Cambridge Lean Coffee

This morning I was delighted to see the long-awaited return of the Cambridge Tester Meetup in the form of an online Lean Coffee! Here's a few aggregated notes from the conversation in the group I was in.

Onboarding of testers in Covid land

From the company's side:

Looking for tips for getting testers up and running remotely.
Structured introduction plan, inluding people, tools, and relevant docs.
Encouraging the new team member to complement that with finding their own path.
Remember that it's hard being new and remote.
Make sure that time to learn and to use the product is available.
Try to find some task that can make them feel productive, an early win.
Have a buddy with priority and time to answer questions.
Set expectations on both sides.

From the onboarder's side:

Be prepared to ask questions.
Self-motivation is really important.
Set some goals for yourself (to get that achievement hit).
Be prepared for it to be harder.
Be brave (even if you don't feel it).

The future of testing

Moving towards more hands-on in other areas, e.g. DevOps, automation, or Quality Champion.
Good testing or quality comes from the team supported by a quality professional.
The basics of testing itself don't change: delivering business value by seeking problems or potential problems, uncovering risks (of what, to who), helping stakeholders to get the information they need to prioritise them.
The implementation of that testing might change, e.g. by different people or with different practices.
The testing work will always be there, so long as we are building things that we want to fulfill people's needs.
Just look at the people on this call. We all call ourselves testers but we do different work in different ways even now.

Quality metrics that are ACTUALLY useful

Looking for metric that represent quality for a team's delivery.
The team selected a bunch of metrics but would like one that represents "maintainability."
That's a hard concept to put a number on.
Perhaps take something that's easy to get hold of, from CI.
Perhaps something that a tool can generate, e.g. cyclomatic complexity.
What is the impact you want to change, course correct?
Can you form the metric in terms of that impact rather than in some property of the code.
Perhaps keep records for a couple of months in a spreadsheet?
... if any developer feels impacted by maintainability issues, record where and some measure of the badness or cost,
... then review the data after a couple of months and see whether metrics suggest themselves.

Remote line management - top tips

A new line manager has never met any of his reports. Tips please!
Openly using a structure, to reduce uncertainty about what's going to happen.
Be transparent about newness, and experiments you'll do with approaches.
Use the mute button and let your reports talk.
Be prepared for it to take longer to get to know someone.
All the traditional stuff is still important.

Comments

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