Showing posts with label pairing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label pairing. Show all posts

Sunday, April 10, 2022

Asking for Help

How is it that asking for help can be both so easy and the hardest thing to do? In my case, if I'm feeling calm and relaxed, I can ask about anybody to help me out. If they agree and do help, awesome! If they don't, well, it's a pity yet I'm calm, so it's not the worst thing in the world either. After all, things are under control anyway.

That situation changes completely when I'm feeling overwhelmed, fires are burning everywhere and I feel the weight on my shoulders (it might not actually be on my shoulders, yet perception matters). In this situation I happen to switch to one of two kinds of modes. Usually, it's my extreme "get things done on my own" mode, which let's me see only one way: pushing through until everything's done! And as I know how to do it, I just do it right away on my own to get things out of the way as quickly as I can. After all, I want to get back to a sustainable pace and things being under control as soon as possible. In this situation I don't feel I have time to enable others to do the same and help me out, I just keep going. On the other hand, I might be going on extreme mode for a while - then everything is getting slower and slower, while I still try to push through. I have less and less energy, so dealing with people is also not high on my list in this situation either. Don't get me wrong, I love people! Yet I'm very introvert and people interactions mostly drain me, unless we also do something together that gives me energy again (like getting valuable things done effectively - this is a real booster for me; hence effective pairing or ensembling does not drain me as much and also gives me back a lot).

Either mode - you don't want to get me there. It might help on the short run, and yes things are getting done - yet I'll do no good to anyone on the long run when I'm in this mode! It's been a while since I realized this and it was a tough pill to swallow. Wait, it's not me saving the world? No, and it never should be, and no, I'm not capable of that either, and yes, it's arrogant to think for a moment I could. And after all, I'm not alone, this is a team sport. Plus, I'm not doing my best work in this mode anyway.  I do my best work when I'm calm. Constraints can help, yes, yet I shouldn't get anxious or overwhelmed or drowning in too many feelings - this is usually throwing me off balance.

Getting back to asking for help: when I didn't catch a situation early enough to stay calm and enable others, and it got too far - then it's getting very difficult for me to ask for help. Especially, what help to ask for anyway? There usually are lots of people trying to help or who offer their support, yet what if they are not in the situation yet that they can actually provide help? Then I'd have to enable them first. Yet do I have the energy? Also, what if other people who would be closest to be able to help do not even see that I'm drowning?

What helped me in these situations are the following things. I'm sharing them here mainly as a reminder to myself. Feel free to go ahead, try them and see if they also help you as well.

  1. Do the right thing and ask for help. No, you're not alone, and there is a team to help out. No one should be left alone anyway, and if that's really the case in your team, then there are bigger issues to solve.
  2. If you can't directly ask for help for any reason, confide in trusted people and have them act as sounding board. They probably will tell you that you're not alone and yes, you really should ask for help! Some might ask you what you are afraid could go wrong if you ask for help. Think about this carefully.
  3. Okay, tomorrow you'll ask for help! Yet it's so easy to chicken out when tomorrow actually comes. What can help is to have someone to keep you accountable on what you committed to do, which is asking for help. In my case it really helps me to make this public (I learned that during my personal challenges). Might be scary, yet it's less scary than actually asking for help. Oh, and then everyone knows, so I'd better really do it tomorrow! Tricking my brain like this usually works extremely well.
  4. Point out and explain the challenge you perceive and how it impacts the team, how others can help you in concrete ways and why, and what part you will do yourself to get out of this situation. Just lay it out as it is. It's not about finger-pointing or blaming in any way how you ended up here, yet here you are. If it's too much work for one person, make the work visible. If it's lack of knowledge, make it clear. Whatever it is, let's get out of this together.
  5. Last but not least, for any situation where you ended up being the bottleneck and hence better ask for help: the only way to break out of a bottleneck and knowledge silo situation like this is indeed to stop and enable others. Yes, it will cost energy - and it's very well spent (I learned this the hard way last year). So do just that, enable others. Don't go on your own anymore. Pair and ensemble, document. Have others take over, trust them - accept different approaches and outcomes, they need to learn their way as well (and no, your way is not always right). It does not have to reach your quality bar either, by the way. You can still debrief and catch the most obvious issues - yet oftentimes, good enough is just that, good enough. Oh yes, and if it's not clear yet: Don't become a bottleneck in the first place. Yet if you really have to (sometimes there's just no other feasible way), don't continue this way and instead destruct it again as quickly as possible. It's about the resilience of the whole team. And testing should never be the bottleneck anyway, yet that deserves a whole other blog post.
Now that you (I do speak to myself here) know what to do, do it. What's the worst thing that can happen after all? Also, only if you do ask indeed, you'll know what actually happened (not what you imagined would happen).

Let me tell you what happened for me when I got into this situation again last week. In my mind, there were several crucial tasks to do that all ended up being on my desk, among them also lots of testing activities. Nothing that I could let fall down, I already cut what I could. In addition, everything needed to happen during the same weeks. I was a complete bottleneck and knowledge silo for the team. And I had planned off time from the next month on - and hence one task on my list was to get more people on the team enabled to help out with testing and quality in various aspects.

On Monday, I had conversations about this perceived situation with two peers. I shared I knew what I had to do and that I needed their backing to have the whole team help out. Both gave me the advice to ask for help indeed. They asked me the questions I needed to hear - what was it I was afraid of? Hurting my relationships with my teammates that I already invested in quite a lot? That things got done with less quality? That I needed to let go? I reflected on what they were saying and yes, I needed to fix myself here. So I tweeted about this to hold myself accountable and get me to really ask for help the next day.
Tuesday came, I summoned up my courage and wrote a message in our team channel, making things as explicit as possible (I asked for help quite a few times the last weeks, yet it seems the message didn't get through to them - I learned that sometimes I need to be a lot more explicit than I think I already am.) I chose the text format here as writing helps my thinking, and sharing on the fly in a call is very hard to  do for me. Second, I wanted it persisted so we could go back to this moment in time, have an artifact to refer to. Third, my team currently works mostly in an asynchronous way still, so I hoped this would fit them. In my message, I pointed out that I needed their help, the challenge I perceived (part of it was too much work in progress, hence people starting to block each other and trying to mitigate this by starting more new work before getting the old one done), what needs to be done when, how they can contribute to solve this challenge and what I commit to do to be part of the solution as well. Then I waited while I continued my work.

