Category: links

My biggest takeaways from AgileTD 2020: The future of testers isn’t in automation or testing

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 future of testers is not in automation or testing – it will play a part but not as big as – helping teams build quality-in.  

Most teams see testing as either bug hunting or just another cost centre that needs eliminating. Therefore testers (at all levels) need to get much better at communicating the value of testing.

As testers we need to start shifting our skill set from doing the testing to advocating for testing within teams.

The skills we need to develop will take time to build as it’s not a matter of just attending training but having hands on experience of using and applying the skills.   

Otherwise testers risk becoming irrelevant in teams that begin to form without the need for testers if (or when) the next shift happens.

What is working in our favour is the slow shift to adopt new development ideas such as those expressed in Accelerate. But also teams figuring out how to really collaborate and not just cooperate. Think of the dance of passing tickets around that happens in a lot of development teams.

Which talks should you take the time to watch?

So which of these talk further lead me to believe the above. Let me break it down:

The future of testers is not in automation or testing

That is not to say it will go away, but it will not be the main objective of our roles.

Is not automation: Automation Addiction by Huib Schoots and Paul Holland (Day 1)

  • A lot of people’s addiction to automation appears to come from automation tool manufactures marketing (promising the world) and sunk cost fallacy (making it hard for people to stop once they’ve started). I’d also add peoples job spec also asking for automation with no rational as to why they want it
  • It is good for some things, generally things we know how they should behave and especially when we can isolate them from the UI.
    • UI’s can behave in unpredictable ways so not always the best place to put automation that needs to be consistent and reliable
  • So what do you do?
  • Focus on teams and start small: 
    • (Focus on) exploratory testing,
    • (Start small with) a good test strategy that includes what is and is not to be tested
  • Automation should be focused and isolated

Is not testing: Let it go by Nicola Sedgwick (Day 3)

  • We as testers need to let go of testing and start focusing on how we help teams understand what quality is and how they build it in
  • Nicola does this by being a Quality Coach and using Quality Engineers embedded in teams to help them mitigates the risks
  • This was a great talk and something lots of others have been advocating.
  • I think we still need to better define the Quality Coach and Quality Engineer roles but we have to start somewhere
  • I’ve written a little about what testers could do next
  • You can also learn a more about Quality Engineer from my TestBash Manchester talk (paywalled)

Also see

  • Testing is not the goal! By Rob Meaney (See below for more)
  • Beyond the bugs by Rick Tracy (See below for more)

Communicating the value of testing

How to pitch and value testing properly in the age of DevOps by Bjorn Boisschot (Day 1)

  • A fairly simple and affected approach to getting the test team behind a testing vision that they can then use to describe what it is that they do.
  • Rather than the typical dry approach of traditional testing (test scripts, reports, bugs) which all reinforce the bug hunter viewpoint of testing
  • This gets testing focused more towards what the organisation is trying to do (think company mission statement) and focuses the testing vision towards that
  • This helps others understand that it more then just bug hunting but about helping make decisions on the quality of the products and how they affect end users
  • His approach was to create a testing mission based on the company vision statement. With a focus on the why of testing and not the what or the how (see Simon Sinek: Start with why). From there they created a number of goals that would help them achieve that mission. Then they used the goal, question, metrics technique to make it measurable.
  • For some in the org this approach made testing much more accessible and greatly improved their view of it.
    • But for others, well, they still didn’t care 

Beyond the bugs by Rick Tracy (Day 3)

