Wow, this is my fourth blog post sharing some of my biggest takeaways from Agile Testing Days, yay me. Some of my most inspiring and actionable ones are from Lisi Hocke’s talk, “Growing an Experiment-Driven Quality Culture”. Follow that link to see her slide deck. Often a slide deck is not much use without the […]
Read Morecontinual improvement
New Challenges in Continuous Delivery
Continuous delivery and deployment (both abbreviated as “CD”) aren’t new concepts. Jez Humble and David Farley published their Continuous Delivery book ten years ago. Patrick Debois organized the first “DevOpsDays” conference in 2009, and created the #DevOps (also written as devops, devOps and Devops) hashtag. Of course, CD is new to many teams. There are […]
Read MoreDiversity in conference speakers == new ideas, more learning
I attended my first testing conference back in the early 90s. I can only remember one woman speaker, and she made such an impact on me, I still remember the session well – it was about how to test requirements. I have used those ideas ever since! Thanks in large part (in my opinion, anyway) […]
Read MoreAll-remote retrospective
In February I wrote about the experimental retrospective format for our team’s “cross-pod retro” (so-called, because our large team is divided into smaller pods). Since then, my manager Jo Webb and I have continued to tweak the retro format, based on feedback from surveys done following each retro. Building on feedback Our teammates said they […]
Read MoreCourage to coach
You might notice that my posts here aren’t necessarily about actually doing testing activities. For the past several years I’ve been one of only three testers on a team of 25 or more coders. Currently, I’m the only tester spread across several mini-teams that add up to around 17 coders. I can’t possibly test every […]
Read MoreRetrospectives for large teams with many sub-teams
My team has 40+ members, distributed into seven or so “pods” and across several locations. It’s a challenge to communicate information among the multiple pods. In addition, we often face obstacles that cross over multiple pods. We usually have a “cross-pod retrospective” once a month. It’s typically in the “Happy/Puzzler/Sad” format. We collect items in […]
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