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…
Stairs in Singapore

August - Toread

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31st August 📻 How Can You Stop Comparing Yourself With Other People? If you manage people then this podcast is worth a listen. Having a better understanding of why we compare ourselves to others (social creatures living in hierarchical structures) and…
Photo by Joshua Golde on Unsplash

How Falling Behind Can Get You Ahead

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“Jack of all trades, master of none,” the saying goes. But it is culturally telling that we have chopped off the ending: “…but oftentimes better than master of one.”
3 things that motivates us to work

July - Toread

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At the intersection of software, technology and people  What is this? Things I’ve been reading this week that I’ve found interesting or intriguing. Sharing because I thought you might like them too. Most of the links…
sunset and signposts

Future of testers: somewhere between users, teams and businesses

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3 minute read I've been thinking a lot recently about what the future of the testers role could look like. Especially in teams that not only fully embrace CI/CD or DevOps but actually get some way towards implementing the ideas behind the…