  • As senior members of the test team we need to help our testers understand what value they bring to teams. Then give them the tools (verbal and written communication skills) to make their value relatable to other roles. Otherwise they are very likely to be seen as bug hunters and a cost that can be eliminated.  
  • Really fascinating talk where he showed how everyone outside of testing views our roles (bug hunters that cost money). He then showed how we need to cover three main arguments for others to see the value we bring. These being conceptually (does it make logical sense to them) practically (how can they/others use it) and monetary (what does it cost and what’s the ROI). 
  • He then applied these three arguments to different testing scenarios from doing no testing at all to shifting testing as far left as possible and doing it earlier and earlier in the process. Through this he showed how the initial investment in testing increased but would dramatically decrease the costs later on in the process due to issues being found earlier and therefore easier and cheaper to fix.
  • This all reinforced the idea that testers do much more then add costs to projects and finding bugs. Such as 
    • Manually finding issues that would otherwise affect users 
    • Testing earlier on in the process before code is written by testing requirements and designs to prevent issues entering into the systems earlier
    • Raising levels of team understanding in the product, the processes they use and potential issues that is could be introduced 
    • Types of risk that could affect the team and acting as a type of insurance of that risk 
    • Making testing relatable to non testers 
    • Providing sources of information for innovation and improvements within the teams ways of working 
  • But all of this doesn’t just happen. You have to invest in your testers (and them in themselves!) for them to be able to do this such as their technical skills, improving their awareness, understanding risk, alignment with the org etc. IMO: If you keep testers ‘dumb’ and just bug hunting then that is all you will get 
  • He then linked this investments to potential measures so you can see if your investments was paying off and a way for testers to see improvements. Cycle and lead times where two areas that came up quite often 
  • These measures where then linked to business value. Two main ones being faster time to market and improved customer trust in the product. 

The skills we need to develop

These skills are not limited to just these talk but are great examples of what they are

How to keep your agility as a tester by Ard Kramer (Day 1)

  • Great talk about how he uses the 4 virtues of stoicism to be a better testers. I actually think this would help a lot of people within development teams so if you’ve not heard of it before I recommend checking it out. 
  • This looks like a good resource https://iep.utm.edu/stoiceth/ but this talk focused on just the 4 virtues of wisdom, courage, justice and moderation 

Also see 

  • Extreme learning situations as testers (Day 3)
  • How to keep testers motivated by Federico Toledo (Day 3)
  • Beyond the bugs by Rick Tracy (See above)
  • Testing is not the goal! By Rob Meaney (See below)
  • Introducing psychological safety in a tribe (See below)
  • Growing Quality from Culture in Testing Times by Tom Young (See below)
  • Faster Delivery teams? Kill the Test column by Jit Gosai (See below)

Adopt new development ideas

Testing is not the goal! By Rob Meaney (Day 2)

  • From  testability > operability > observability and his journey with his learning with these techniques and how teams have be able to make use of them.
  • I think one of the really interesting points he made was understanding where your team is in their development life cycle.
    • Are they just starting out or are they an established team and product.
    • Depending on where you on this cycle will affect to what level you will need testability, operability and observability.
    • As the three things are about managing complexity and when you are starting out complexity isn’t the problem, product market fit is. 

Also see

  • Faster Delivery teams? Kill the Test column by Jit Gosai (See below)

How to really collaborate and not just cooperate

Growing Quality from Culture in Testing Times by Tom Young (Day 1)

  • Great story from Tom Young on how the BBC news mobile team have grown over the years and how focusing on their team culture has been one of the best ways to build quality into their product. All they way through the talk Tom shouted out to how the whole team help deliver their product

Faster Delivery teams? Kill the Test column by Jit Gosai (Day 2)

Introducing psychological safety in a tribe by Gitte Klitgaard and Morgan Ahlström (Day 3)

  • Hearing how other people have tried to address psychological safety in organisation was very interesting. There was a lot in the talk that I recognised from Amy Edmundsons work (Teaming and Fearless organisation). They didn’t use Amy definition of what psychological safety is but from what I’ve seen all the definitions are almost the same. Simply put are people willing to take interpersonal risks within group settings. If so they have psychological safety if not then they are considered lacking it. 
  • The things that stood out for me was that all these types of initiatives take time and constant work. They are not things that you run a workshop, take a few questionnaires and you have the safety.
  • Also psychological safety is very personal thing so what one person feels is not the same as another in the same team. 
  • There is also a lot of misconception around psychological safety in that people feel that in psychologically safe environments will no longer have any conflicts and is all about everyone being comfortable. This is not the case.
    • PS environments are about being able to share your thoughts and ideas without the worry that it could be used against you in some way.
    • The main reason for PS is to establish environments conducive to learning from each other – which is what is needed for the knowledge work that we do 
    • But to learn effectively your need some level of discomfort
    • Too much discomfort and it can tip into fear which causes the flight or flight response  
      • and you’re not learning anything other then self protection 
      • The best way to protect yourself? Don’t say anything that could lead to a situation that causes conflict… 
    • So PS environments are about people being able to work through conflict productively that can lead to new insights and ideas

There was many, many more talks at the conference (perhaps too many) that I wasn’t able to make and thats not including the workshops so it is worth looking through the programme and seeing what stands out for you.