The good news: I didn't have to wait for long! The team responded amazingly well and I'm considering myself fortunate - and still they couldn't have responded that well if I never gave them the chance to do so in the first place.
  • One teammate instantly agreed to pair test with me on their story, clearly seeing it was too much for me.
  • One teammate took action right away and took over testing for two other stories, I didn't even need to bother further.
  • One teammate shared they're struggling as well with their task, yet I can ask any time and we can do things together.
  • One teammate had a chat with me and shared they got inspired by my message and took action to take over testing where they could.
You can't imagine how relieved I was! Also, it went really well. Yet I know from experience that these kinds of helpful bursts can happen and still, soon enough things go back to the previous normal again. I was curious to see how long it holds this time.
Wednesday came, and I paired again with the same teammate - just as the first session, it was amazing and we discovered lots of valuable information while also sharing knowledge. Now they know a lot more how to test these kinds of changes as well and what to look for.
Thursday came, and more good stuff happened! I asked the previously struggling teammate to pair on a specific story - and we did! I know this didn't come easy to them so I'm even more grateful. Again, really valuable insights in short time on both sides. I also had asked generally in the team who can pair with me on another story - and one teammate quickly volunteered, a person I didn't expect to do so! This was in itself such a nice thing that it made my day.
Friday - another pairing session with yet another person, hence enabling the team further, and it was a success just as well. Again, I'm aware this might collapse again, as it's hard and takes time to change behavior and mindset; there will be setbacks. Yet four really positive days in a row make me very hopeful. I am very happy I did ask in the end, and very grateful for the amazing response of my team. If we continue on this journey together, I do think there's a bright future ahead of us.

Overall, our work to do as a team already became more manageable in short time. I could feel the relief in my bones! I'm already a lot calmer. Which makes it easier to ask for help again. And if asking for help is difficult once more, remember you are not alone.

Posted by at No comments:
Labels: , , , , ,

Tuesday, June 8, 2021

Dear Future Me: I Am Not Alone

Dear future me. I'm writing this while being very tired. I am still spending my time and energy on this deliberately, hoping to remind you of a very stressful time I'm still recovering from: the last six months.

Over the past couple of years, I've started to think a lot more about my energy levels and capacity. Especially when the pandemic became obvious beginning of 2020 and life changed, I felt I needed to cut down on what I do and focus on a few things at a time, working at a sustainable pace. Thinking I had achieved that, I promised myself never to get back into a situation with high stress levels over a long period of time, feeling completely overwhelmed. Little did I know, I did not have everything in hand to prevent what happened since beginning of the year. So here's a reminder to myself and anyone who relates to this situation: if you encounter circumstances again where everything ends up on your desk, be reminded of what happened this time, what consequences it had and which strategies helped to get through it.

So what happened? In short, my work load exploded, I went with it and the energy spent left me depleted.

