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I talk quite a bit about leadership as creating spaces where people can thrive and grow. It suits my leadership style to lead in such a way. I get to amplify my strengths and work in a way that rewards me. It's a beautiful experience to see people back their ideas and abilities and venture into something new. Creating spaces is about allowing people the agency to decide how the work they're accountable for is executed. It's signalling that around here, your ideas and goals are valuable and will be listened to. It's the opportunity for you, if you wish, to determine what success looks like and ..read more

We all have a voice and a song. Sometimes, the song beats loud in our hearts, and sometimes, it's so quiet that you must stop everything else to listen. It's your song. Only you can sing it. No one can sing your song like you do. Sometimes, you might think you don't have a song. You do. There are times you'll want to ignore your voice because it feels like it makes life harder. Your song knows that. It stays with you and holds your hand. You might think you must voice your song for it to matter, that you don't know enough, that you are not strong enough, or that you are not bold enough. That ..read more

Recently, I’ve heard references to mediocrity in software testing. Statements like “Tolerance of mediocrity has done massive damage to our testing field". There’s an implicit judgment in this statement. In that word mediocre, there’s a suggestion that many in the software engineering field are somehow negligent, lazy or weak. They take the easy path because they want to be liked, looking for approval from other more technical software engineers. Or they chose to remain willfully ignorant, favouring income over ethics.    Being mediocre doesn’t mean any of that. It means precise ..read more

Recently, I’ve heard references to mediocrity in software testing. Statements like “Tolerance of mediocrity has done massive damage to our testing field". There’s an implicit judgment in this statement. In that word mediocre, there’s a suggestion that many in the software engineering field are somehow negligent, lazy or weak. They take the easy path because they want to be liked, looking for approval from other more technical software engineers. Or they chose to remain willfully ignorant, favouring income over ethics.    Being mediocre doesn’t mean any of that. It means precise ..read more

In software testing, an activity that provides information on the state of quality, we're often in a position where we say "If only". If only we could get developers to do better unit testing if only the requirements were more complete. If only people kept us informed about changes. But by wishing this, we put our ability to achieve outcomes into other's hands. What if we asked ourselves: what's the smallest thing I can do to make things better? What small action can I take to improve the situation? Don't get me wrong. I know how much courage this takes. But I also know how much it benefit ..read more

TL;DR: Quality coaching is a model you grow into, not adopt. That's because testing is an acquired skill, and teams must learn how to test. Pairing is an optimal way to learn about testing. As teams learn about risks, test design, and exploratory testing, they can preempt risk and build quality into their design. As a team matures in its quality practices, a tester may feel their role becomes redundant. This is a great time to introduce a quality coach. A fairytale in tech A long time ago (10 Julian calendar years, centuries in Bezo years), a fairy godmother was asked to devise a way of scali ..read more

"Move at the speed of trust. Focus on critical connections more than critical mass—build the resilience by building the relationships." - Adrienne Maree Brown What is trust? Trust, according to my go-to source of truth, The Thin Book of Trust by Charles Feltman, is built on four elements: sincerity (you're honest) reliability (you're dependable) competent (you can get the job done) caring (you have other's interests in mind) Trust in Engineering Imagine a world of engineering work where we moved at the speed of trust. To do that, we would have to understand and be guided by: the trust we h ..read more

To be precise, I am the energy. Power is energy applied. Power can be positive or negative. Energy just is. And that's what I have. We all have it. But most times, it doesn't feel like it, especially if things are not working out the way we want. Instead, we go to (SFD) Shitty First Draft* mode. It's that story my internal voice sells as the absolute narrative. In my SFD, it typically a record along the lines of, "You're not good enough", "it's unfair", "you were never going to succeed", "Everyone hates you"..blah blah blah. You probably have your unique version of SFD that's been carefully c ..read more

Quality is everyone's responsibility, right? But precisely what does that look like? Having a basic understanding of what quality means for your organisation is essential. You can do quality workshops to get a shared agreement. But what about the responsibility bit? What does that mean for a product team, Director of Engineering, VP of Engineering, or even a CTO? And how does responsibility differ from accountability? As a director of quality engineering, it will be on you to help your peers, senior leadership and teams to understand and come to a consensus on who owns and who is accountable ..read more