Dots

Three things of 2021

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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…
Island Adventures by Matthew Brodeur on Unsplash

Speed Vs Quality: Can you have both?

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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…
Why Don't Teams Go For Incremental Improvements by @JitGo

Incremental improvements: Why don’t teams do it more?

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(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…
What now?

The risk with direct questions

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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…
Words to live by: Begin by Danielle MacInnes on Unsplash

3 traits of Self-leadership

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A colleague of mine Qambar Raza recently shared this great Ted talk with me on self-leadership 👏 🎥 🍿🥤 Great leadership starts with self-leadership | Lars Sudmann In it Lars describes three behaviour traits to improve your…
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?
Fire extinguisher by Piotr Chrobot

Why is psychological safety important to software engineering teams?

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4 minute read Update: Scroll to the bottom for a video of what is Psychological safety and why should you care in under 10 minutes. Before you can answer this question you need to know what psychological safety is. Amy Edmondson in her…

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…