Hiccupps

I was at Cambridge Agile Exchange 's first Unconference the other night and I pitched a 15-minute discussion with the title  The value of testing is ... : I'm a tester and I'm interested in the value that others perceive testing brings to product development in their contexts. Where does testing add value? Where does it add most value? When does it add value? What kinds of testing activities deliver the right kind of value at the right kinds of costs? Do you need testers in order to test?  The participants in the session included product owners, scrum masters, developers, coaches, an ex-test manager, and a colleague from Linguamatics who has just switched to testing from linguistics. (And I'm still hiring .) The mission I had in mind was to gather data, to solicit and record views, and to not push some kind of militant testing agenda. I think that worked well, and if I had to pull one observation out it'd be how quickly the conversation turned to  th...

The testers at Linguamatics decided to explore the adoption of a set of team values and this short series of posts describes how we got to them through  extended and open discussion. If you find the posts read like one of those "what I did in the holidays" essays you used to be forced to write at school then I'll have achieved my aim. I don't have a recipe to be followed here, only the story of what we did, in the order we did it, with a little commentary and hindsight. Introduction Why? Teasing Them Out Living With Them Reflection --00-- We took our own sweet time to  arrive at a set of team values . That's okay with me. It felt like a good pace for us given all of the variables: the ongoing work, the people, the novelty, and the uncertainty of the outcome. We took small steps, with space for review, with clarity on the next stage, and with consensus. We've now been living with our values for a few months and I thought it might be interest...

The testers at Linguamatics decided to explore the adoption of a set of team values and this short series of posts describes how we got to them through  extended and open discussion. If you find the posts read like one of those "what I did in the holidays" essays you used to be forced to write at school then I'll have achieved my aim. I don't have a recipe to be followed here, only the story of what we did, in the order we did it, with a little commentary and hindsight. Introduction Why? Teasing Them Out Living With Them Reflection --00-- Having got to a longlist of seven values that we were struggling to cut down further , we decided to live with them for a while and then see how we felt. I made small cards listing the values and short descriptions and distributed them to the team. I also made the values prominent on our team's pages in the company wiki and wrote about our exper...

The testers at Linguamatics decided to explore the adoption of a set of team values and this short series of posts describes how we got to them through  extended and open discussion. If you find the posts read like one of those "what I did in the holidays" essays you used to be forced to write at school then I'll have achieved my aim. I don't have a recipe to be followed here, only the story of what we did, in the order we did it, with a little commentary and hindsight. Introduction Why? Teasing Them Out Living With Them Reflection --00-- So far we've thought of a load of reasons that a team might want values , and loosely grouped them. That's the Why. Next step: the What. In a second meeting following the same lightly-facilitated format as the first , we asked ourselves what kinds of values might be good fits to each of our four motivational categories: encourage, empha...

The testers at Linguamatics decided to explore the adoption of a set of team values and this short series of posts describes how we got to them through  extended and open discussion. If you find the posts read like one of those "what I did in the holidays" essays you used to be forced to write at school then I'll have achieved my aim. I don't have a recipe to be followed here, only the story of what we did, in the order we did it, with a little commentary and hindsight. Introduction Why? Teasing Them Out Living With Them Reflection --00-- Having decided that we wanted to go ahead and attempt to sculpt a set of values for ourselves , we reviewed the data from our research into what others had done. In terms of motivation, there were some reasonably common factors for enumerating values in teams: Shared purpose. Shared approach to achieving it. A priori justification and guidance for work. Empowering staff to take action. The terminology used ...

The testers at Linguamatics decided to explore the adoption of a set of team values and this short series of posts describes how we got to them through extended and open discussion. If you find the posts read like one of those "what I did in the holidays" essays you used to be forced to write at school then I'll have achieved my aim. I don't have a recipe to be followed here, only the story of what we did, in the order we did it, with a little commentary and hindsight. Introduction Why? Teasing Them Out Living With Them Reflection --00-- Our team provides testing services to other teams in the company, in their contexts. That means we cover a selection of products, domains, and technologies across several development groups, operations, professional services projects, our internal compliance process, and more. In terms of methodology, we are in permanent Scrum teams, we join time-bounded projects set up to implement a particular feature or satisfy...