  • Team size exploded. End of last year, my product team consisted of six full-time employees and a working student. With only three full-time developers we were looking for more people to join. Then one of the three decided to leave and the situation became more urgent to solve. As a blessing in disguise, four developers moved internally and one developer came from outside the company to join our team - all within one month. Yay, problem solved, right? Well, this meant we suddenly were eleven full-time employees plus one working student. I guess most people who have worked in cross-functional product teams can understand what that meant. Our communication pathways multiplied with every new person on the team. With me as the dedicated tester on the team still being involved in all stories, the team mostly working in solo mode at that time, and people starting new stories when waiting for feedback, meant that I had at least twelve stories at the same time on my desk. Imagine the context switching effort and waste coming along with that alone. Feedback loops slowed down immensely and our cycle time increased. Everything took long. Working modes that were okay-ish before did not work at all anymore.
  • Onboarding effort multiplied. So overall, in January and February five new developers joined nearly at the same time. With me being one of two persons having been the longest in the company, in the team and on the product, plus having a unique holistic view on everything that's involved with developing it, this meant a lot of the onboarding and knowledge sharing effort ended up on my desk. While I really enjoy onboarding new people - and these five were lovely people to join our team - this really took a toll on me. Yet still, we need to set people up for success and give them the knowledge they need to have impact themselves. I simply can't leave my teammates hanging.
  • Old conflicts reached the melting point. My team from last year was together for quite a long time and it started to dissolve more and more. We had wonderful times together, and also times we did not manage well. There's a lot to learn from that alone, yet the sad fact is that a long and slowly growing conflict took a toll on each and every one who had been part of that old team constellation. In the end, the two other former developers decided to leave the company for new opportunities as well. All these ups and downs took a lot of emotional energy from everyone of us. It took up a lot of cognitive capacity as well and made any interaction way harder than it had to be.
  • Building a new team, remotely. Since beginning of May, we're now finally our new team constellation and starting to shape this team to the one we want to be on, where everyone is welcome, included, safe to speak their mind, encouraged to experiment and collaborate and learn together and everything. Exciting times, yet we need to put in lots of effort. Also, this is the first team for all of us, where nearly everyone on the team only met each other remotely. We need to learn how to grant ourselves social time, get to know each other, evolve our culture, and more - all virtually. We are distributed across four locations, so the remote setup is amazing in leveling the playing field and providing the same access for everyone. I'm curious where this journey leads us, and already very happy to be part of this new team.
  • Upskilling people to enable them to take over activities that usually ended up with me. No matter how often I reached a point where testing was indeed a whole team activity, with the former team constellation it ended up again mostly with me. Especially exploratory testing or testing for any kind of other quality aspect than the core functionality. The same with operations and infrastructure tasks, responding to alerts, user support, writing release news, and so on. Scheduling and facilitating meetings. Cross-team communication. All kinds of glue work to keep the balls from falling to the ground. I strongly believe in the whole team approach and creating a base of knowledge for everyone. No need to become the expert in one area, yet we should be able to help each other out, reduce bottlenecks and waiting time, unblock each other, being able to go on sick leave and also vacation without things piling up for us in the meantime or worrying they won't get done. So with new people on board, this task could only be done by me, naturally. Super thankful that my new teammates are very open and supportive and not hesitating to see beyond their own nose. They stepped up and took over responsibility even if things were outside their usual comfort zone.
  • Taking up product work and sharing its responsibility in the team. Our product owner had great news: his family got a new member! I really appreciate him going on a long parental leave and also preparing the team for it. He is still working one day per week, yet we all agreed to spread the product responsibility across the team and see that we all carry a bit of the load so it's not too much for anyone. Still, with me being the one longest on the team and product, I ended up as natural contact person for most people outside the team, even though it was communicated differently. So many requests coming in! While I am only seeing a fraction of it, I'm in awe of product owner work. Also, we all in the team are now learning how to tackle user experience in a better fashion, how to spread UX knowledge in the team and how to support our researcher better with his work, and how to fill the gap of other UX roles like design or writing. A lot more to learn on this path!
  • Our team's domain got lots of fresh people. Since beginning of the year, a lot more new people joined our domain, including two new persons on the domain leadership level. New people bringing new energy and lots of ideas! Naturally, onboarding needed to be done on domain level as well. Again, as being one of the persons longest in the domain and also having the "Principal" seniority level, sharing a lot of knowledge and experience ended up on my desk without the possibility of delegating this work. Giving feedback to new initiatives, doing my share helping to drive them forward, new sync meetings, participating in domain workshops, and more.
  • Seeds planted over the last years in my colleagues' minds finally began to sprout. I really don't know what exactly happened, yet since beginning of the year a lot of people reached out to me. Suddenly they were taking me up on my continuous offers to give workshops or talks, to listen and give advice where wanted, to support their own experiments and initiatives, and more. I love seeing people this energized and acting on their ideas and I'm happy to support. "People first" as a principle does not only apply to my own team, so I didn't turn them down. Yet all these requests added up for me.
  • Mentoring, coaching and an accountability partnership. Over the last years, I had about one mentee at a time, sometimes one or two more without the formal relationship. This year I got a new mentee to nudge further on her journey - which is great! Also, this part of the job comes with the seniority as well: growing more senior people. With my mentee from last year we had agreed to continue the relationship as accountability partners - on the topic of saying "no" (imagine). In addition, I took on my very first coachee as an experiment for both our growth as well. Each and every of these relationships have clear boundaries and don't take up much time - yet overall they do add quite a bit. Yet again: people first.
  • Co-creating and running a series of six leadership workshops. I'm in a hybrid role as a principal engineer who's embedded on a cross-functional team. This means that I spend part of my capacity on cross-team initiatives to drive change on a different impact level. Over the last years I've found a rough rule that worked nicely for me: one third of my time I spend on everyday work on my team to evolve our product, one third for thinking ahead and driving innovation within said team and product, one third for initiatives outside my team, usually on a global scale. Worked pretty well last year, helping me to focus on less work in progress and also keep a sustainable pace. For this year, the main initiative I chose to do outside my team was to pair facilitate a series of six leadership workshops together with our coach Shiva Krishnan. I had participated in these workshops in the previous year and found their content to be very relevant and valuable to spread further. My experiment was to build quality on yet another level here, setting the base line and culture for good things to emerge. According to my experience, driving specific testing and quality initiatives mostly failed when they clashed with the existing culture. This year, I wanted to work on the mindset part from yet another angle and also build awareness on diversity, equity and inclusion topics as part of these leadership workshops. Well - long story short, Shiva and I ended up reworking each and every one of the six workshops, pulling them to a higher level and building yet a better framework by doing so. The magic of pairing! Any one of us alone would not even have imagined the end result. Together we put in a lot of effort yet also had a way better outcome in the end. I don't regret any moment working on these workshops - even though it was way more work than anticipated, and we had put ourselves up to keep hard absolute dates with each workshop.
There might have been more things that I've forgotten to list here. Yet you can already see that there's no way that all of this would ever fit into a 40 hours work week when everything needs to take place at the same time and the goal is to achieve all that in five to six months. Some colleagues reached out with lots of requests, and when I explained my situation they shared they can really relate and things can wait; while giving me yet three more tasks. Sigh. My task list of additional "small things" to work on grew to 40 tasks that all would take at least 15 minutes to 1 hour and I just didn't know when to ever do them, while me being the only person who could work at them. I felt I was set up for failure and adding to that myself. Believe me, on each thing landing on my desk I pushed back way harder than at any time in my career before, challenging every bit of work if it really needed to be done, be done this way, be done by me, be done by me alone, be done by time x, be needing my attendance - and yet way too many things ended up with me anyway. Way too often I was in back to back calls the whole day (with follow-up tasks coming from them of course), while in the meantime I received so many chat messages with way more tasks waiting for me. Yes I can pull through this, and yet it will drain my energy levels completely. Way too often I felt I'm playing a game of "Whac-A-Mole" without being ever able to win - at least not on my own.

