Friday, April 28, 2017

A Thousand and One Things

The last weeks had been quite busy at work. When I think about all the things and topics I worked on, I'm getting dizzy at first, then excited, and finally thoughtful.

Although I love focus, I also love contributing to many topics. And I learned that I should just do what I like to do if I think it's worth spending my time on. Well, this could be considered good ("you're not just delivering what's asked of you but providing additional value") - or bad ("you're not focusing on your actual task"). During the last months, I received mixed feedback from several people about my involvement in many areas which got me thinking about this topic a lot. So I decided to reflect on what I actually did during the last three weeks since we had the first mobbing session in our team.

  • Lots of testing. My team made really good progress, collaboration mood was high, backlog items flew nicely through our workflow. Investing time upfront, before a first increment is implemented, paid off again. Brainstorming things to test, clarifying questions, trying to reach shared understanding together with product owner and developers, and also testing early increments, was again well worth the time. Though it might sound counter-intuitive ("you have to do the work twice then"), it speeds things up a lot for me. And it leaves a great feeling of being "on time" with providing feedback, instead of "always late" when tickets suddenly pile up.
  • I've been sitting with some of my developers, pairing on trying out different implementations, debugging, or fixing identified defects. I love doing so, but currently don't prioritize it high enough to do it more often.
  • As we have a new developer on the team, I had a few onboarding sessions with her to provide an overview on workflows, product history, company backgrounds, and much more to get her started.
  • My team is giving peer feedback a try, so I've provided written feedback for my teammates. Though I think I should provide feedback more often and rather face-to-face, I really like this formal instance. I feel it helps me discipline myself to provide regular feedback also on a personal level, not only on things we are working on. When it comes to providing feedback on personal level, I'm not confident enough that I'll find the right words in a face-to-face situation to help the other grow without offending him. So in the end I mostly either say nothing (which I feel is pretty bad, and also a missed chance for the other one) or I address things in team settings (like a retrospective, which is often not the right place for personal feedback). Getting the chance to take the time and carefully formulate the feedback before providing it, helped me a lot. The only problem: I don't know how the others interpreted my feedback and responded to it.
  • We've just officially introduced OKRs (objectives and key results) at my company. As I happen to be in a supporter role to help kick this change off, we regularly meet to reflect and decide on next steps.
  • We also happen to think about an official company tech blog. I highly support this endeavor, so I agreed to join the group of editors.
  • To further increase our perception as tech company, we are striving for hosting more meetups at FlixBus. I'm part of the organizing group, and we even had two meetups hosted a few days ago. That was a great first step, but further steps have to follow.
  • We have an internal agile testing community at FlixBus, open to anybody interested in testing. As community moderator, I prepared another internal meetup. This time, one colleague shared her insights from TestBash Brighton, and another one her lessons learned from implementing a new onboarding concept. Thanks to my fellow community members, I learned a lot!
  • As community moderator, I am frequently the first contact person in case someone needs input regarding any testing topic. One of our people managers asked me for a rough list of skills and topics I would see for an agile tester. Hard topic! Made me ask questions first, like why this is required and what exactly is needed.
  • Another colleague contacted me if I could support during an ongoing audit where the auditors wanted to gain more insight in how we do testing. So I provided a collection of materials.
  • A tester from the international testing community approached us and asked whether we might offer one of our products as system under test for the meetup he organizes. Great opportunity for both of us. I connected the right people so they can proceed on the topic.
  • We received several more applications on our job offer for software testers. For now I only reviewed materials and provided feedback, but probably I'll find myself sitting in interviews soon again.
  • I supported a tester colleague with registering for this year's Agile Testing Days including booking hotel and flights, and did so myself. We both will attend the full week and can't wait for it!
  • A fellow team plans to introduce automated tests through the UI. They asked me whether I might share how we deal with automated tests, on which levels we test, who writes them, which tools we use, etc. They wanted to learn how we do it and see what might fit to their context as well. We had a quite interesting conversation, I'm curious what they will decide on during the next weeks.
  • The tester of yet another team asked me whether I could give a testing workshop for his team and share how we handle testing in my team in general. He simply wanted his team to hear about testing from a different person and perspective. During the first part of the workshop, I shortly introduced the developers to exploratory testing, and then had them engaged in a hands-on testing session. I did this with three different groups already, and it's always been fun! I had a great time, but also the developers enjoyed approaching the product from a different perspective and finding many issues in short time. As second part of the workshop, I presented how we do testing in my team and our context: our whole-team approach to quality, testing throughout the workflow, what kind of tests we run and on which levels and systems. Especially our vacation replacement rules, having the whole team take over all testing, caught attention and we had a great conversation. Hope I could trigger some thoughts and ideas.
  • A colleague and I hosted an agile UX workshop for our teams - using LEGO! We had so much fun together. Well, we had LEGO, right? The workshop was inspired by one I attended at last year's Agile Testing Days, hosted by the wonderful Karen Greaves and Samantha Laing. Big thanks to them! If you have the chance to join one of their workshops, do so, it's worth it.

One more thing I learned during the last weeks: I've been selected as new voice to speak at TestBash Munich in October! I'm so happy about it and looking forward to take you on quite a personal journey with FlixBus.

All in all - I do understand why I received mixed feedback regarding my many activities. It's definitely great food for thought. So far, I've not decided in which way to adapt. But I wonder what they might think if I also told them about the many topics I don't involve myself, or the many more ideas I intentionally postpone?

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