
Why is psychological safety important to software engineering teams?
Agile, Collaboration, complex work, leadership, management, psychological safety
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…

Three things of 2020
Collaboration, feedback, leaders, leadership, management, psychological safety, Tips
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
Agile, Collaboration, leaders, leadership, management, psychological safety
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…

My biggest takeaways from AgileTD 2020: The future of testers isn’t in automation or testing
Agile, Collaboration, Kanban, leaders, leadership, links, psychological safety, Quality Awareness, talks, Test automation, testability, Tips, TOC, videos
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…

Why do we respond the way we do in social situations?
leadership, management, Neuroscience, psychological safety, Uncategorised
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…

The difference between leaders and managers
complex work, leaders, leadership, management
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…

August - Toread
Agile, code coverage, links, Quality Awareness, Reading, Testing, Tips
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…

How Falling Behind Can Get You Ahead
Agile, links, Reading, talks, videos“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.”

July - Toread
Agile, links, Quality Awareness, Reading, Testing, Tips
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…

Future of testers: somewhere between users, teams and businesses
Agile, Collaboration, Quality Awareness, testability, Testing
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…