The difference between leaders and managers

3 minute read

Tl;dr: Hybrid Leader-managers could be one of the keys to successful software teams but first you need to understand the difference between the two. 

A higher quality version of the model can be found on my Miro board.

The default style for most leadership within the software teams is towards a management style which caters for managing complexity through process and routines.  But by understanding the differences between management and leadership we can better create hybrid leader-managers. This approach is beneficial for software teams as the work they do can at time be highly complex. 

Complex work can be described as work that has an uncertain outcome due to the many variables that can affect it. These variables can be known or unknown either before, during and after the work is completed.

Leader-managers styles are best suited for leads that work closely to where the work is happening as the hybrid model takes into account that some work is routine, and therefore a management style is suitable and some work is innovative and therefore leadership approach is more appropriate. The further up the hierarchy you go the more a leadership style is suited as this enables the organisation to better handle change. 

Being able to adapt to change is a now a feature of almost all software teams and ones that a better equipped to adapt to it are more likely to succeed on more dimensions of success other than just delivering what the users want. Successful dimensions could be sustainable team performance, team member satisfaction and delivering end user value consistently. 

What does this model illustrate? 

Based on a HBR article what do leaders really do by John P. Kotter it shows that management is about reducing complexity through standardisation and making work efficient. This heads organisations towards certainty. Leadership on the other hand is all about creating change within the organisations and embracing the complexity that exists. They do this through communication and motivating the organisation towards that change.

Management

On the left are the management styles for handling complexity within organisations through three distinct approaches. Managers communicate what needs to be done through planning and budgeting. Create networks of people and relationships to do the work by hiring and organising them. Finally making sure the work happens by managing complexity and solving problems.

Leadership

On the right are the leadership approaches for creating change within organisations. Leaders communicate what needs to be done by setting the direction the organisation is heading in and letting the employees figure out how they get there. They create networks of people and relationships to do the work not by telling them to collaborate but by aligning them through that direction. Leaders make sure that the work happens by motivating those people to solve problems for themselves instead of handing them solutions.

Which is better?

As is clear from the model management and leadership do have their differences but it’s not about one approach being better than the other but that they are complementary to each other. It is almost like they balance each other from the extremes of just following one approach.

Do you see a difference between management and leadership?

How have you been led or managed in the past?

Does this model change your approach to leadership and management?

Let me know in the comment below

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!

Future of testers: somewhere between users, teams and businesses

3 minute read

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about what the future of the testers role could look like. Especially in teams that not only fully embrace CI/CD or DevOps but actually get some way towards implementing the ideas behind the approaches.

I’ve broken up my thinking into two posts with the first about whats could happen and this follow up on what testers could do next…

Raising quality awareness in teams

Raising quality in teams isn’t about banging the drum of “We need to make this a quality product” or showing how the product failed some quality criteria e.g. raising a defect. It’s about helping the team understand what quality is and what that means for their system. To be able to do this testers need to be able to articulate what quality means and then apply this to their teams context.

Not sure what quality awareness is then see my earlier post on Building a Quality Culture: Is it Quality Assurance or Quality Awareness

For each tester this context will be unique to their environment. But in a large part, this will be based on how their team works, what their organisation expect that team to produce and who their end users are. Simply put, testers will sit at this intersection of teams, business and users.

Teams

This view point is all about understanding how the team works through their combination of tools, processes, technology, the people involved and what the resulting output is. How does the team do what it does but also why does it do it the way it does.

Business domain

This viewpoint is about understanding the organisation that the team works in. Why does the business exist? What is it trying to accomplish? Yes you can argue that pretty much all businesses are trying to make a profit but how exactly is it trying to do that? Is it by selling advertising, software as a service, access to some physical world good? What is your companies unique selling point? How does it compete against other companies? What external factors affects its ability to achieve its mission? How does the organisation expect the team to contribute to its mission?

Users

This viewpoint is probably the one most familiar to testers as this has been a view they’ve almost always considered. Who are the systems users and what do they expect from it? But they should take this view and expended it further. Why do the users take their time to use your product over others? What do they find valuable about it? Why do some users stay but others leave? Are these the intended people that your organisation expected to use it? Are the users the actual people who pay for the product or does someone else? Who is that someone else and why do they pay for it? Testers should take their time to build, broaden and deepen their understanding of the users, intended users and future users.

