Push your own flywheel

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

12 things I learnt from Agile Manchester 2023

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My key highlight and insights from 3 days of Agile Manchester 2023
Photo by Rainy Wongon Unsplash

How We Built Testability with Psychological Safety [External post]

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Ben Linders recently interviewed me for my talk at AgileTD on how we failed at testability. That resulted in this InfoQ post about how to build in testability you need developers and testers to collaborate. But to be able to do that, you need…
Fear is a reaction. Courage is a decision by Cristi Ursea on Unsplash

The courage to supercharge your testability

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Testability is all about building quality-in. It's about identifying known issues before they become a problem while coding. Pairing testers into this process can supercharge the testability feedback loop. It can allow you to pick up known and unknown issues. But pairing devs and testers together needs courage.
Baby spider by Umesh Soni from unsplash

Test Automation: Don't report the bugs it catches

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Reading time: 3 minutes Don’t report the bugs your test automation catches. Report the reduction in uncertainty that the system works. When you report the bugs you send the signal that test automation is there to catch bugs. But that’s…
Remote working by Sigmund on Unsplash

13 things I've learned from running remote workshops

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Over the last 12-18 months I've been running a lot of remote workshops and during that time I've learned a few valuable lessons along the way. Most of my experience is based on translating and running an in-person workshop to a remote online…
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Three things of 2021

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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…
Island Adventures by Matthew Brodeur on Unsplash

Speed Vs Quality: Can you have both?

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5 minutes reading time I was recently part of a panel discussion around the topic “What is quality?” and an interesting question came up. Is it always a choice between speed of delivery and the quality of that delivery? The thinking…
Why Don't Teams Go For Incremental Improvements by @JitGo

Incremental improvements: Why don’t teams do it more?

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(Reading time: 10 minutes) I’ve been working with a lot of different engineering teams over the years and there has been a strong tendency for them to avoid incremental improvements and instead go for bigger changes. There are many reasons…
What now?

The risk with direct questions

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The risk with the direct question is that the person being asked could assume intent within the question. E.g. asking what risk there in this release could be assumed that you think there is a risk in the release or that you don’t trust the…