The consequences of all this?
  • Being the bottleneck. It's been a long time since I've enjoyed being the bottleneck. A long time since I said goodbye to that mindset and never wanted to look back. From time to time I still ended up being the bottleneck (e.g. being the only one knowing how to do a certain thing), yet I usually took this as an indicator to change the situation. Having bottlenecks and knowledge silos is neither resilient for the system nor fun for the individuals. It just increases waiting times, triggers unhelpful behavior (like taking on a new task while waiting) and more. Believe me, I'm totally happy with not being the bottleneck and I'm way better able to contribute then.
  • My cognitive load exploded. With all the points above I had to keep way too many things in mind. Way too many context switches. Way too much balancing and juggling. If one thing dropped, way too often it cascaded into other things. Once more I realized what 100% (or more) utilization really means: a catastrophe. So many times I simply could not think anymore; you know, deeply think, really think something through. Staying too superficial just to cope with the situation led me to make less fortunate decisions. I lost focus on what's actually important and what can wait. Trying to make all these switches slowed my thinking to a halt. And yet I tried to pull through instead of taking breaks.
  • The more stressed I got, the more I fell back to bad habits. Like solo work, trying to solve everything myself (so it's "faster" and just "done") without pulling others in (so more people could help out in the future). Especially in the first months this was a missed chance. Another bad habit: being unable to say no. I know I'm a people pleaser, a learned behavior from childhood years, so I'm aware I need to work on this. I do have an accountability partnership specifically for that reason, so we can keep each other accountable on keeping an eye on our load. Practicing saying "no" to opportunities, or "not yet". Trying to delegate things, sponsor other people instead of taking on more things that are not in our focus, outside the area where we want to make the biggest impact. End of last year this worked well, yet this year I learned that the higher my stress levels, the lower my boundaries to accept new work load. This is something to keep in close check.
  • Getting angry with myself and the example I set. Angry with myself that I let this happen to me (which was not helpful at all but just added another layer of energy spent and capacity used up). Angry with myself that I felt the need to pull through all this and cope with the situation - despite me never wanting to take on as much anymore. The contradiction alone. Also, I was well aware being in a position of leadership, and leading by example taking on that much and not being able to delegate or take breaks, this is setting a really bad example I did not want for our culture. Working late or on weekends? I was always the first one telling my teammates that this is not the way to go (unless where really needed to balance with life), and that it's not good to set this bar for the rest of the team who might start thinking it's expected from them. All this while I was doing exactly that, just trying to hide this from my team. While I am also the one who advocates for transparency! Oh my.
  • My body alerted me of the elevated stress levels. I mean, more than usual. I started developing new physical responses to stress to a level that my body actually made me notice - a first timer for me. This was something I could not push away yet really got me thinking. It made me realize I really need to stop this. Get out of this situation as soon as possible.
  • Feeling overwhelmed, helpless, anxious. Way too many times I broke into tears or screamed in frustration or wanted to throw something. Anything. All this took up again time and energy that I felt I needed to spend to resolve this work situation and get out of it as soon as I can - while still being aware that this would mean months. Several colleagues and friends repeatedly reached out to me sharing their concerns that I'm stretched too thin and that I really need to get things off my table. Yes, I know. I don't know how though, and I'm sad it shows. I really appreciate you all for reaching out - I still couldn't see any other way out than pulling through.
Of course that's not everything. There's more to life than work.
  • We're still living in a pandemic. I learned that I am totally happy with continuous change at work and drive improvements actively, yet especially in private settings I need a constant to hold on to and give structure, like my schedule. Any change in my daily routine takes a long time to establish new automatisms around it - costing lots of energy. The constant change of rules what's allowed and what not in the pandemic really drained me. Rather give me a more restricted set of rules and keep it for longer, I can live with that way better than having it change every few days or weeks.
  • Family and friends having a hard time. People were needing me in many different ways. We went through lots of ups and downs. Having to solve a lot of things remotely with people who are not used to work that way is a challenge in itself. Solving problems I never had to solve before while conveying that knowledge at the same time took a lot of energy from my side.
  • My personal projects and endeavors came to a full stop. At first I tried to make time for them nonetheless, then I realized I had to stop whatever I could. The last years I took on a lot and I'm aware of that. At the same time, my personal projects served as a sort of boundary for work, any hours outside working hours were simply reserved for other things already which helped me to keep these boundaries. They also gave me a lot of energy and allowed me to learn a lot of different things. Yet they had to go - during the past months I simply didn't know anymore how to ever manage that load otherwise. Slowly, I am now taking up a bit of public speaking again, yet mostly around existing sessions with the least effort possible.
  • Crossing my own boundaries for self-care way too many times. I failed to keep up my personal goals to do things only for myself (like games, sports or reading). Feeling guilty here as well and trying not to.
  • Way too many private messages and communication. While I heard many people struggling with the reduced connections during the pandemic, I so often wished for a lot less. I am usually receiving around 40 to 50 private emails every day, with around 10 I really need to respond to. Usually I'd be fine with that, I learned to get them out of the way quickly whenever I can. Also I'm happy when people are reaching out! Yet in above situation over the last half year these messages were way too many! Hence, seeing any kind of new email or social media notification immediately made me cringe and increased my stress levels.
If I've ever felt burned out or getting real close to it, it was over the last months. A really scary place to be that I wanted to get out of as soon as possible. So I did work on finding my own way out. Oh yeah, this came on top - yet I felt this would be my saver. I tried a lot of things, yet here are strategies that indeed helped me on the long run in my specific context and situation. They mostly resolve around setting boundaries and spreading the load by enabling people to help out.

