Push your own flywheel

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Today marks my 20 years working in the software industry. I was going to write a post about what I've done over that time and my takeaways from all the weird and beautiful things I've done. I might still do, but below is something that's taken me nearly 20 years to realise.
Photo by Rainy Wongon Unsplash

How We Built Testability with Psychological Safety [External post]

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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…
Fear is a reaction. Courage is a decision by Cristi Ursea on Unsplash

The courage to supercharge your testability

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Testability 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.
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…
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?

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 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…
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…