Think I missed a talk that should be in the list above let me know in the comments.

What is it about that particular talk that makes you think it should be included?

What above do you disagree with?

August – Toread

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 what issues it can cause (de-motivation, decreased self-esteem and confidence) can help you from stop doing it but also help you help your reports from falling into the trap. They also cover some biases that can lead to it such as casual inference and narrative fallacy.  

💪 How Resilience Works  The post calls out three traits for resilience: 1. A grasp of reality 2. Life has a purpose (for you) and 3. An ability to improvise. I’ve not see resilience called out like this before but there are some good anecdotal stories in there and in broad strokes I agree with it. But like a lot of things with the mind its easier said than done. Especially when you’re in the thick of things going wrong. (Book to add to the reading list: Mans search for meaning)

🍏 How Apple controls the App Store and therefore the end users How Ben explains the App Store Integration in stages is really interesting and key to understanding how Apple has so much control over developers and users. This is a long read but worth it to understand Apple’s almost unbelievable control of developers and users. If you want to access Apple’s users then you almost have no choice but to do as they say otherwise they can revoke your certificates and cut you off in a instant. The thing is this integration is so complicated most people are either not going to understand it or take the time to figure it out. This is very different to how Microsoft controlled Windows. 

17th August

🗺  Things Jobs said I’m no Steve Jobs fan (in the literal sense of the word) but no one can deny he helped create some incredible products. Every so often I read these quotes from him and depending on what’s going on in my work life they take on a different meaning. But one that always stays with me is this one: “You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something–your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.” 


🏌️‍♀️The Beginner’s Guide to Deliberate Practice What is it? Deliberate practice requires focused attention and is conducted with the specific goal of improving performance, while regular practice might include mindless repetitions. But its not that simple deliberate practice requires that you break down the task into small sub-sections and practice each one till you get better. This is easy if the domain you’re trying to learn is well known, but if it doesn’t have any existing training that you can make use of or you don’t have access to trainers that can help (e.g. mentors or coaches) than you might struggle. I believe this is why it is always a good idea to learn from multiple sources when skilling up in something new that pushes you out of your comfort zone in different ways. If you’re learning something just from one source then keep in mind that it might be one sided…  

10th August

🎼 What software teams can learn from music masterclasses Via twitter from ‪@katrinaclokie.‬ Feedback is by far one of the best ways you can learn and Helen makes a great point in that software teams can learn a lot from music masterclasses and studio classes too. Both are great ways to get feedback from more established artists, peers and teachers. But also from peers in different disciplines who can give a viewpoint that your own peer group might not be able to. Another key point Helen makes is that giving and receiving feedback is a skill and as such needs to be practiced to really help people. I don’t think we do this enough in software teams and when we do it’s not always the best. There is a lot we can learn from artistic masterclasses as an industry which I guess reflects the maturity of their professions and the relative youth of ours. 


🚽 Code Coverage Best Practices This post from Google testing on the toilet series makes some great points on how code (or test) coverage can be a useful metric for teams to use. The biggest one being about how it highlights code that isn’t covered by tests. This is the perfect opportunity for teams to discuss if it should or shouldn’t. Also the advice on using it to inform on conversations topic for code reviews per commit it also a really good idea. But as the articles points out going straight in with “We should use code coverage!” is probably not going to get you very far. Most engineering teams have been burnt pretty badly by it in the past with developers just trying to hit numbers or it being used to measure the effectiveness of them. Both of which lead to the wrong incentives of number gaming rather than productive conversation starters on what are good and bad tests for your context. 