  • Take breaks. Really, I need to take breaks even if I feel I don't have the time for them. Sometimes just getting away from the table helps, like when making myself a new tea even though I didn't need one yet.
  • Take time to reflect and think. Sit down and reflect on what worked in times that resembled the current one, like back when I was working on big teams. The past months I continued reflecting and taking note of my thoughts in a journal. In hindsight this helped me a lot to unload myself of emotions or thoughts as well as to clear up my thinking. I had discovered over the last years that writing helps my thinking, so journaling is a great way for me to get my thoughts straight. If you wonder, I mostly just take bullet points, as little as needed, and sometimes thoughts are just flowing and filling up the white space.
  • Reduce the load in progress. Making principles like "stop starting, start finishing" very explicit again so people start looking around if they could help out someone else before starting something new, or just not start something new not to increase our work in progress even further. Cut down what you're working on, and then cut down even more.
  • Remember you are not alone. As shared, I'm a people pleaser and this often drives my behavior. I am using an "allower message" as antidote, so whenever I perceive being a failure (meaning I cannot please all people), I remind myself of a specific message to ground myself again. "Please yourself first" worked well for me last year. This year I changed it to "I am not alone". This reframing allowed me to break out of my solo overwork behavior (that helped no one), reach out to others earlier, and accepting their help better.
  • Refrain from solo work. My current team is not yet familiar with ensembling, yet open for pairing. So I paired a LOT. To the point where I committed to testing only together with other people - if we didn't find time together, well this thing did not get done. Giving myself permission to use that time to finish other things instead, and not to use off hours to test something. I deliberately went slow here so we all could go fast in the future, together. When things are valuable to us, we need to own them together. Sharing knowledge is one thing, sharing activities is key.
  • Focus on unblocking people. Teach people how to help themselves and the team and then let them do it. Let them be responsible of follow-up tasks instead of grabbing any little further todo in addition, like setting up meetings or taking notes or checking in with another person.
  • Invest in upskilling people, continuously. Pairing added to that goal just as much as sharing knowledge in a fun and realistic way. For example, I gave two operations and support trainings that put my team in the actual situation of an incoming user request or an alert by our product, while also enabling them to investigate the situation and go through it. This helped a lot with sharing why this work is important, why we need to bring our pieces of knowledge together, and how to do it without making it a tedious burden yet allowing us to learn from it.
  • Explain your situation and manage expectations. Share your context in any interaction. Being open and transparent with people helped a lot with their understanding and us seeing the full picture. It also allowed us to find alternative ways to accomplish things faster or with less effort.
  • Find sympathetic ears. What really helped me was talking with a lot of people - people who listened and I'm ever grateful for that. Sharing your situation and speaking out loud helps reflection and becoming clear that this is not a situation to stay in. It sometimes triggered other ideas what to try, or re-established my confidence in doing my job; yet even if it only helped make the other aware of my situation, talking already helped.
  • Refrain from taking on more on top. Saying "no", "not yet", "not me". A lot. If you can't (as priorities change, right?) communicate what goes instead - you can't do everything at once.
  • Connect people. Instead of taking things on your own desk, empower others to do so. Sometimes all there's needed is to make people visible and connect them.
  • Reduce your cognitive load and singletask. Wherever possible. Do one thing at a time and complete that one thing at a time before tackling the next one. Sometimes more stuff comes in on which you can't decide right away, yet instead of keeping this in the head just park it in a todo list or similar. Anything that freed my thinking capacity to focus on the current task at hand helped. Sometimes it also meant getting rid of a few smaller and less important things just to free my mind again for the big important impactful one. Anything to get calmer or stay calm enough and maintain thinking capacity. If I'm drowning, my biggest value is gone: being there for people, going deep thinking in different perspectives and creating bridges and connecting people, driving experiments and inspiring change. So I'd rather should help 10 people not 100. Spreading myself too thin does not work.
  • Consider unplanned work. No matter what we do, we will discover new things as we go. Whether it's the tooling that suddenly does not want to work with us anymore, or incidents taking over priority, or a personal crisis. Some things will happen and shift previous plans. We need to keep this in mind and enable us to act on new insights quickly.
  • Maintain your own space. I need space to drive testing and quality topics in my team. I need space to contribute pro-actively. I need space to help other teams and people in the company as well. I need space to be helpful. The safer I feel and the more space within constraints I have, the more ideas I get and think positively about my work and the impact we can have together. Sometimes I just needed space to tackle a few things on my todo list - so I'm really thankful for my team giving me this space. Yet remember: filling the day with back to back calls is the opposite of maintaining space.
  • Make space for others to step up. My new team achieved a lot of things I wanted to drive forward just by getting the space to do so. Together, we finally tackled some long waiting improvement points. We introduced integration tests for consuming Kafka messages, added template testing for our frontend, increased the level of observability of our backend, introduced actual feature flags to decouple deploying from releasing, integrated first accessibility testing to tackle this increasingly important quality aspect, and introduced user tracking with Hotjar to get even more data and make more informed product decisions. Yes, I nudged a bit on all these topics, yet most of this was achieved by my teammates with me getting out of the way.
  • Reclaim your calendar. Setting my work and private calendars to tentative helped me a lot. This can serve as a signal to others looking for free slots and having them reach out to me directly, yet it mostly served as a signal to myself when looking at my calendar. Screaming in my face: "no more extra meetings during this time, don't schedule or accept if not absolutely needed".
  • Reclaim your inboxes. Responding to private emails only on weekends; just because this way no further response could come in between and add to my load.
  • Prioritize sleep. This grew very important, especially after my body made clear my stress levels are too high. Cutting on sleeping hours is never the way to go.
  • Make space for "me time", no matter what. Canceling private appointments to get a little me time here and then. Even if I just used it to watch another episode of my current series. Anything to distract my mind from work.
  • Accept what you cannot change. We don't have everything in our hands. Accepting this can be hard, yet many times I can only change how I cope with what comes.
  • Be okay with being not okay and focus on finding a way back to okay. As soon as possible. In the end it boils down to that. I cannot be of any help to others, especially on the long run, if I don't take care of myself. Remember the oxygen mask and why we need to put it on ourselves first.
  • Take time to socialize and have a good time with people. With my new team starting to grow together, I drew a lot of energy from any social moment we had, great conversations as well as having fun playing a game together. I desperately need the bonding and building these relationships on more than just work topics.
  • Celebrate achievements. I sometimes really need to acknowledge what I managed to do and allow myself to feel not only overwhelmed but also take in good energy from these achievements. The trick is: even if I don't feel like it, celebrate nonetheless. With the responses the good feelings come along. Looking back I'm thankful I did and can now feel more proud than at that point in time.
With all that, after half a year, I finally feel I'm in a better place again. Most of the topics on my desk that had absolute dates attached are done, people around me are finally enabled to help out, and I have capacity again to deal with what's still there while remembering not to take on too many new ones at a time. The rest can wait, there's a time coming for that.

Huge kudos and gratitude to my new team - I really appreciate you for stepping up big time, feeling responsible for the whole product and team, for more than your own area of expertise. For being ready to take over unfamiliar things outside your comfort zone. For sharing the load and helping each other. For learning every day with each other. For experimenting. For really having my back when I went on vacation or spoke at a conference. For listening. For sending me on vacation early. I know some of you feel you're just doing your work - yet let me make this clear again: yes, you are doing your work, and I appreciate you for doing it well.

Huge kudos to so many people of our lovely communities - thank you all for listening to me in this time or for bearing with me canceling appointments, not accepting pairing requests anymore, and not being there for a lot of things. I am coming back to all the lovely community stuff, yet I need to remember to use my energies wisely and look for synergies where I can.

Huge kudos to my friends for reaching out, and especially to my best friend and sister Marlene Guggenberger - thank you for honoring me as first listener of your first novels (which are amazing, so people who understand German should definitely check them out!). I loved the live reading as the story progressed, it was the time off my head that I needed on many of these days and hence a real life saver for me! Not taken for granted.

The one most helpful thing I've learned to prevent a situation as described above worked also as the way out of it. Dear future me. I am not alone.

Posted by at 2 comments:
Labels: , , , , , ,

Thursday, February 25, 2021

Creating the Space for People to Learn Together

A few weeks ago, a colleague reached out to me. They looked for input on how to make a new approach successful within their domain. They knew I experimented a lot with various collaborative approaches in teams. Therefore, they asked me for advice and ideas how they could set things up in a way that teams have a fun time, people learn together, and the whole thing has a chance to become successful. Today I learned that the input was valuable to them and they included it in their concept, so I decided to share it publicly as well. Please note that I've learned a lot of this from other people who added to my own experience, like Maaret Pyhäjärvi and Woody Zuill, so lots of credit go to them.

The most important thing I learned from enabling people to learn together: creating a safe and inclusive space for learning is crucial. This starts with inviting everyone in at times they can make (considering people like parents or caretakers have a difficult life to balance and we all have a pandemic ongoing, too) and making a point everyone is welcome, no matter who they are or what they bring to the table. When we're learning together we will have to show what we know and especially what we don't know yet (yet!). This can trigger lots of uncomfortable feelings, especially if you're not used to learning together (and most of us grew up in systems where learning together was rather discouraged and this runs deep) and if you're likely to fail. Failure is part of learning (love the acronym FAIL - first attempt in learning), yet many of us first need to unlearn that failure is a bad thing per se. Make it clear it's okay to be uncomfortable, it's okay to fail and learn from it; it's not okay to make it unsafe for people to feel uncomfortable.

