
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.

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…

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…

Reducing Uncertainty in Software Delivery
Agile, Automation, Collaboration, DevOps, Quality Awareness, talksA 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
Agile, Collaboration, feedback, leadership, management, visulisationThe 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?

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

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…