🐦🧵 Everything you needed to know about 2+2=5 Kareem makes a great point that it’s all about context. If you’re thinking just about raw numbers then 2+2 =4 but if the context was say a male cat and a female cat give it some time then could quite easily be 1+1=8. Numbers are an abstraction of the underlaying reality therefore context matters when you’re looking at numbers. One to ponder the next time you’re looking at statistics 🤔


📹  What is white privilege? Via BBC Bitesize from psychologist John Amaechi. This short 3 minute video does a really good job of explain what privilege is and what white privilege in particular means.It’s not that white people have it easy or struggle any less than people of other races. It’s that their struggles are not going to be about their race where as race can be an additional limiting factor from people in the BAME community. In short white privilege means your skin colour will not be used against you.  

At the intersection of software, technology and people 

Things I’ve been reading this week that I’ve found interesting or intriguing.

How Falling Behind Can Get You Ahead

 📹  15 minutes TEDx talk from Manchester 2020 How falling behind can get you ahead some highlights: 

  • “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.”
  • In a society hyperfocused on headstarts, we are told to choose our paths early, focus narrowly, and start racking up our 10,000 hours of deliberate practice. But a mountain of research shows that, among people who end up fulfilled and successful, early specialization is the exception, not the rule.
  • Winding paths and mental meandering can be sources of power, not disadvantages, but we rarely hear those stories. David is trying to change this.

Specialising may not be such a great thing and references an interesting theory  Kind and Wicked Learning environments. 

Kind Learning environments  

  • Kind give lots of feedback as you progress which aid deliberate learning 
  • The rule of the system don’t change either so what it is today is the same tomorrow 
  • Golf and chess are such environments 

Wicked learning environments  

  • Mixed levels of feedback as you progress
  • Rules of the system keep changing 
  • I think software engineering maybe a wicked environment
  • But need to do more research  

The biases called out in the paper could be really helpful when thinking about decision making that affect learning in these environments. I’m also certain I’ve been influenced by survivorship, censorship, selection and the ‘hot stove’ biases.  

July – Toread

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 will revolve at the intersection between software, technology and people – with the occasional testing slant. I aim to update them weekly, with some commentary on my thoughts and findings. Feedback always welcome 😁

📬 Latest post what do testers do next if the risks mitigated by manual testing can be reduced through other means? Is it about moving more towards creating a quality culture and if so what do you need to know?

📝 My notes on Kind and Wicked learning environments and how they affect your ability to pick up skill.

Some more notes on a really interesting idea from Eugen Wei on Invisible asymptote. See July 10th below for more or head over to my notes on the article that pull out some of the bits I found interesting.

31st July

❓ Four-Level Training Evaluation Model some useful ideas on what to look for when trying to get feedback on your training or other presentations. Another question that comes to mind: Is the training for the learners or for you to accomplish/be recognised for something… 🤔


💭 10 signs you’re an over thinker While thinking is obviously a good thing overthinking isn’t. But how do you know when you’re doing the good type of thinking? Simple rule: overthinking is focusing on the problems (by either ruminating about the past or worrying about the future). Good thinking is problem solving by focusing on the solutions and self-reflective thinking is looking at situations from a different perspective and finding new insights. 

3 things that motivates us to work

👷‍♀️  3 things that motivates us to work From Dan Pink’s RSA lecture based on his book Drive. The three things being autonomy, mastery and purpose. Autonomy is about being self directed over what and how you do something. Mastery is having the ability to get better at something that challenges us and making a contribution. Purpose is the reason for being or why are we doing the thing we do. The interesting thing is this is about individual motivation to work. Does it still apply when working in teams as we do in software? 

27th July

A model of what could happen if you dropped the ‘In Test’ column…

👷‍♀️ From ‘In Testing’ to ‘In Progress’ columns on team boards: This has a very narrow focus on just dev and test relationship. This model helps illustrate how improving their relationship and getting them to actively collaborate to improve confidence that the code changes work as intended is going to start having an affect on work in progress (WIP). Which as @johncutlefish shows high WIP can lead to a whole host of other problems. The grey lines are what it was previously with the ‘In Testing’ column broken out into it’s own section.

