Team Agile - Sharing challenges and solutions on applying modern software engineering practices

November 19, 2018

Inclusiveness

The past year has been one where I’ve had to focus even more on diversity, inclusiveness and what all that means. I’ve long held the view that diverse teams are better teams as they bring with them diverse experiences and knowledge. That diversity can give a diversity of solutions so it’s more likely your team will apply the best or even discover a novel solution. It’s a theory I hold closely that is backed up my some academic research tool

However I’ve also experienced the high productivity homogeneous teams can experience. It can be much quicker for the team to create social cohesion and disagreements are rare. It can free people up to focus on what they are producing (which for me is software) with few concerns about social interactions.

October 25, 2018

Three Ways Testers Are Better Able To Resolve Conflict

I’m not talking about “scary conflict”. There is lots of healthy conflict at work when you have a diverse and inclusive team. It might be technical decisions (tabs or spaces?), product plans (high risk or high return first?) or casual choices (where do we go to for lunch today?). When I think of “scary conflict” I think of personal grudges, unprofessional behaviour or confronting office politics. Those conflicts need to be resolved but are much more confronting.

October 8, 2018

Testing as a Holistic Exercise

Early on when trying to apply Agile methods to software development I found a lot of the challenges were in the area of software testing. Not just because a lot more automated testing was being done, but because requirements would shift and change rapidly. Many levels of rapid feedback needed to be in place to ensure the development didn’t misstep for too long.

I started exploring more places a focus on testing and quality could be applied. And that led me on a journey earlier and earlier in the development timeline.

October 1, 2018

Avoiding Giving Advice

There is a famous experiment in behavioural science called the Marshmallow Experiment. In the simplest version of this experiment they sat down a child in front of a marshmallow, the instructor told the child that if they sat there and waited the instructor would come back with an additional marshmallow and they could have both. However if they took the one marshmallow before the instructor returned then that was all they would get. Once the child understood the instructions they were left alone for 15 minutes.

September 16, 2018

Pair and Mob Programming for Interviews

In a recent assessment of people applying for graduate and intern positions at my work we wanted a way to quickly assess them as a group. Ideally we wanted to see their individual skill at work, how well they worked with others and all in under an hour for groups of up to five. So I suggested we get them to do some Mob Programming on a Kata exercise. It wasn’t something we tried before but the idea wasn’t completely out of the blue.

September 4, 2018

Dumb Questions

My go to tool in coaching is to ask a question. I used to try and give people advice but I learned that no one listens to uninvited advice. Telling people want to do can work in a position of authority but they wont take the time to ask why you want them to do it differently and are happy to abandon it all when you leave. So I take a different approach and ask them about what they are doing already.

August 25, 2018

Learning Refactoring Together

My team has a challenge that I haven’t run into before. We all want the code to be better quality that it is now. However we don’t agree on what “better” is.

Even simple things can lead to long discussions and debates so it was a struggle to get some serious progress. Reviews could get bogged down because a refactoring someone did triggered a debate on its merit. We needed a format to allow us to work through some of the fundamentals and find where there was consensus. So I booked us in to do some mob programming together except we were not going to write new code. We were going to focus on only refactoring.

August 29, 2017

Coaching is a Transferable Skill

It’s been interesting over the last year for me as I explore where coaching for software teams and coaching for sports people overlaps. This year I got to be coach for a Roller Derby team which is the first time I’ve called myself a coach for more than a brief workshop. In my day job I’m involved in many activities that have nothing to do with coaching so I rarely call myself an Agile Coach. But to that sports team I am the coach. And while I’ve been involved with Roller Derby for 5 years I have very little training in coaching sports teams so I started applying all the things I’ve learned coaching software teams.

June 6, 2017

What Role are your Tests Serving

We had a discussion at work after watching the excellent Kelvin Henney talk about good unit tests. And it helped me clarify the many roles tests play and why people get a habit of complaining about their tests getting in the way. So here is the four categories a test is trying to balance:

Requirements
Regression
Documentation
Refactoring guide

May 11, 2017

Applying the Toyota Kata

Last year I got to attend a workshop on the Toyota Kata by Hakan Forss and I could immediately see how it could be useful but I didn’t have an obvious place to apply it until recently. We got some good experience with the concept using jigsaw puzzles in a group.