a story on failure

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

Thank You!

@charrett

http://mavericktester.com