At the intersection of teams, business and users

Due to the subjective nature of quality, tester need to understand the reasons behind others views of what quality means to them. These three core areas give the testers the foundational knowledge to do just that.

Now armed with this knowledge and the why of their stakeholders quality measures they can begin to translate this into something their teams can understand and incorporate into their daily work. It’s within this translation/incorporate that you can begin to create a quality culture that isn’t about demanding quality, but creating the understanding of what it means within your teams context.

Context contains teams, business & users
Context contains teams, business & users

What do testers do next?

2 minute read

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about what the future of the testers role could look like. Especially in teams that not only fully embrace CI/CD or DevOps but actually get some way towards implementing the ideas behind the approaches.

I’ve broken up my thinking into two posts with the first about whats could happen and the follow up on what they could do next. So what could happen to testers?

For a lot of software teams the testers role is to assess the quality of the work being produced by the developers. This is usually done by manually testing the software using techniques such as exploratory testing to find any issues that may impact the end users. Any issues found will be raised with the developer who did the work (as defects or an informal chat) to fix if the team deems necessary.

Some teams found this process to be one of their biggest bottlenecks in releasing software so attempted to automate more of this type of testing using UI tests with varying levels of success. Others meanwhile started to look at the testability of what they where producing and started to build quality in.

In both of those scenarios the testers role looks obsolete. With the first supposedly replacing the work they did through automation and the second by removing the role as issues are mitigated before they have end user impact. In both cases what they alway assume is that a testers role is just that, to test.

If the perceived value of testers is just to test the changes made by the development team then the future of the testers role looks bleak but could it be more than this?

Some testers are starting to repurpose the old QA acronym to mean Quality Awareness. What they are doing is shifting the perceived value of their work from purely a testing activity, which was to assure the quality of the system to that of raising awareness of the quality of the system.

This may, at first, look as if they are still doing the same work under a different name, but on closer inspection it is a vastly different role.

Post continues here: FUTURE OF TESTERS: SOMEWHERE BETWEEN USERS, TEAMS AND BUSINESSES

June – 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 😁

29th June

🎓 Why Your Organization Isn’t Learning All It Should In your every day work do you have time to look at the cause of small issues or do you work around them with hacks and fixes? Can you bring them up with other colleges or are they brushed off as trivial or worse are you labelled as a complainer? As detailed in How to learn from failure and Nobody ever gets credit for fixing problems that never happen it’s usually these small preventable problems that build up into big complex problems so having time to get at the 2nd order problems (root causes) is really important. Also research suggests that once you start fixing these issues there is a re-enforcing effect that encourages others to raise problems but also start to address them too, slowly improving the whole system.

🖥  Brief history of Apples OSX If you primary work machine is a Mac then having a basic understanding of its history helps you understand why it works the way it does. If it’s not your main machine then this short history lesson can also help you understand what Apple did that was different to iOS and to some extent Windows. 

🔬 First and second order problem solving From the article: research on problem solving makes a distinction between fixing problems (first-order solutions) and diagnosing and altering root causes to prevent recurrence (second-order solutions).First-order problem solving allows work to continue but does nothing to prevent a similar problem from occurring. Workers exhibit first-order problem solving when they do not expend any more energy on a problem after obtaining the missing input needed to complete a task.Second-order problem solving, in contrast, investigates and seeks to change underlying causes of a problem.

👩‍🏫 XConf Online Usually a free to attend conference held by ThoughtWorks at different locations throughout Europe with one being in Manchester. But COVID means it’s all online so anyone from anywhere can attend this year. It’s usually a multi track conference but this time they’ve just gone with one track with all of the talks coming from ThoughtWorks employees.  

In previous years they’ve never really had any talks on testing but this year they had three covering what a unit is for a mainframe system, testing things in production and mutation testing. The interesting thing was none of these talks where given by testers but developers. Is this a sign of things to come 🤔?

All talks should hopefully be made available soon so I’d highly recommend checking them out. Personally I got a lot out of the Redefining the unit and Your test coverage is a lie (mutation testing) talks for which you can find summaries in my notes.

22nd June

🗞 75 years of US advertising – This will help you create a deeper understanding of the advertising market and how the trends in online businesses and consumer behaviour (think end users) is sifting power from the traditional advertising conglomerates (print/TV/radio) to the online ones (Google, Facebook, Amazon etc). It’s not a simple lift and shift but a decline in business that did mass marketing to business that need targeted advertising. 

