How Do You Foster Collaboration and Sharing in Your Team?

🙋 Questions
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I like to get some insights into collaboration and sharing within teams, especially when we have newcomers and Junior Testers join our ranks. Here are some questions I’d love to know the community’s experiences and ideas:

  1. How to Encourage Collaboration for New Team Members:
  • How would you help encourage someone new to a team to collaborate effectively?
  • What strategies or practices have you found useful in integrating new team members smoothly?
  1. Junior Tester’s Role in Information Sharing:
  • What sort of information would you expect a junior tester to be sharing with the team or with you, specifically?
  • Are there any tips or guidelines you follow to ensure that junior testers are contributing valuable insights and information to the team?
  1. Defining Collaboration in a Testing Team:
  • What does collaboration in a software testing team look like to you?
  • Can you share examples of how collaboration is typically practised in your team?
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Collaboration

  1. Our recruitment process partially revolves around capabilities such as collaboration so hopefully if we do it right we already have people who are predisposed to collaborate.

  2. We run matrix management so your People Manager will view it as their mission in your early months to ensure that you land well in your assigned engineering team, the wider Engineering Profession and ultimately in the wider (John Lewis) Partnership.

  3. Each new member also has a buddy assigned to them for at least their first 90 days and usually that buddy comes from your assigned engineering team.

  4. All teams and all engineers are primed to value feedback in general, and more specifically to see their Quality Engineer as a coach, helping the team do better engineering.

  5. All of the above hopefully means that we create a safe space where new engineers feel comfortable collaborating and being open and honest.

Junior Testers

  1. At the moment we are not really in the space of recruiting junior testers. In QE we currently recruit to two levels (internally known as) PL7 and PL6. PL7s are considered experienced professionals in their specialism (e.g. Quality Engineering or Backend Engineering or Frontend Engineering, etc.) and PL6s are that but also considered (and expected to show) leadership - improving the way their teams and the Partnership as a whole does engineering.

  2. Having said that, once a new QE has got their feet under the desk of a new team I would expect them to be sharing with the team some questions that had occurred to them about how the team is currently doing engineering, to understand perhaps the historical reasons for the team working in that way and to provoke a discussion within the team as to whether there are improvements to the team’s approach that could be tried.

Collaborartion in a Testing Team

  1. We don’t have Testing Teams, we have individual Quality Engineers who are assigned to engineering teams to help them with their (Quality) Engineering.

  2. Having said that we do have one of the liveliest communities in the Engineering Profession. We meet once a fortnight for Lean Coffees or for demos from a QE who has something to share.

  3. For some topics we join forces with other communities, such as the Backend Community or the Frontend Community and jointly discuss a topic of mutual interest.

  4. Outside of our meetings we have a number of Slack channels such as our #topic-pact-testing channel looking at and discussing Consumer Driven Contract Testing, or #comm-accessibility discussing all things accessibility. At a more generic level there is #comm-testing in which people pose questions or talk about their challenges.

I don’t want this to sound like an advert. But, the John Leiws Partnership is the most collaborative work environment in which I have ever worked and that is why having previously stayed a max of two years in any one job, I have been in the Partnership now for over 10 years.

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As someone who has built up a tolerance to being impressed, that is an impressive answer. Integration, early help on hand, process feedback and coaching. Covering social needs, constant support, engagement, responsibility over process, feedback and fun with channels for testing issues and sharing experiences and solutions. Nicely done.

It’s hard for me to add anything here, but I find that having teams meet outside of a work context can be very helpful to get them to mesh faster. Introducing a new personality to a group always changes the group and forces them to re-settle, so a meal or a chat or a game can help everyone interact at some level to feel more comfortable in coming forward with questions.

Also I like a buddy that can make introductions. I like someone who will walk me to someone else and oversee a handshake to give me a new contact to work with in another department. I like a network and I don’t like to network.

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