One way to set the scene is to set some ground rules we all agree on before starting, making them bilateral. I love the guidelines and principles I learned from ensemble programming (formerly known as mob programming), which I use in many of my workshops. See also my Miro board to introduce the ensemble approach.

  • You're in the right place if you're either contributing or learning.
  • You have two ideas what to do next or more? Bias to action, try them out both. It's a good idea to try out the one from the more unexperienced person first.
  • Use the rule from improvisational theater: "yes, and ..."; don't destroy each other's ideas but build upon each other's ideas.
  • We cannot know where people are coming from, so let's treat each other with kindness, consideration and respect.

An additional way to create a safe space is to be vulnerable ourselves, especially if we're holding a privileged position (e.g. as facilitators, hosts, experts, experienced persons). If we show it's fine to say we don't know, we're curious to learn, we learn from everyone (no matter how unexperienced they are), we set the stage and evolve the culture we want to see. Small things matter, language matters a lot. For example: "Oh you don't know that?! Everyone knows that." or "Oh but that's easy." - these messages can come across belittling and hence can cause harm. Instead we can say: "Great, here's a learning opportunity! I offer to walk you through."

To make group sessions more inclusive, be sure to hold space for all kinds of people and balance their speaking time. Loud voices that frequently talk need to learn to hold back and create space for others, quiet voices need to get the space to contribute and learn that they are welcome to do so as well. Observing communication patterns and dynamics can help immensely; some groups need more facilitation from outside, others already learned to be balance this out themselves better. Language plays an important role here as well. Make an active effort to avoid stereotypes and use neutral language (e.g. gender-neutral language; no matter the group you're working with).

To make a learning session fun and energizing, it's best to make it as hands-on as possible for everyone. We all learn in different ways, yet for work related scenarios, hands-on learning is so far the best approach I've experienced with groups. To make things hands-on, it's a good idea to take turns at the keyboard. Beware that this can be a very uncomfortable situation for some people, yet if it's safe the learning effect is massive. Also, it will allow facilitators to observe where people stumble, where they lack local setups and tooling, where they find new approaches, if they understood what the group is up to, to uncover implicit knowledge, and more. To facilitate this remotely, either work on something everyone has the same access to and they can switch easily so screen sharing alone works, or stay on the same computer and share screen control.

Be intentional about how the group navigates, i.e. who knows the next step to go, who keeps the big picture in mind. Whoever navigates has to think and speak out loud, and practice how to communicate well. They explain the intention behind the next steps; if that does not help yet, then location and details can help; yet the intention why we go this step is crucial for learning and sharing the mental model. If you combine the navigator role with being at the keyboard (usually called the driver), this can be a lot of cognitive load for this person and all others might easily loose track. If you split this task from the keyboard and have the driver taking instructions and taking care of implementation details while the rest of the group navigates, this can work well in mature teams where they learned not to speak over each other and give each other space; yet people new to this might not do too well. If you have the driver at the keyboard and another person practicing the navigator role, taking input and suggestions from the rest of the group, people have a good chance to learn together. At first this might feel artificial and slower, yet it allows for more thoughtful thinking, clearer communication and deeper learning. Things will speed up naturally. Having an expert on the group who knows a lot more than others (might be you), you can consider to take over navigation from time to time to unblock the group; yet you can also consider to navigate the navigator instead of navigating yourself, which is once again a learning opportunity for them.

Making things fun is a tricky thing. Learning itself can be fun already, learning together with great people as well, just as solving a tricky problem. So might be that fun evolves naturally given the structures you provide. One approach you can try in addition is to gamify the session, especially if you'd like to run more of them. However, beware not to make this competitive and compare people within the team or teams with other teams. Instead, have the whole team work together on a goal (as they're also supposed to in the real case), and measure something that matters to the group (they can set their goal themselves so they have a say and are invested). After the first session they then have historical data they can compare themselves to after the second session. We can only compare ourselves to ourselves in the past as no one else shares the same context; and if we do so we can make our own learning more visible and tangible. After all, practice does make all of us better.

A few more things: it's a good idea to start with why we do this, why it's an important investment, what's the desired outcome. Make it clear this is part of work as learning time is part of working time. Depending on the length of the session, allow for good recreational breaks where they are not supposed to work on anything else but take a real break for body and mind. Depending on the length, allowing snacks might help as well (especially as people have different eating habits and needs).

Hope this helps. :)

Posted by at No comments:
Labels: , , , , , , , ,

Sunday, November 15, 2020

Agile Testing Days 2020 - Recharging My Batteries

Joining the Agile Testing Days at the end of the year was always a blast and a real energy booster for me. This year, the conference was forced to go online, and I wondered how it would be. I might have shared it before, I'm rather skeptical regarding online conferences. While I love the fact that remote makes attending conferences a lot more accessible, I personally feel online events drain my energy more while I'm not getting the same benefits from them as if they would be on-site. I really miss the hallway tracks, the informal casual conversations, having food together, the social hours after the official program ended, maybe even going sightseeing together. From all these informal situations I learned so much, drew a lot of inspiration, and gained wonderful friends and a lot of connections in the community. The only online conference so far that made me feel re-connected with the community was TestBash Home earlier this year; shout-out to the wonderful people at Ministry of Testing!

This was a very unusual and rough year. It had and still has a toll on everyone, on many people dis-proportionally higher than on me due to my high level of privilege. If I already feel it and go through a (rather smooth) roller-coaster ride, how must it be for those with less privileges? Here's where I learn so much from stories told by other people, especially those systemically underrepresented. Even in my lived experience, I felt in need of refueling my energy.

Back to the Agile Testing Days 2020 online edition. First of all: many thanks to the wonderful organizers to make it happen at all, many thanks for putting so much effort and mindfulness into making it happen, and many thanks for making it a great experience despite all the issues that only surface when you bring a product to production. You did a great job to solve or work around them quickly. Cheers to you! Super grateful.


The Highlights: Community Magic

The first day had me starting quite tired, yet eager to see if the magical Agile Testing Days community spirit would be alive and kicking also virtually. And it worked! Seeing so many people in the talk chats and all the tweets flowing on Twitter really drew me into the zone. All this crowned by the announcement of the Most Influential Agile Testing Professional Person (MIATPP) 2020, the wonderful and ever inspiring Angie Jones!!! So glad this community award finally went to Angie after her being on the top voted list for years. Well, I might be biased here as I repeatedly voted for her myself - yet I'm convinced I'm not the only one thinking this was overdue. Here's what I wrote to nominate her. Angie, in case you're reading this: thank you once again for everything.