🕵️‍♀️ Snopes on white privilege in America – Snopes was something I used a lot when I was in my late teens/twenties to disprove things that used to be flying about on the Wild West of the early internet days. This time they pull part an argument that white privilege doesn’t exist in America. This is a long but worth while read on what white privilege is and how its affected black Americans lives.    

🍏 Apple begins to enforce in-app purchases (IAP) of *any* good – Why should testers care? Understanding the what of this is useful in knowing how it could affect the apps you work on and other apps in the market.

🤖 Ironies of automation The two ironies 

  1. Designers of automation believe that the manual operators are unreliable and sources of problems. Therefore believe that by automating the manual task remove the unreliability. The irony here is that the errors that the designer unintentionally creates in the automation are the major source of unreliability in the process 
  2. Designer who attempt to automate the manual operator away still leaves the manual operator in the process to handle the tasks that couldn’t be automated. The problem here is the tasks left for the manual operator can be quite arbitrary with little thought for how they will actually carry out the task resulting in a new set of issues. 

This is not to say that automation is bad but some of the intention (removing people) may not be for the right reasons (improving the process). I believe if the focus was to improve the process then the risk from the two ironies could be greatly reduced. One of the best ways to achieve this is to actually include the manual operator as part of the improvement process. Essentially have a user centric approach to improving systems.

15th June

🎓 SQ3R learning technique 30s reading time
Not come across this one before but could be useful for helping you recall things you’ve read . I particularly liked attaching meaning to the content and looking at it from different viewpoints .Personally I’ve found I’ve done this unknowingly with some things and it really does help with recall. Plus trying to re-call it again at a later date and applying that knowledge to different situations has helped further embed that information.

🗣 Asking Powerful questions 1 min reading time
The Powerful questions pyramid could be a helpful tool for asking more open questions that get people thinking.

📑 Making job descriptions more accessible 3 mins reading time
Stop reusing job descriptions and start tailoring them to the candidates you want. We’re not doing ourselves any favours by sending out the same old thing every time.

5th June

📰 The Origin of Product Discovery or what is Product Discovery? … true collaborations between engineers, designers and product managers. Not a dictatorship run by a Product Manager.  But what does true collaboration in this context actually mean? Which leads me onto a scales of collaboration…

 ⚖️ Scales of collaboration While thinking about how people and teams collaborate it occurred to me that there must be scale from not at all to full collaboration.  Quick search returned something called the levels of collaboration. This could this be helpful for teams to 1] make them aware how well they are working together and 2] what would they need to improve to able to get better at it. Maybe we should stops saying we need to collaborate more and start saying what that actually means? Which leads me onto some advice…

☀️🧴It was that time of year again (🎂) so what better then some advice: Learn how to learn from those you disagree with, or even offend you. See if you can find the truth in what they believe taken from 68 bits of (someone else’s) unsolicited advice. Need some life advice then this list is a good place to start, there’s a video too. But I think I’ll always remember  Mary Schmich column, Advice, like youth, is probably wasted on the young better know as the lyrics to Baz Luhrmann song Everybody’s free (to wear sunscreen)

🤔 Long read of the week comes from Joep Schuurkes Nobody ever gets credit for fixing problems that never happen: Creating and sustaining process Improvement. The work harder and work smarter balancing loops in this model do a great job of explains what “work smarter, not harder” actually means. But the reinvestment reinforcing and shortcuts balancing loops really get at what goes wrong with most process improvements initiatives in software organisations: it’s difficult to attribute process improvements to improved performance the way you can with working harder. So we trap ourselves with working ever harder till one day you just can’t do it anymore 🤯

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.  

Building a quality culture: Is it quality assurance or quality awareness?

5 minute read

If you ask testers what does QA stand for most are likely to say its Quality Assurance and is typically described as providing confidence that some quality criteria will be fulfilled. Some people in the testing community believe that it’s actually Quality Awareness*. The thinking goes how can tester assure the quality of something if they never built it in the first place? All they can do is make your team aware of the quality. I agree with both explanations and believe that they are different sides of the same quality coin.

Read on to see what this means for testers and how it’s a useful to consider both in teams.

*I’ve also heard Quality Advocate and my favourite Question Askers, both fit this model of Quality Awareness.

Firstly some definitions:

What is Quality?

Quality is value to someone – Gerald Winberg

But who is that someone and what does value mean?