👯‍♂️ Don’t Mock Types You Don’t Own This happens more often then you realise and leads to lots of other problems the main one being you now have to maintain a mock of a service you don’t own or fully understand how it works. Therefore you’re testing against your assumptions of that service you’re mocking. This could lead to a false sense of confidence that everything will work when you go to production. Ideally you want to be using a stub with little to no logic e.g. little to no assumptions and any made are obvious to other developers. Contract and consumer driven contract testing particularly can help here. The other issue is people use the word mock to mean a whole host of other types of Test doubles (fakes, stubs, spies etc) which leads to more confusion so check what they mean when they say mock before assuming you’re talking about the same thing.

🎓 Accountability vs Responsibility This has been really useful when thinking about who is accountable within teams for tasks and who is responsible. I found others (and myself included!) mix these up. Accountability can not be shared and means you are answerable for your actions where as responsibility can be shared and you must respond when someone questions your actions. Having these distinctions can be really helpful in making sure people understand what they are accountable and responsible for. The comments are worth a read too…

20th July

😱 Programming is not a craft from Dan North in 2011 and I have to say I agree with his take even from back then this still stands. I think this really sums it up “Non-programmers don’t care about the aesthetics of software in the same way non-plumbers don’t care about the aesthetics of plumbing – they just want their information in the right place or their hot water to work”. By putting programming at the centre (by treating it as a traditional craft) and not the value you are delivering you risk building what you want and not what users want/need/care/value. Thats not to say the that the code can be shoddy far from it, but just like the plumbing it needs to work but does it need to be gold plated with silver fixings? 

🐦 Learning How to Learn thread from Jez Humble calling out a book: Learning how to learn: A guide for kids and teens. The book aims to help you talk to younger people about how to learn. It covers a really interesting topics called focused and diffuse mode of learning that I hadn’t come across before. There is also a free coursera course by the author on the mental tools of learning covered in the book. 

📻  How to make your own luck (podcast) the frame with which you look at world (people, events, things that happen etc) are going to have a big impact on the opportunities that you’re going to find. So what frame are you using when making decisions? The world is a wicked learning environment (slow feedback hard to tell which variable caused the outcome) while poker can be kind learning environment (fast environment, low number of variables, easier to identify mistakes and learning from them) therefore helps you to understand your decision making easier and then possibly translate over to the real world.

You can find more about wicked and kind learning environments from How Falling Behind Can Get You Ahead:
Kind Learning environments  

  • Kind give lots of feedback as you progress which aid deliberate learning 
  • The rule of the system don’t change either so what it is today is the same tomorrow 
  • Golf, chess and poker are such environments 

Wicked learning environments  

  • Mixed levels of feedback as you progress
  • Rules of the system keep changing 
  • I think software engineering maybe a wicked environment

13th July

🤩  Invisible asymptote (AKA The Invisible glass ceiling of testing) Excellent (and long) read from Eugen Wei and a must read for anyone working in product and software development in general. Brilliantly articulates that all products have an invisible glass ceiling and that by recognising your total addressable market it can help you understand when you’re going to hit it and actually do something about it.  

Why should testers care?

This is a great way to understand how your product owners might be thinking (or should be if they are not). In terms of product quality this could be one of the lenses from which you should look at your products to understand what is valuable to product owners. It’s also a great way to start understanding what value your product is potentially bringing to your users and what cohort that it is and isn’t addressing. My notes on the article pull out some of the bits I found interesting.   

In terms of analysis this hits two of the three domains that testers should have a grasp of: business and users. From that angle we can help the third domain (teams) understand how this affects them.

Remember testing doesn’t always look like testing


🔈 How do you handle criticism Getting feedback is by far the best way to get better but not all feedback is equal. You need to filter out the valuable parts from the things that sting the ego. One way to get better at receiving feedback is to rate yourself on how you respond to it. 5 being excellent and 1 being poor. Did you respond positively and thank them (4 out of 5) or did you try and talk them out of their opinion (2 out of 5). This will help you get better at hearing feedback but also more likely to do something about it. 


