things I've done. I might still do, but below is something that's taken me nearly 20 years to realise.

12 things I learnt from Agile Manchester 2023
Agile, working smarterMy key highlight and insights from 3 days of Agile Manchester 2023

How We Built Testability with Psychological Safety [External post]
Agile, Collaboration, complex work, feedback, leadership, psychological safety, testability, trust, working smarter
Ben Linders recently interviewed me for my talk at AgileTD on how we failed at testability. That resulted in this InfoQ post about how to build in testability you need developers and testers to collaborate. But to be able to do that, you need…

The courage to supercharge your testability
Agile, Collaboration, continuous improvement, feedback, incremental improvements, leadership, psychological safety, QA, relationships, testability, Testing, Uncategorised, working smarterTestability is all about building quality-in. It's about identifying known issues before they become a problem while coding. Pairing testers into this process can supercharge the testability feedback loop. It can allow you to pick up known and unknown issues. But pairing devs and testers together needs courage.

Test Automation: Don't report the bugs it catches
Automation, continuous improvement, Test automation, testability, Testing, unit testing
Reading time: 3 minutes
Don’t report the bugs your test automation catches. Report the reduction in uncertainty that the system works.
When you report the bugs you send the signal that test automation is there to catch bugs. But that’s…

13 things I've learned from running remote workshops
Agile, Collaboration, complex work, remote working, working smarter
Over the last 12-18 months I've been running a lot of remote workshops and during that time I've learned a few valuable lessons along the way. Most of my experience is based on translating and running an in-person workshop to a remote online…

Three things of 2021
Agile, continuous improvement, DevOps, feedback, incremental improvements, psychological safety
Every week I spend some time reflecting on what I learned or found interesting and this is a summary of my year. After doing this for nearly 3 years one of the biggest ways it's helped me with is seeing the thread through my work which reminds…

Speed Vs Quality: Can you have both?
Agile, continuous improvement, incremental improvements, quality, speed, working smarter
5 minutes reading time
I was recently part of a panel discussion around the topic “What is quality?” and an interesting question came up. Is it always a choice between speed of delivery and the quality of that delivery? The thinking…

Incremental improvements: Why don’t teams do it more?
Agile, Collaboration, incremental improvements, leadership, questions
(Reading time: 10 minutes) I’ve been working with a lot of different engineering teams over the years and there has been a strong tendency for them to avoid incremental improvements and instead go for bigger changes. There are many reasons…

The risk with direct questions
Agile, Collaboration, feedback, leadership, psychological safety, questions, relationships, trust
The risk with the direct question is that the person being asked could assume intent within the question. E.g. asking what risk there in this release could be assumed that you think there is a risk in the release or that you don’t trust the…