Hiccupps

The theme at  LLEWT this year was Rules and constraints to ensure better quality.   My experience report concerned a team I'd been on for several years which developed (bottom-up) a set of working practices that we called team agreements.   The agreements survived "natural" variation such as people leaving and joining and even some structural reorganisation which preserved most of the team members but changed the team's responsibilities or merged in a few people from a disbanded team. The agreements did not, however, persist through a significant round of (top-down) redundancies where the team was merged with two others.  I'm interested in thinking about the ways in which constraints on how people work affect the work and whether there are patterns that could help us to apply the right kinds of constraints at times they are likely to be useful.  I'm going to use this post to dump my thoughts. My starting po...

I attended LLEWT 2025 at the weekend. LLEWT is a peer conference  hosted by Chris Chant, Joep Schuurkes, and  Elizabeth Zagroba in Llandegfan  on the island of Anglesey, North Wales. This year's theme was Rules and constraints to ensure better quality: Think of things like WIP limits, zero bug policies, trunk-based development, not allowing any form of interprocess communication except through service interfaces that are externalizable, or just firing all your testers so the devs have to step up. (Yes, not all of these are a good idea all of the time.) Some terms related to this theme are forcing functions, poka-yoke, and behavior-shaping constraints. Basically we're looking for any rule or constraint you put in place to get to better quality. (Some systems thinking might be required.) The format of LLEWT encourages proposals for experience reports on the theme, takes feedback on the proposals, an...

Last weekend I participated in the LLandegfan Exploratory Workshop on Testing (LLEWT) 2024, a peer conference in a small parish hall on Anglesey, north Wales. The topic was communication and I shared my sketchnotes and a mind map from the day a few days ago. This post summarises my experience report.  Express, Listen, and Field Just about the most hands-on, practical, and valuable training I have ever done was on assertiveness with a local Cambridge coach, Laura Dain . In it she introduced Express, Listen, and Field (ELF), distilled from her experience across many years in the women’s movement, business, and academia.  ELF: say your key message clearly and calmly, actively listen to the response, and then focus only on what is relevant to your needs. I blogged a little about it back in 2017 and I've been using it ever since. Assertiveness In a previous role, I was the manager of a test team and organised training for the whole ...

This weekend I was at LLEWT 2024, a peer conference on Anglesey , north Wales, discussing communication. Given the day jobs of the participants, it was no surprise that the experience reports and the conversations that followed them mostly focussed on software development contexts.  Notes from my presentation are in Express, Listen, and Field . I made sketchnotes (below) for each presentation and a mindmap (above) to try to summarise the whole. Without much reflection yet, I guess I would pull these common high-level threads from the day: There are multiple reasons that communication fails  ... like, duh! ... but having multiple strategies for framing a message can help ... and having multiple tactics for delivering a message can help too. Understanding what you want from an interaction is key ... so setting the context to make that more likely is wise ... which might mean meta-conversation, being transparent, or changing your approach...