👩‍💻 Develop your culture like its software Interesting post from 2017 from the ex-engineering manager of The New York times. They used a google doc to make it collaborative and to start iterating on it. Culture is something that either just happens and evolves in a direction out of your control or you try and be deliberate about it. My preference is towards deliberate because then if it starts heading in a direction you don’t want you’re in a position to do something about it. Otherwise you find out when something hits the headlines. At which point its too late to do something…


🏚 Extreme testing Cool video of what IBM do to make sure their mainframes can handle earthquakes. Makes you wonder what type of testing AWS/Asura/GCC do for all their server farms

6th July

👩‍🏫 Professionalism is not enough via Ten things I’ve learned by Milton Glaser 

…when you are doing something in a recurring way to diminish risk or doing it in the same way as you have done it before, it is clear why professionalism is not enough. After all, what is required in our field, more than anything else, is continuous transgression. Professionalism does not allow for that because transgression has to encompass the possibility of failure and if you are professional your instinct is not to fail, it is to repeat success. So professionalism as a lifetime aspiration is a limited goal.

🥾  New employee bootcamp really interesting approach to getting people (product owners in this case) up to speed quickly and productive within their work. I really like the concept of “put your own gas mask on first before helping others”  in terms of helping them figure out their own career paths. What would this look like for on boarding new testers in a team? 

🧫 What is culture? I was doing some research on this and it turns out (unsurprisingly) that its not that easy of a question to answer but the Centre for Applied Linguistics at the University of Warwick (UK) has some really good resources. In particularly this doc which tries to answer that very question in a way that is approachable and can actually help you understand what it is. They break it down into 12 key characteristics but I think this explanation from Spencer-Oatey (2008) does a pretty good job:

“Culture is a fuzzy set of basic assumptions and values, orientations to life, beliefs, policies, procedures and behavioural conventions that are shared by a group of people, and that influence (but do not determine) each member’s behaviour and his/her interpretations of the ‘meaning’ of other people’s behaviour“

https://blackswanfarming.com/value-a-framework-for-thinking/

🤑 What is value? Interesting way of thinking about what value means. In this model there are two focusing areas: revenue and costs. How does something sustain revenue, increase revenue, avoid cost and/or reduce cost. By applying a monetary number to these  you can then discuss them in a way that everyone understands and can hopefully agree on. The other reason for relating this back to a number is having a discussion on what assumptions people are making about those numbers. 

Thanks to Duncan Nisbet for his intriguing blog series on cost of delay Vs cost of poor quality which linked me to the above post. In Duncans post he does a really good job of showing why trying to answer that question is really difficult and is setting up a framework in trying to do just that. I’m looking forward to seeing how this works out!

May – ToRead

Toread

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 will revolve at the intersection between software, technology and people – with the occasional testing slant. I aim to update them weekly, with some commentary on my thoughts and findings. Feedback always welcome 😄 

May Round Up

Three new posts this month with what is a quality culture within teams and what do people mean when they say they have confidence in test automation? I also attended Agile Manchester which had a lot of talks that related to testing and testers too.

I’ve been using Headway to get digest of books which has been pretty good for working out if it’s worth going all in on. I can recommend reading the The Coaching Habit and The five dysfunctions of a team but wasn’t so sure on Leaders Eat Last. Scroll down for my summaries of the books.

It turns out google do have testers, ThoughtWorks got a new technology Radar out which is always worth a look through, Spotify called them squads because it sounded cool and risque was all about pirates for 18th & 19th century merchants.

31st May

🕸 Technology Radar (PDF download) of the latest trends as seen by ThoughtWorks. Always worth a look through as they have the advantage of seeing what’s actually happening with tools, platforms, techniques and languages within the industry. Still recommending team use pipelines and infrastructure as code (worrying teams are not!). Simplest possible feature toggles which is exactly what it sounds like use if/then statements if you can get away with it. Some useful tools for ethical bias testing of ML algorithms too. Visual regression testing was another mention worth looking at for legacy systems but be careful of it turning into your only form of testing. It tells you nothing about behaviour change of the system unless that results in a UI change. 

📖 Thinking in Systems Quick primer from Headway on systems thinking but be warned this isn’t enough to get why it’s a useful way to look at things. So you’re better off reading the full book. Thinking in terms of systems might make it easier to understand the world a little better and maybe how you can tackle those big problems.  

