Quality Coach Newsletter 15

Less Friction, more Freeway

This month's newsletter looks at the topic of frictionless services. I hope you enjoy it.

It's more than a Field of Dreams

It's not enough to simply create a frictionless service. I wish it were like Kevin Costner in "Field of Dreams", where "if you build it, they will come" is all it takes to simplify team scope. But in my experience, it takes hard work and intentionality to encourage teams to embrace what they perceive as 'additional work' regardless of how easy it is to pick up.

We have both internal and external interference when picking up new skills and tasks. And, if we want to really embed a 'way of working into a team, into a culture, we need to work on both types of interference.

Creating a frictionless service that is easy to pick up and use goes a long way to reducing external interference.

Work on reducing obstacles for teams, are tangible tasks that demonstrate quick wins. These are necessary for you to grow and build relationships.

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Quality Coaching: Focusing on Frictionless

TL;DR It takes effort to persuade by logic or motivate people. You may achieve more success by removing team obstacles that are preventing them from performing quality-related tasks.

Anne-Marie CharrettAnne-Marie Charrett

Some posts/talks on platform teams and quality engineering.

Team Topology & Quality Engineering Structures

What is the optimal structure for Quality Engineering within Engineering? Anne-Marie Charrett writes about some of the complexities to consider

Anne-Marie CharrettAnne-Marie Charrett

Question with sprinkle of humility on the side

Michael Bolton tweeted yesterday: > Testers: let’s not obsess over trying to be influential, and work on beinghelpful. And let’s be careful to offer—not inflict—help. #testing[https://twitter.com/search?q=%23testing&src=hash]> — Michael Bolton (@michaelbolton) October 16, 2013[https://twitter.c…

Anne-Marie CharrettAnne-Marie Charrett

Round the neighbourhood

Great to see Heather Reiduff writing. In this post she looks back at her nine months at Glofox and writes about her wins.

Making an Impact Here

Seeing the impact I’m making 6 months into my new role.

Such an insightful post by Maaret on the value of documentation.

The Documentation Conundrum

Ideas and experiences on software testing, software development, conference speaking and organizing.

Maaret Pyhäjärvi

Areti Panou writes on the difference between Product Plans and Product Strategies and the value of using the product plan to communicate and interact with key people.

Care Tips for Product Plans

This article by Dragan Stepanovic comparing code reviews and pair programming was interesting to me.

From Async Code Reviews to Co-Creation Patterns

This article dives into the throughput and quality of the async code review process, which are very important dimensions to optimize for in product development teams. It also explains why co-creation patterns – Pair and Mob programming – as an alternative way of working are able to optimize for both…

InfoQDragan Stepanović

‌Finally, I wrote a post on end to end testing and how its not just how logical it not that influences a team's decision to do end to end testing. We need to consider psych safety, and a companies openness to experimentation and exploration.

Advocating for less testing

Tests don’t exist in an isolated repo. They represent decisions on testing based on beliefs, relationships and safety.

Anne-Marie CharrettAnne-Marie Charrett