Build Quality In, workshop with Janet Gregory and Lisa Crispin at Agile Roots 2015

Editor's Notes

• #2: 3:30
• #3: Each of us introduces ourselves briefly
• #4: Janet - quick raise of hands … Animated slide
• #5: Janet Give them a minute – I doubt whether any one will, but …
• #6: Lisa. Explain the idea of “giveaways” instead of “takeaways”, from Fanny Pittack & Alex Schwarz’s keynote at ATD last year. We offer these ideas – participants can choose to take them. End:337
• #7: Lisa 3:37
• #8: We mentioned this in the plenary talk, so only need to highlight … End 3:42 Lisa T-shaped skills are a metaphor to describe the abilities of an agile team member. Focus on skills, competencies rather than roles The horizontal bar represents a broad skill set: the ability to collaborate across disciplines with experts in other areas and to apply knowledge in areas of expertise other than one's own. Generalizing specialist. The vertical bar on the T represents the depth of related skills and expertise in a single field Testers can indeed be proactive and learn many skills to add value to their team. They will talk about how can testers can expand their roles rather than reduce them <Thinking skills, honing your craft> <Dev-Tester Pairing> <Product owners can accept a user story, seeing it does what she expected. However, she may not consider other areas important to customer – performance, risky edge cases, security – tell story of how our team has both PO and testers look at each story> I think we can dilute our skills if we try to be everything. I was talking to someone the other day, who dropped out of programming because they couldn’t keep up with all the technical things they needed to know. Story from agile testing group - once a dev has committed passing code, he coordinates with the tester to establish a window to push to the QA server, as well as the functionality of the code in the push. We're working toward involving the tester more in the design and test authoring phase so that she has a better understanding when she starts testing exactly what's going on.
• #9: Lisa - 3:42 – 3:47 debrief end 3:52 give examples of a couple of yours – domain knowledge, eliciting examples of desired behavior For example , one of Janet’s might be facilitations skills, nothing to do with testing specifically - Keep the stickies close – we will use them in the next exercise. - what kind of debrief should we do here??? We’ve got 5 minutes, so maybe you ask for examples from people, and I write them down – sharing.
• #10: Janet Explain internal vs external and that the customer gets to decide external… Might be easy if you have predefined rules like in sports. Janet’s daughter gave this explanation to my 6 year old grandson. I thought it was actually very good. “It the level of precision one hopes to acquire”. I think it about says it all… although I’d like a different word than precision – she was talking about quality of a video streaming.
• #11: 3:52 What quality goals their team would really commit to – put it in writing, make it visible and obvious, make it realistic. As the team improves, change the goals – strive for more.
• #12: Janet Also on the plenary talk.. So just quick review End 3:57 See links for more by Rob Lambert and Adam P. Knight at the end of the slide deck. How is your team shaped, and who is on your team.
• #13: 3:57-4:09 Debrief – get each team to talk about 2 of their groupings? - an extra 10 min ?? End debrief 4:17
• #14: Lisa These are some techniques that could be used to help train, teach, mentor Next slide will intro 2 patterns
• #15: Introduce 2 patterns – just to show them there are other places to look END 4:24 Just Enough: Difficult, complex concepts can overwhelm novices. When introducing a new idea, concentrate on the fundamentals/big picture and give only a brief description of more difficult concepts. Spark interest. EG: you’re presenting an idea to upper mgt. Have a slide or two about more difficult concepts, but emphasize conclusions, benefits. Wait until they are ready to provide more info. Provide references for more learning. Show how it can be useful in their jobs. Persistent PR: people may forget about the new idea. Post info about it around the team space where people are likely to see and discuss it. Use a graphic with bright colors, a memorable quote. Promote casual interaction about it. Information radiators (Alistair Cockburn). Lisa’s story: in our new office we have a huge whiteboard all along the work area, doing a story board exercise there makes it visible to others, they ask about it. Leave a book or magazine out where people may pick it up and glance through it.
• #16: Lisa, The hope is to actually be able to try these ideas in the workshop itself so it is easier to bring back to your organization. 4:24 – 4:44 Debrief end 4:54
• #17: Janet
• #19: Yeah, let’s make a new list, these are from the advanced topics workshop.
• #20: 19