Followership - flipside of the leadership coin

The working title of this post was “Followership - because sometimes leadership can go f*ck itself”.

This sentiment seemed to sum up where my head was at after a challenging role which left me taking stock of what I wanted from a career & my life / work balance. I retreated back to my comfort zone to let someone else do the leading.

You may be able to tell, in my funk I was seeing the term “followership” in  a negative light. After studying the topic further I started uncovering the importance of  followers & the related skills of following.

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Systems Thinking: Software Development Programmes as Bathtubs

I’m currently learning about the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) so that I can comment on it from a position of knowledge.

This path of learning came about after I spent 12 months as a Test Manager on a SAFe implementation.

I was new to the organisation & I was new to SAFe. It was a steep & treacherous learning curve which I was (thankfully) eventually removed from.

I’m now on the more sedate learning path, where identifying gaps in knowledge & filling them is actively promoted.

This post continues to consolidate my learning by making me think critically about what I’ve studied (trying to inform others is a great way finding out what you don’t know!)

Bath filling with water as a metaphor for a software development programme
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30 days of API Testing

The Ministry of Testing is running a 30 days of API Testing challenge. I’m going to give it a go…

I always believed that if you shared your goals, you’re more likely to achieve them, but whilst trying to find science to back up my thoughts I found several articles stating the opposite - sharing you’re goals makes you less likely to achieve them.

Weird.

Well, time to test my hypothesis then!

Ministry of Testing 30 days of testing image
MoT 30 days of testing image
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Lessons Learned Running a Successful Software Testing Meetup

After nearly 3 years & 16 Liverpool Tester Gatherings, the 3 of us have learned several very valuable lessons in running free meetups to provide a platform for new & experienced speakers, with both local & international testing status.

This post aims to share some of our learning

Liverpool Tester Gathering Logo
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Wonderful Women - A Top Trumps Pack WIP

As well as being a software developer, I am also a husband & father of 3 children - twin girls (8 years old) & a boy (4 years old).

Part of my parenting responsibility is ensuring that my children respect themselves & others. This post focuses on respect for women.

For my daughters, this means that they are confident & know their place in the world. For my son, it means he knows what respecting women entails & (eventually) build empathy with them.

This post outlines a project of mine to help demonstrate to my children the awesomeness of some women who can influence them & help build respect for women.

"Wonderful Women" Top Trump pack created by Duncan Nisbet
Wonderful Women Top Trumps
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Questionable Therapy & Counseling Applied to Organisational Coaches

George Dinwiddie shared a Tweet last week that really caught my attention:

As an experiment, I decided to take a copy of the original article and perform a find & replace on the keywords “counselor” & “therapist” with the keywords “coach” & “consultant”.

I took this idea from Jerry Weinberg who did the same by replacing “structured” with “agile”

I’m interested to see how this experiment pans out - my hypothesis is that at least 80% of the statements will still make sense in the context of organisations…

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Surviving Scaled Agile - Jenga!

I’ve recently been working with project teams who are attempting to remain effective after their organisation has chosen to adopt the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe).

I’m trying capture & refine the common patterns I’ve observed across several SAFe implementations that have helped those involved in the implementation remain effective after they have been left wondering where they fit.

I’m hoping it will help others who have been in touch with me who are trying to understand what it means to be a practitioner in their newly formed SAFe organisation.

Jenga Blocks Tower
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Testing The Leading SAFe Certification

Several projects I am working on within my organisation are adopting SAFe in order to build software solutions, so I thought I should perform some SAFe testing!

With my Agile background, I am able to provide a lot of value in helping the teams follow an iterative development lifecycle (predominantly Scrum), but I have little experience of processes outside of the development teams themselves.

I also seem to struggle to get my message across to senior stakeholders within my organisation who are new to Agile & SAFe.

My hypothesis is that achieving the Leading SAFe Certification will help me

  1. with the process knowledge gap
  2. improve my communication with senior stakeholders

This post aims to outline what happened in the experiment…

Question-4-Level-SAFe-Big-Picture-4.0

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Experiments in Harmonic Mixing #1 - Round The Clock

It seems I have been living under a rock when it comes to what appears to be a fundamental tool in DJing (a side hobby of mine)

It’s called Harmonic Mixing which is the implementation of the Circle of fifths found in music theory.

This post is about my first foray into harmonic mixing & how I can improve my DJing by incorporating the skills into my toolbox.

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Batch Size Reduction and Software Testing

I’ve been studying Don Reinertsen‘s work on product development flow for some time. Whilst I talk about the ideas from a testing perspective, I’ve never actually attempted to get my thoughts on to paper.

I’m attending Don’s workshop on flow in Cambridge at the end of September, so I’m using this post to record my current thoughts so I can use them for reflection after the course.

These notes still need a lot of refining…

3-mini-burgers3

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