Yong He and Andy Norton spoke at Leeds Testing Atelier.
It really resonated that while we can get caught up in tech it’s really just:
“Humans working with humans to build things for humans”
There were more key takeaways:
- Focus on people and focus on the outcome (not output).
- Get involved as early as possible
- Understand the full cycle of the product
- Identify dependencies and untangle complex work
- Understand risks and help others weigh in
- Expand our capabilities
Stop using these stereotypes
“QAs break stuff. Devs just google stuff. People just do their thing and are not interested in what other roles do. Teams just get stuff done.”
The development value stream (Build Ship Support) enables the operational value stream.
Optimise for Flow (a fast flow of change from one thing to another) and focus on Lead Time (a fast feedback loop).
Team Topologies - a model of organisational design. Bring all role types into the team to maximise flow. Remove functional silo ownership - re-establish team ownership – work inside your scope yet communicate and think outside.
Ask questions to reduce the lead time to business impact – the value realised by the user.
What to focus on with development/testing?
- Frame as a group activity
- It starts from the beginning before code is written/verified
- Keep on learning
- All about capabilities
As a team do not accept that “This cannot be tested”. Find a way to build testability into it all.
The unit of delivery is the team.
Observability is an important unit in understanding what’s happening in production right now with customers. Can your team answer a set of questions about your customer experience right now?
Use Communities of Practice to bring people together around a particular area to focus on.
Don’t get stuck in the waiting place.
Recommended resources:
- Mob Programming by Woody Zuill and Kevin Meadows
- Capability Comb by Emily Webber
How about you? What stories and approaches do you have about moving from “me” to “we”?