a story on failure
TRANSCRIPT
FAILUR
A STORY ABOUT
E
Anne-Marie Charrett
@charrett
FAILUR
A STORY ABOUT
E
Anne-Marie Charrett
@charrett
FAILUR
A STORY ABOUT
EAnne-Marie Charrett
with random photos of my kids & cats
@charrett
@charrett
Philosophy
!A test coach
!Facilitate Change
!Be Dispensible
@charrett
Objectives and Goals
“As we discussed, our key priority is to bolster the existing testers and to help broaden the testing capability across the rest of the team with a view to understanding what we need to do to achieve a viable testing capability preferably without increasing our dedicated testing resource levels.”
@charrett
• Testers felt they had no support • Testers felt they weren’t listened to • Excessive points for testing • Stories not making release • Difficult to accommodate change in
priorities • HTML breaking code in merge • Hidden work
Challenges
@charrett
Testers Afraid to speak up Afraid to question stories Afraid to suggest change Afraid to get bugs closed Afraid to question developers
Culture Eats Testing for Breakfast
@charrett
Culture can kill curiosity
“Culture is a pattern of shared tacit assumptions that has been learned by a group, that has worked well enough to be considered valid ….” !
--Edgar Schein
•Don’t communicate
•Keep your head down
•Jiggling is good
•The business is not to be trusted
•Testers offer little value @charrett
What kills curiosity?• Being Dead
• Being intimidated
• Lack of Understanding
• Lack of Authority
• Lack of Clarity
• Lack of Trust
• Lack of Knowledge
• Lack of appreciation of culture
@charrett
@charrett
• I made assumptions about my role
• I made assumptions about the company
• I made assumptions about the team members
• I made assumptions about the testers ability
• I made assumptions about my own ability
• I didn’t see how the culture was affecting me
• I assumed that demonstrating quality testing @charrett
@charrett
Take Yourself Seriously
David Silverman - Rage Comics
The cucumber gets pickled more than the brine gets cucumbered.”
Jerry Weinberg
Other Lessons LearnedReview goals regularly
You can’t change culture on your own
Power handed over is hard to regain
Delegate versus abdicate
Have a back bone
Discover the leaders
Be vulnerable
Be Persistent @charrett