25th May

📮New Post: Building a quality culture: Is it quality assurance or quality awareness? I’ve been thinking a lot about who does what in a teams lately and especially about automation and exploratory testing. That’s when the two different meanings of QA occurred to me again.

🗣 OnlineTestConf 2020: Testing Stories in Modern Times by Alan Page. The future of testing looks to be less about traditional testers running testing (even exploratory) and more coaching teams on what quality means and how they build it in. You might be able to sign-up still and get the download.

📰 Not even wrong: ways to predict tech “That is not only not right; it is not even wrong” – Wolfgang Pauli. Sometimes with testing and especially exploratory testing it can look like we’re just trying things and seeing what happens.  Which can be helpful in coming up with new ideas but is it something we should be doing all the time? Why are you doing what you are doing? What are you trying to find out? What theories do you have about the software and what are they based on? Are they facts, instincts or just because someone told you to

🐦🧵  All in or all out: remotes working is here to stay but probably not everywhere. Good thread on why it works somewhere and not others. Hybrid (some in the office and some out) just doesn’t work very well. From my experience the remote person either gets forgotten or just has a terrible experience trying to hear the people in the office. We tried group cameras, all sorts of mic rigs, always on cameras etc nothing worked to keep the remote people included. The only way it works is everything is remote first no matter where you are. That’s headsets, camera and chat clients for all conversations. It’s the main reason it’s working now as there is no other way to communicate 

📰 Chips and Geopolitics The product architecture and integration diagram (figure 5-1) can actually be thought of as an end users quality measure diagram. The end users in this case are business users and the quality metrics at play are good enough performance/features sets of the product being analysed. This could be really useful if you work in a B2B organisation and trying to understand how your customers see your product. If quality is value to someone then quality in this case is good enough performance and someone is a business users.

📰 https://kanyi.blog/2016/07/30/risk-at-sea the concept of “risque” as we understand it wouldn’t have made much sense to the 19th century sea going merchants. In their time it was related to the financial risque that they took by going to sea to transport goods. For which insurance was created to offset the losses made. 

🐦🧵How the podcast ecosystem works Podcast are open and essentially hosted by the creators (or system that does it for them) Spotify are offering something quite different to the open model. They’re intermediating between the podcaster and the users. Why? So you can start adding in targeted advertising. Much in the same way Facebook and Google do. But this will only work if what Spotify offer is actually better then what is out there. So they need to get podcaster onboard on one side (look better tools and ways to make money!) and users on the other (look all the best podcasters In one place no more hunting around!). Once Spotify can show they can target listeners the advertisers are not going to be far behind and Spotify can sit in the middle taking a skim. It’s called aggregation theory. The interesting thing about this is it’s usually a better experience for all those involved (podcaster, advertisers and users) unless the podcaster wants to build a direct relationship with their listeners…

18th May

📚 Leaders Eat Last via Headway App (Scroll to the bottom to find out what Headway is). There was some interesting ideas around brain chemistry and the idea of shellfish and selfless chemicals. With some citations and references I’d probably get behind these idea but this digest provide none.

Along with this the book has some good ideas and I buy into relationships being key to good leadership but it’s difficult to work out how much of the book is the author’s opinion and how much of it is based on research and/or experience. I don’t think I could recommend this book based on this digest. Which raises another question. Is this because of the author of the book or the author of the digest

⚗️ Agile Manchester: Tester Edition Summary of the talks I attended and why they are relevant to testers. Testing doesn’t always look like testing…

 👩‍🏫 Agile Manchester Overall: Peep show conference – My first virtual conference which was pretty much as I expected: 

  • 👍 Talks that start and finish on time and are easy to see and hear for everyone.
  • 🤷‍♀️ very little audience interaction during talks, passing opportunities to meet other people, see what others thought, breakup your usual week

You can find my very rough notes here… 😉

It’s almost like being at your own personal conference. You know others are there but everyone is in their own little booth watching the talks in isolation. A peep show conference. It’s not necessarily a bad thing just very different when compared to in person conferences. By the end I was very much screened out. Each talk for me felt even more full on then in real life and being sat in front of a screens all day had taken it toll for me. So come 6 o’clock I’d had enough and didn’t attend the virtual social events which may have given me the networking opportunities I mentioned above. 

