Why we failed at building in testability

25-minute Talk

This talk is about how our team moved to testability, succeeded but then ultimately failed to maintain the new way of working. I’ll detail how we got started with testability, what caused us to fail

Virtual Pass session

Timetable

2:45 p.m. – 3:30 p.m. Wednesday 23rd

Room

Room F1 - Track 1: Talks

Audience

testers, test leads, developers, dev leads, engineering managers, test managers

Key-Learning

  • What we are doing wrong in teams that causes testability to fail
  • What are the leadership behaviours that enable success with testability
  • What steps can be taken to maintaining testability once established

This talk is about when I was a test lead in a development team that moved to testability and succeeded but ultimately failed to maintain the new way of working. I'll detail how we got started with testability, what caused us to fail in maintaining the approach and how other teams could do it differently. 

How we got started will cover: how we created a shared understanding of what testability means for our product and how our team leaders encouraged experimentation, reflection and speaking up, which was vital for collaboration. This level of collaboration, coupled with their shared understanding, enabled the team to build in testability. 

Why we failed will cover: what foundational team behaviours were missed by the leaders for this approach to continue beyond the initial implementation. The foundations are establishing psychological safety, how everyone can and must learn from failure, how to work across discipline boundaries and the power of positively framing work. 

What others can do will cover: Why team leaders are best positioned to do this. I'll detail some basic steps that teams can take towards creating psychological safety, how teams can get better at learning from failure, what they can do to encourage working across discipline boundaries and what positively framing work looks like.

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