
Push your own flywheel
incremental improvements, leaders, leadership, management, psychological safety, talksToday 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.

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.

Three things of 2021
Agile, continuous improvement, DevOps, feedback, incremental improvements, psychological safety
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…

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…

What are your default settings?
feedback, leadership, Neuroscience, psychological safety, willpowerWhat are the defaults that we use when thinking and how do they affect our analysis of situations and decisions

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…

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…