From the Lenses of quality on who that someone is:

…that someone could be their Products Owners (PO), the organisation they work for, the team they work with and their end users and all these groups of people could have very different views on what value means to them and even contradicting in some cases.

https://www.jitgo.uk/lenses-of-quality/

Again from the same post on what value is:

Each of these groups of people view quality with a different lens therefore see the same system differently to one another. We as testers should help our teams to see quality through these different lenses by helping them identify these groups and what their measures of quality are.

https://www.jitgo.uk/lenses-of-quality/

Simply put value will depend on the viewpoint of the person. Identify whats viewpoint that person sees the product/system through then you’re halfway there to working out what’s valuable to that person. If you take this a step further and see what incentives drive that persons viewpoint then you might identify whats valuable to them too. But thats not as easy as it sounds.

For any given team there are multiple members and stakeholders therefore they are likely to be a number of unique and overlapping quality attributes too. Identifying the key ones for each cohort of people is a valuable exercise for any team. It might help explain why some people are never happy no matter what you deliver.

What is Quality Assurance?

Firstly what does assurance mean from the Oxford dictionary:

a statement that something will certainly be true or will certainly happen, particularly when there has been doubt about it

One way to think about assurance is that it’s a promise that an outcome will happen so as to give others confidence. In this case it’s quality and as mentioned earlier quality means value to someone. Therefore QA or Quality Assurance means providing confidence in the quality of the product to stakeholders. This it is about certainty that an outcome will happen not a guarantee. You are saying that best efforts will be made and this is an assurances in making that happen.

What is Quality Awareness?

What does awareness mean from the Oxford dictionary:

knowing something; knowing that something exists and is important

interest in and concern about a particular situation or area of interest

This would lead to QA or Quality Awareness to be a person who is interested in quality (value), understands its importance and has knowledge about the quality of a product or system. To take this a step further someone who works in Quality Awareness understands that quality is value to someone, knows who those people are, what viewpoints they hold and possibly what incentives drive those views. They are then able to apply this knowledge to the system and subsequently increases their teams awareness of overall system quality. Essentially Quality Awareness is about building awareness of what quality is in a team, how it is affected and who it matters too.

Quality Awareness sits at the intersection of the team that produces the system, the domain in which the system operates in and users of the system.

Two sides of the same coin

Both are focused on quality but one is about improving the teams understanding of what quality means for their stakeholders. While the other is focused on maintaining (and hopefully improving) the quality of the product.

In this scenario Quality Awareness can improve Quality Assurance by giving it the metrics with which quality is being assessed on. In this model Quality Assurance can actually fulfil it’s job of providing confidence that the quality of the product is being upheld. Why, because it is taking into account who the stakeholders are and what is valuable to them. Then converting that value into a measurable metric which the engineering team can either:

  1. assess themselves against to make sure they are doing what they said they would do or
  2. provide the stakeholders the metrics to improve their confidence that not only is the engineering team doing their job but maintaining and perhaps even improving it.

The thing to keep in mind is not all quality values can be converted into an easy to measure metric. You can use proxy measures to give you an idea but some measures are always inherently subjective. On top of the this the systems we build are interdependent on other systems which are out of our control and can affect the quality of our systems. Therefore techniques such as exploratory testing can be very beneficial as it can help build a fuller awareness of what quality means for your product.

Back to Quality Assurance?

Does this mean we should go back to using QA again and naming ourselves the QA Team? No, we’ve come a long way in some areas of our industry and going back to QA teams might bring back all those old problems. Such as test team silos, testers being the gatekeepers and why didn’t we catch that bug?

How is this helpful?

Where this can be useful is giving teams another lens through which to look at their testing approach and think is this heading towards building assurance of quality or is this about raising awareness of quality. By separating out into these two camps you can see the value it’s actually going to bring and if its worth the investment. It might also help clear up who should be doing what and when.

Using this model of awareness and assurance could be helpful for testers trying to figuring out what it is that they want to do with their careers. Do you want to learn more about building team confidence in quality through test automation (Quality Assurance) or building a quality culture within teams (Quality Awareness)?

Agile Manchester 2020: Testers Edition

I’ve always found that tester representation at agile conferences to be lacking. It’s a bit like it doesn’t have the word test in the titles so it’s not for me. Personally I’ve always found a treasure trove of information from talks that are directly or indirectly related to software testing. Remember testing doesn’t always look like testing you sometimes need to change the frame with which you look at things to get the best out of them. 

