Mike Harris' Testing and Quality Blog
Testers can help increase cooperation across the company, and cooperation will help us and the company. Testers give feedback to developers when we test. We should also get feedback from other departments and customers on our work and the product we are testing. The feedback we get from cooperating with other departments brings the perspectives …
Continue reading “Cooperation helps to improve testing, helps testers and helps the company”
I am interested in how thinking slowly can help me test and I have been reading Gene Kim and Steven Spear’s new book Wiring the Winning Organization: Liberating Our Collective Greatness Through Slowification, Simplification, and Amplification with the Deming Profound Book Club. Spear and Kim acknowledge how Daniel Kahneman, who recently passed away, influenced them …
Continue reading “Think slowly when you are testing And Think slowly when you are automating”
Cecelia S. Kilian was W. Edwards Deming‘s long-term secretary. She created this book which contains her memories, and many curated documents from Deming. I read this book with the Profound Deming Book Club and it made me think about why I am interested in Deming. The details of Deming’s life are interesting, however I am …
Continue reading “Get insights from “The World of W. Edwards Deming” by Cecelia S. Kilian”
As testers, we often use checklists, such as a Definition of Done, so I was drawn to this book when it was suggested at the Profound Deming Bookclub. Atul Gawande tells the story of how he was asked by the World Health Organisation(WHO) to develop a global programme to reduce avoidable deaths and harm from …
Continue reading “A review of ”The Checklist Manifesto How to Get Things Right” by Atul Gawande”
We need psychologically safe workplaces. Testers, and all other members of development teams, need to feel safe enough to be able to ask questions and express opinions about the project we are working on. The need for psychological safety is not a new issue. W. Edwards Deming saw it as an important issue. Drive out …
Continue reading “Drive out fear to improve psychological safety”
We all know that speaking up and getting your point over at a meeting is important. However, I am sure that we have all taken part in meetings when everyone is so keen to speak that we do not listen to one another. It is not only important to speak, it is also important to …
Continue reading “Developing your listening skills is really useful”
If we want to make good quality software we need to remove barriers to good work. Dr Deming‘s 14 Points for management were the basis for lessons for top management in Japan. Dr Deming said that “the 14 Points apply anywhere, to small organisations as well as to large organisations[1]”. Point 12 is to “remove …
Sometimes testers need to “coach”, when I do so I draw on my knowledge as a junior cricket coach and use the PoP framework. My cricket coaching qualification also included using the coaching tools that best suit the player, outcome and practice. The tools that we can use to coach are: Having a list of …
Sometimes testers need to “coach” and when I do I use a coaching framework to help me. At the weekend I coach junior cricket and I use what I have learned from cricket to help me as a tester. The PoP framework we use in coaching cricket can be useful to us as testers. In …
I am looking forward to speaking about my story in the ebook Testing Stories at the BCS SIGiST webinar on the 12th October because I want to show how Test Lead’s have an important role to play in making agile transformations successful. I will be speaking with three of the other testers who contributed stories …
Continue reading “Testing Stories: Test Lead in an agile transformation”
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