Uncertainty

Reducing Uncertainty in Software Delivery

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A key theme that I’m seeing from these talks is that they are spending a lot of effort on learning from failure. Either by analysing ones that have happened in production or actively encouraging teams to cause failures.
Scales-of-collaboration

Scales of Collaboration

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The scales of collaboration can help you and your teams to work more effectively by improve your collaboration. It allows you to measure how you are currently collaborating and what you can do to improve its effectiveness. But what's wrong with our current approach and how do you use the scale?
Testing techniques plotted on a speed, value, environment axis

Exploratory and Automated testing: Using the right techniques in the wrong contexts

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Exploratory testing is about testing in an unpredictable context and therefore detecting unpredictable failures in our software. Automated testing is about testing in a predictable context and therefore detecting predictable failures. The mistake we make with automation is we try to apply it to the wrong context

What are your default settings?

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What are the defaults that we use when thinking and how do they affect our analysis of situations and decisions
Fire extinguisher by Piotr Chrobot

Why is psychological safety important to software engineering teams?

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4 minute read Before you can answer this question you need to know what psychological safety is. Amy Edmondson in her book The Fearless Organisation describes it as:  The belief that the work environment is safe for interpersonal…
3 vintage telephone on the wall Photo by Pavan Trikutam on Unsplash

Three things of 2020

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3 minute read Below are three things that when I reflect back on 2020 that stand out to me. I’ve purposely not mentioned COVID because I think this is one thing that all of us would have on our list so didn't think there was anything…

Foundations of great teams? Start with relationships

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4 mins reading time tl;dr: check out my miro model to get the key points. Good informal relationships are they key to better collaboration https://miro.com/app/board/o9J_khGWgWc=/ Over the last couple of years I've started to see…
Picture of a takeaways at night in Margate

My biggest takeaways from AgileTD 2020: The future of testers isn’t in automation or testing

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I was lucky enough to speak at AgileTD this year and also attend some of the talks. These are my main takeaways from the conference based on the talks that I was able to make. My confirmation bias sense is tingling with this but…   The…
Mindmap of SCRAF model

Why do we respond the way we do in social situations?

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A colleague recently shared an article with me called Managing with the brain in mind. It argues that the workplace is experienced by employees as social structure first then a workplace and that keeping this mind might lead to better employee…
flow diagram showing the difference between leaders and managers

The difference between leaders and managers

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3 minute read Tl;dr: Hybrid Leader-managers could be one of the keys to successful software teams but first you need to understand the difference between the two.  A higher quality version of the model can be found on my Miro board. The…