Below are the talks that I attended with a brief summary of the talk and what it could mean for testers. 

Want the full unadulterated notes then see my personal notes.

Fighting Code Rot with Continuous Improvement 

by @garyfleming Slides http://bit.ly/fight-code-rot

Summary of the talk Good talk covering all the basic with keeping your system update and why. Well delivered and really useful for less experienced team members and a good recap for “they should know better” members.

For Testers For testers understanding what needs to be updated when can help them understand how that change could affect end users. Be proactive what do the release notes say for X, how do we use system Y. Building this knowledge takes time but can be really valuable in the long run. Start small and work your way up. Developers can help you but try and help by having specific questions for them.

Agile metrics for predicting the future 

by Mattia Battiston Slides: https://www.slideshare.net/mattiabattiston/agile-metrics-for-predicting-the-future

Summary of the talk: Forecasts will always beat estimates for non-deterministic projects (think all software projects). As they help you understand what could happen with a confidence rating. You’ve probably already got most of this data but knowing your lead times and throughput can help with this and some spreadsheets.
The key thing to remember is you need to talk to your stakeholder and make sure they understand what the numbers mean and how it affects them. Don’t just give them the spreadsheets and expect them to understand. 

For Testers: If quality means value to someone then value to people working in delivery roles is greater predictability with delivering our software systems. Understanding what these metrics are, how they are used and what affects them will not only enable you to have more productive conversation with delivery but also understand why they are important to that group. This will help you articulate risk better within your teams as you will be able to tailor the message to that specific audience. This will not only help you help them understand risk better but increase your value from just being the person that finds all the issues. This elevates you from being just a tester towards a test analysts. 

Crucial conversations in agile teams

How making it safe to talk about almost anything unlocks continuous improvement by Chris Smith. Slides: https://www.slideshare.net/chris_smith1976/crucial-conversations-for-agile-teams-agile-manchester-virtual-may-2020

Summary of the talk Really interesting talk by @cj_smithy at #agilemanc focusing around the book Crucial Conversations but bringing in ideas from the Chimp paradox, 5 dysfunctions of team, Radical Candor and generative cultures by Ron Westrum. Conversations within agile software teams are incredibly important (remember individuals & interactions over process & tools) so being better skilled at them is a great thing.

For testers We have conversation with team members all the time. Whether that is to find out information or to inform others about whats going on, its a core part of our skill set. Getting better at communicating verbally should be part of our personally development as testers. The resources mentioned in this talk would go a long way to help you build up that skill and help keep it sharp.

Leading an agile organisation through hyper growth

By Patrick Kua

Summary of the talk The company Patric was a CEO for went through some really fast growth over a very short period. The model he used was simple and acknowledged that it wouldn’t work forever so they kept iterating and scaling the organisation. Useful to benchmark your company against to see where you are in the growth of your organisation. 

For testers Understanding how a company develops from startup to enterprise is really helpful in in seeing what types of problems you’re likely to face. This can help you help your team understand how quality is likely to be affected when scaling and what they can do to mitigate it. 

Improve your agile coaching skills with a Training from the BACK of the Room

By Sabine Khan

Summary of the talk: Its called back of the room as you’re not using slides decks and you presenting but getting the participants to stand and present instead. Hence coaching from the back of the room. 
Really interesting approach to learning and using coaching skills in teaching others. The 6 learning principles are really quite easy to apply and can make almost any session interactive. This combined with the 4C’s gives you a framework to turn any learning topics into something more than just sit and listen. 

For tester needs updating: Need to help team members understand what exploratory testing is then why not do something interactive instead of just another slide deck. Teach them through doing and the key points might actually stick. 

Culture + Code ≠ Delivery

By Vimla Appadoo @thatgirlvim

Summary of the talk: Vim makes a great point in that just delivering through code and a good culture isn’t enough as this misses how that delivery affects users. Especially if the system has biases built in unintentionally.  She says we need communications as well. Communication to be able to link together all the parts of the culture of the organisation, systems, processes and people + the code can help us deliver the right things.

For tester: Testers help raise the awareness of quality within systems, but for them to be able to do that affectively they need to take into account the team, the business and users as well. The key skill to be able to do this is communication and helping to link together all the parts to understand the other. This is not to say that testers are the key to culture but on a smaller team scale they can have huge influence over what direction that culture moves in. Do the teams care about how their systems affect users or wait to see what happens?