Hiccupps

In September 2017 I attended  Ian Johnson 's visual note-taking workshop at  DDD East Anglia . For the rest of the day I made sketchnotes, including during Karo Stoltzenburg 's talk on exploratory testing for developers  (sketch below), and since then I've been doing it on a regular basis. Karo recently asked whether I'd do a Team Eating (the Linguamatics brown bag lunch thing) on sketchnoting. I did, and this post captures some of what I said. Beginning sketchnoting, then. There's two sides to that: I still regard myself as a beginner at it, and today I'll give you some encouragement and some tips based on my experience, to begin sketchnoting for yourselves. I spend an enormous amount of time in situations where I find it helpful to take notes: testing, talking to colleagues about a problem, reading, 1-1 meetings, project meetings, workshops, conferences, and, and, and, and I could go on. I've long been interested in the approaches I've evol...

Jessica Bane presented her Scope Discovery and Alignment meeting format at last week's Cambridge Tester Meetup . As the name suggests, its function is for a team to develop a shared understanding of the reason that work is being requested, what is expected to be included, and what is not expected to be included. The structure involves collaboration on a statement that represents the mission and a breakdown of project factors (such as risks, questions, in/out of scope, resources) using tools familiar to many teams these days, a Kanban-like board and post-its. But the format is flexible and intended to service the key thing: making space for a productive conversation about the why and what , leaving the team free to go away and get on with the how . After the talk, a brief workshop gave us a chance to kick the tyres of the approach. The group I was in were asked to organise a baby shower for our product owner's wife and, after aligning ourselves first on what a baby sh...