I have enjoyed a lot of ensemble / mob programming, aka teaming, over the years. As a diverse group, including people with different deep skills, backgrounds and experience, we learn faster, work smarter, and vastly reduce our cycle time. So, I was not surprised to have many takeaways from Agile New England’s virtual Software Teaming 2024 conference! The conference Zoom was a warm, welcoming space. Woody Zuill and Nancy Van Schooenderwoert established a comfortable tone of safety and collaboration. We were all among friends, new and old, sharing experiences. Training developers to be technical ..read more

Gitte Klitgaard reminded me recently that it’s been 10 years since we met at BoosterConf. It seems like yesterday, and it seems like a lifetime ago. I love BoosterConf and I went again in 2019 (another fab experience). And, I treasure the joyful memory of getting to know Gitte there. Gitte has written her story of courage and friendship about that event. I’d like to celebrate my memories of it as well. I was excited to participate in the conference. And, being a shy person, I was nervous. I knew very few people. Despite meeting new people (some I knew from social media), I just withdrew emotio ..read more

When I tell people what “DevOps culture” means to me, they want to know how they can help it grow in their organization. The term “DevOps” has been around for almost 15 years now. It’s still a widely misunderstood and misused term. We still see software organizations that have a siloed “DevOps team”, a complete anti-pattern. A little history When agile development started to get traction in the Noughties, many large organizations created small, cross-functional teams that included programmers, testers, designers, product owners, and other specialists – but not operations specialists. These dev ..read more

More learnings from Agile Testing Days 2023! This is part 3, and I’ll need at least one more post! I still haven’t gotten to the extracurricular fun, though you can see in the featured image, ATD is conveniently located near the incredibly beautiful Sans Souci Park! Dealing with conflict One of my favorite keynotes was prepared by Alex Schladebeck and Sophie Kuester: “A Fighting Chance: Learning the art of conflict resolution”. Sophie couldn’t be there for the talk, but Alex brought her stories and ideas to life. We heard many examples of people being “ducks” with each other, and how we can ge ..read more

The Agile Testing Days program always includes a vast range of topics. Some are perennial favorites, some are totally original. This second post about stuff I learned at Agile Testing Days 2023 will give you a taste of that. Monday at ATD is tutorial day. Janet Gregory and I co-facilitated our all-day tutorial, “Holistic Testing: Effective Strategies for Agile Teams”. We had 20 delightful participants. They formed four-person teams to energetically engage in many exercises. We practiced techniques for testing activities all the way around the infinite software development life cycle. One fun f ..read more

ATD 2023 – I don’t have enough words to describe the joy, the human connections, the learning. I think I do have words to share some of my biggest takeaways. For this first part, I’m going to share some things I learned about AI  in workshops and open space sessions. Note that there were many more sessions on the topic of AI and machine learning, I simply couldn’t get to them all! “Bart and James learn about testing AIs” You’ll see that I pretty much just went to sessions facilitated by Bart Knaack and James Lyndsay! James and Bart gave us the opportunity to train a model using https ..read more

Leading quality in software organizations – what is the best way? For more than two decades now, software organizations have wondered: when we transform to agile or a DevOps culture, what do we do with the testers / quality engineers? The leading practice is obviously to embed them in teams. Should they report to the same manager as the other development team members? Should they report to a separate testing / quality manager? What’s the best way? As a tester on agile teams in companies ranging from small startups to 40+ engineering teams,  I’ve worked in a variety of organizational struc ..read more

Recently, Melissa Fisher asked a Slack community I’m in for ideas on creating successful workshops. Community members who are highly experienced in delivering excellent training and workshops shared some excellent tips, I asked them if I could share them here too. They agreed, so here goes. Training from the back of the room Ahsley Hunsberger was the first to recommend my own favorite resource, Sharon Bowman’s Training from the Back of the Room. (Also known as TBR). This book transformed my ability to turn my workshops into effective learning opportunities for participants. It’s based on scien ..read more

In our new Agile Testing Fellowship Donkeys & Dragons video chat episode, Janet Gregory switched from being co-host with me, to being a guest with Selena Delesie! We talked about assessing quality practices with their Quality Practices Assessment Model, aka QPAM. Selena and Janet explain how they came up with the model. They explain the quality aspects and dimensions, and give a brief overview of how to use it. we talked about the benefits, too. And their books about QPAM! Lots of information in just 18 minutes, I hope you will watch! I’ve used the model and found it so effective to help a ..read more

A conference called Agile on the Beach sounds like a summer vacation! By scheduling some free time before and after the conference, I did turn it into one. A vacation where I learned a lot and picked up many new ideas! Janet Gregory and I were invited to pair on a keynote, “Weaving Quality Into Your Product”, which gave me a fabulous opportunity. Gyllyngvase Beach in Falmouth, Cornwall, UK Arriving in Falmouth two days before the conference gave me time to enjoy Ihe beautiful beaches and coastal walks, as well as the charming town center. I snarfed down my first authentic Cornish pasty, which ..read more