Principle 3 - Exercise 1: What are three things you want to improve on your team?

Time: 5-10 Minutes

Purpose: Think about you can help improve your team.

Introduction: Modern Testing embraces continuous improvement. This means that we should continually seek out things we can do that help and improve the team. This can include people, process, and tools.

Activity:

Reflect on how your team can improve. Draw from bottlenecks identified while discussing Principle 2 as well as your experience and context.

  1. What have you or your team done recently to improve?
  2. What do you think the next improvement should be?
  3. What do you think the other team members want to do to improve?

Let’s discuss our answers here on a thread.

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  1. What have you or your team done recently to improve? - I think taking this course and others like it is something I am personally doing to improve. I want to know more, to reflect more, to do more of what I do as the result of conscious thought and decision-making rather than habit, bias or complacency. In terms of my team, we have recently worked together to build a more fit-for-purpose competency framework, describing the career progression of testers in our org through the lens of various relevant competencies.

  2. What do you think the next improvement should be? - that’s a really tricky one to answer as I do feel that I am at a bit of a crossroads right now and I don’t know which of the many options we have should come next. Perhaps the most honest answer here would be, “keep thinking, keep exploring, keep turning over rocks”. I think we are still in a kind of discovery phase at the end of the last raft of changes we committed to as a quality group. We have enough data to evolve more, or again. We need to consider what is fit for purpose and what is aging out. Our focus is pretty wide right now, between the nitty gritty of actual hands-on “testing” and the more conceptual, big-picture thought process. We could use better definition in our next target.

  3. What do you think the other team members want to do to improve? - I think there is a great drive from our teams to do more test automation and for testers to be more hands-on in actually producing that code. I think we like the idea of more technically competent testers who can solve quality problems and sleuth out quality issues ever deeper in the code. I think we’re already fighting a pincer movement here as well, by being more active and conscious of the “people problems” we need to solve as testers to have better teams and better integration in all stages of the work we do. We have shifted really far left and increasingly right.