The day after the talks  Having had some time to digest the talks the day before the following things stood out for me: 

  • Wipe developers machine regularly from fight code and team rot with continuous improvement 
  • Use forecasting to give predictions on when we’ll deliver from agile metrics for predicting the future 
  • What stories are you telling yourself from crucial conversations 
  • Document the implicit from leading a agile organisation through hyper-growth 
  • Let the participants drive the workshops not you from coaching from the back of the room 
  • Communication is the glue of our organisations this can be nurtured, don’t leave it to nature from code + culture ≠ delivery 

Now that’s not to say that was all there was from the talks. There was lots to unpack from them all which you can read above in my notes. For me the two standout talks where agile metrics for predicating the future and coaching from the back of the room. These are two areas I looking at right now. But still enjoyed hearing crucial conversations, leading a company through hyper-growth and code + culture ≠ delivery. Software teams in general would also get a lot out of fighting code and team rot which was succinctly delivered. 

11th May

If you want testers to be 💪 confident in the 🤖 automation then either 🎥 “show” them how it works or build 🤝 trust in the person doing the work. Better yet do both 🤖+🎥+🤝= 💪 💪 https://www.jitgo.uk/building-confidence-with-automation

 📰 The real lord of the flies What would happen if 6 boys where left on an island for a year. The twitter thread is worth a read too with some interesting facts about the original author of lord of the flies. 

🧪 So google do have testers! But they’re actually developers working on code level tests and tools; no exploratory testing in sight. They call themselves Test Engineers which makes more sense when you think of Software Engineers. One focuses on software the other on testing but both use engineering (code) to do their jobs. 

🔈Bad is stronger than good We focus more on negative things than positive. Which is probably useful if you’re living as a caveman and the negatives things can kill you where as the positive things mean you just stick around a little longer. Not so sure how helpful this is in office based situations. Original paper is worth a read too. 

8th May


🔈 The planning fallacy Why things always take way longer than anyone thought. The planning fallacy is a tendency to underestimate the time it will take to complete a project while knowing that similar projects have typically taken longer in the past. So it’s a combination of optimistic prediction about a particular case in the face of more general knowledge that would suggest otherwise.

📰 Product vs. Feature Teams A big telltale of a feature team is the product road maps with prioritised list of features that teams needed to deliver. I think a lot of teams want to become product teams but teams have never had the full autonomy led by their product manager to focus on outcomes. It feels like they get stuck grooming the backlog for the team rather then helping the team focus on what’s valuable to users and the business. Speaking of autonomy…

📰 Follow up to Spotifys failed Squads from last week: Spotify Vs Fitbit Spotify had a lot of autonomy but you need that for innovation. If you have too much control you end up with FitBit which delivered what someone in the company asked for but at the cost of autonomy. Which could have created new opportunities for FitBit via innovation. 

📚 The five dysfunctions of a team via the Headway app. You should read this book. Letting just one of the dysfunction occur can cause a snowball affect and open the door to the others. Start with building trust and accountability and then work step by step on the others to build well performing collaborative teams. Which links back to product Vs feature teams. How do you give teams the autonomy without is leading to chaos. Well one way is to avoid the 5 dysfunctions 

1st May

📹 How falling behind can get you ahead Kind and wicked learning environments sounds like a intriguing concept.  I think software development in teams is a wicked learning environment so what can we do to make it kinder? 

📖 The Coaching Habit via Headway Great introduction to coaching and questions. This is a book that is definitely worth reading rather then just a digest. The 8 questions that the author recommends are all themes that I’ve seen from other books so are not just picked at random. The reasoning behind the questions also backs up other theories especially from Coaching for Performance whose author is considered one of the founders of modern coaching methods.

📰 Spotifys failed Squads 🤭 “Spotify had teams it called squads because it sounded cooler (not joking)”.  “The Spotify model” was what they wanted not how it actually was and failed in parts when they tried to implement it.