Angie did so much for our testing community. She's sharing her wisdom every day with us, on Twitter, her blog, touring the world and more. She's an amazing presenter and wonderful workshop instructor. She continuously promotes the importance of automation and testing and how to do it well.

Angie has been super influential for a long time already. Last year, she took it to the next level, advocating for all of us when she brought Test Automation University to life. This was a stroke of genius! She got so many world class instructors on board and really engaged the community to learn and go beyond. 

There are so many more reasons why Angie should finally get the MIATPP award, yet one thing deserves emphasis on top of all this. Angie was key to me waking up to what's happening in the world. To not only see the systems of oppression, systemic racism in specifics, but also to act on what I see and start dismantling it. What she shared, her own lived experiences as well as those of many others, triggered me to move; to go ahead on my lifelong journey of learning more and doing better. It's clearly up to me now, yet still: Angie, I cannot thank you enough.

Right after the award "ceremony" (what a pity we couldn't really celebrate Angie all together on-site as she would have deserved it!) it was bar chat night. Alex Schladebeck hosted one of them which draw me right in. It was lovely hanging out with people even just virtually, seeing known and new faces and hearing about their lives and experiences. This strengthened the re-connection to the community and got me looking forward to the next days even more.

Yet my absolute community highlight was the evening of the second day. Party time for some, PowerPoint karaoke and pub quiz for others. I chose to again hang out informally with people, looking for new connections or strengthening old ones. For this purpose, the conference organizers did not offer a usual conference call setting, yet used a Gather town instead. I haven't come across this tool before and was delighted to discover it! Entering the town, you get a tiny avatar and are placed on an isometric world map looking a lot like a retro game. You can wander around the map and as you meet other people, our video feeds get active and we can talk with each other. If you wander off too far away, you cannot overhear conversations anymore. Mimicking the real world situation! Bonus point: it's free for groups up to 25 people.

At first I found myself in the need of exploring the tool, I was not ready for interaction yet. Yet then some familiar faces popped in and we started to explore the tool together which was a lot of fun.

More and more people joined and we figured this was coming as close to the real conference on-site feeling as it could! Groups formed and dissolved quite naturally, conversations evolved on one topic and moved on to others. We figured if we start our own map we could enable the builder mode and customize our map, even add interactive tools like whiteboards or games. We ended up with playing the game Set online with each other and had great fun! Really, I haven't had so much fun in the virtual for a long time. And the evening wasn't over yet. I had to leave the group for about an hour due to a dry run for my workshop the next morning, yet just like on an on-site conference, I came back and looked whether there would be still people around and up for a conversation. I actually found them! Thanks to my dear friend João Proença for sticking around and inviting me over to the late nighters talk. Also here, once more I felt the spirit of Agile Testing Days. I knew I had to call it a night to be reasonable, yet I simply didn't want to leave the conversation just yet. So I stayed up way longer than intended and had to pay for that the days afterwards. Still don't regret it a bit.
The only sad thing: not too many people from our power learning group could attend this year. They were deeply missed, especially my learning partner Toyer Mamoojee. With those who could join, we didn't find enough time to connect. Well, we will have a dedicated call in a few weeks and re-live Agile Testing Days just for us.

The Program: A Mix of Everything

This year I chose to stick with my own commitment of being kind to myself and not creating sketchnotes for online talks. Although I do like creating sketchnotes and sharing them, I feel they only help me in real life settings. When I'm in front of a computer anyways, I take digital notes. Also, this decision allowed me to keep up with Twitter more in time so I didn't need follow that urge at the end of the day when I'm already exhausted. Still, if you'd like to see sketchnotes, check out the ones created by Ekaterina Budnikov, Eveline Moolenaars, Katja Piroué and Konners Brai.

When at on-site conferences, I tend to attend workshops whenever I can and hope they will be really hands-on and full of interactive exercises. I learn a lot by engaging and experiencing things myself. I feel these are the situations I cannot just replay as I can do with talk recordings. That being said, of course hearing a talk live together with other people is a huge difference compared to watching a recording alone. Still, I wanted to make time for workshops as much as I could also for the online edition of Agile Testing Days. Here are the sessions I ended up attending live.

Day 1:

  • Keynote: It's Always About You by José Díaz. José ended up jumping in with a backup keynote as Daniël Maslyn who was scheduled for the opening keynote faced connection issues. In hindsight, I really loved this happening, it was amazing! This was a very personal and vulnerable story showing how José became the person he is today. It was the perfect keynote to open the conference; no matter if it was a backup or not. Really triggered lots of thoughts. Super inspiring, setting the tone for the conference.
  • Testing Tour: My journey of Pairing and Learning by Parveen Khan. I just love that Parveen is sharing the story of her testing tour, pairing up with people and learning a lot together. From what I observed she inspired a lot more people to step outside their comfort zones on their journeys. Just awesome!
  • Being a tester after trying almost everything else by João Proença. Loved it! So many lessons learned in different positions over the years, there's lots of wisdom to draw from. Great reminder that everything we learn can help us with testing. By the way, did you know João is an amazing musician? Check out Marty Was Right (also available on Spotify)!
  • Keynote: Automation Addiction by Huib Schoots and Paul Holland. What is automation, really? How did this fixation on test automation evolve and how to see the symptoms? Great keynote on why we cannot automate everything and we shouldn't. Automation can do a lot for us, yet automating too much, automating the wrong things, or maintaining ineffective automation hurts. We need a comprehensive strategy supported by the whole team.
  • Workshop: Security Games by Marianne Rady, Claudius Link and Matthias Altmann. I learned new ways of engaging participants using a Miro board. I got to know about a security game I wasn't aware of yet: OWASP Cornucopia. I could get my toes wet with the Elevation of Privilege (EoP) Threat Modeling Card Game. Besides that, I learned about the difficulties to make security accessible to a wide variety of people.
  • Keynote: Level Up: Playing the Automation Game by Angie Jones. A-ma-zing. As always. Thank you Angie for sharing your wisdom! Really dropped gems here, once again. This time, transferring what she learned from game design to automation. Also: loved the video of young Angie playing city bingo!
Day 2:
  • Keynote: Testing is not the goal! by Rob Meaney. So much wisdom condensed in one talk. And the messages cannot be emphasized enough: "life is too short to build software that does not matter and too short to inflict harm on people", "build organizations and teams obsessed with learning", "design systems together that can be safely adapted based on what we learned", "optimize for a great whole team experience to get happy productive teams working in successful, innovative businesses delivering valuable software to satisfied customers". Definitely check out all the great work Rob does! Especially when in need of mental models, Rob has a real knack for them.
  • Workshop: Put testing on the map by Wouter Lagerweij. Wouter prepared great visualizations to help us have meaningful conversations on different kinds of tests and how they fit to different parts of our system, process or pipeline. He pointed out to make sure to have a shared definition on the terminology used for tests, no matter which one.
  • Keynote: 8 Bit Pro - A gamer's guide to testing by Dan Billing. I had listened to this talk last year already, and loved the latest version even better. Besides showing how any product needs to provide value using the example of games, Dan even had the whole audience playing Lemmings with him! Really energizing and fun. Also, I really appreciate his plead for increased diversity and inclusion right after his talk.
  • Workshop: TDD with You, You, You, and Me by Zeb Ford-Reitz and Mira Kottmann. This was an amazing workshop, really grateful for the experience. I loved the theory part, they made it really easy to follow by providing very clear and helpful explanations. I especially loved the workshop part which was really hands-on! It's just great working in an ensemble, learning and practicing together. Big kudos for Mira and Zeb for being really kind and mindful. I felt very welcome.
  • Dear Mrs Aquafresh: Bottling this girl’s confidence by Clare Norman. Wonderful story, and especially wonderful storytelling! Incredible job for a first-time speaker. Clare shared a very personal story on how she re-built lost confidence as an adult while she had a lot of confidence as a child. She reminded us to be - us. Not cool or normal, the weird us that we are. To let our inner child out in while. To decide ourselves where to spend our courage on, to put our own stamp on everything we do, and to celebrate that. From my observations many people saw themselves in her story. I really hope more people get the chance to learn from her experiences, they'd be in for a treat.
  • Keynote: bAd-gile: The Online Gameshow by Huib Schoots, Alex Schladebeck and Bart Knaack. What a great idea! Didn't know what to expect from this keynote but I loved it. They had two teams playing impossible games before the keynote, recorded the outcomes and shared their observations. Then it was time for the audience to do the same! They even asked them on stage to share their own moments when agile had gone completely wrong or misunderstood. This was entertaining, engaging, fun - and also inspirational. Have to try out those game ideas back at work!
Day 3:
  • Keynote: Beyond the bugs by Rick Tracy. Interesting look at how testers are perceived by different people and how they see themselves. The one thing in common: they find bugs. Yet there's a lot more what testers do and how they provide value. Rick went so far to even calculate their impact in concrete money value. Impressive.
  • Keynote: Let it go by Nicola Sedgwick. What a wonderful personal story to close Agile Testing Days. Nicole learned lots of lessons about testing and quality on her way. She encouraged testers to let go: of testing as a role, of defining themselves by the quality of their systems, of perfection, of the defensiveness that if they're not testing they're not contributing. Let's embrace the coaching aspect, learning new skills and experimentation. Very relatable story, inspiring us for the future.
I had planned to attend another workshop on the third day on accessibility testing yet found myself too exhausted after my own session so I decided to take a break instead.

From what I've seen on Twitter, there had been several talks that looked very insightful: personal mental health stories, talks on effectivity and productivity, and important aspects like biases and ethnics in testing. Good to know the recordings are there for me to catch up!

The Excitement: Our Own Sessions

This time I facilitated two sessions. Lucky me - I was not alone for either of them! I paired on creating a pairing workshop, I ensembled on creating ensemble workshops. Just in the spirit of what we wanted to have our participants experience. Also, these had been first-timers for me as I did pair on workshops before, I did remote workshops before, yet I never had both combined. Also, both session concepts were brand-new, world premiers so to say. Experiments in themselves and to be incrementally refined as we go, as we definitely aim to give those sessions at further conferences in the future.

The "Extreme Pairing" workshop that I had the honor to prepare and facilitate together with the wonderful Simon Berner was something I had on my ideas list for a longer time. Thanks so much Simon for making this happen together with me! We started scheming this since May when the conference was still planned as on-site conference yet we knew this could change any time. Just as it did; first to a hybrid for a small on-site crowd and a virtual audience, now as completely online conference. Looking back, it was a great decision that Simon and I decided very early on to make our workshop feasible to do remotely from the start. Our rationale was that for a pairing workshop, even the on-site setting would require people to sit far from each other with their own screens in front of them. In the end that decision served us well. It was clear we opted in for giving this workshop remotely and we don't regret it. It was a blast! So honored and happy that the twenty people joining us stayed with us the whole time for a 2.5 hours online workshop. Really happy about the feedback received and looking forward to improving the session further. For the limited time we had we couldn't go as "extreme" as we would have liked to, yet the way we designed the workshop we could easily scale it up to a longer session and adapt it to different audiences.

The other workshops where both Simon and I were involved in were the "Daily Ensemble Sessions" with our wonderful conspirators Elizabeth Zagroba and Joep Schuurkes who initiated the whole idea. Each day we offered a different session with different facilitators, introducing ensembling in a different way, offering a different topic to work on, and having different participants working together. This was a great experiment and a great experience with a lot to learn from! We would have loved to offer this on-site on a bit bigger scale, yet making the scope smaller for online worked really well to test out the concept. Once again it was clear that the ensemble approach combined with a safe learning space can enable a group of strangers working together successfully and learning a lot on the way. Also, it's teaching valuable lessons how to communicate and collaborate better with people in general. I hosted the third of these sessions together with Joep Schuurkes and I learned a lot about facilitating again, what helps setting the stage for an easier start and what helps making the space safer for everyone. 

On a personal note: it might not have been the smartest idea to facilitate two workshops on the last day of the conference, knowing I will have my energy depleted after the first one. Still, I'm really happy we made this happen. I learned a lot, it was great working together with my fellow facilitators, and it was a pleasure having our lovely participants.

Next Up

Well - that's it for my conference year 2020! Next year? Originally, I had planned a lot of things already including conferences I've already agreed to. However, no one can tell how the world situation might look like then, so let's wait and see.
Regarding Agile Testing Days 2021, I do hope that some of the planned conferences can take place in any kind of form. Agile Testing Days USA, the newly announced AgileTD Open Air, and of course the usual Agile Testing Days again end of the year. Let's see what comes, I'm eager to feel this wonderful community spirit again. Until then, I could recharge my batteries to full once again this year. Thank you everyone.

Posted by at No comments:
Labels: , , , , , , , , , ,
Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)