Friday 25 November 2016

Finding the vibe of a dispersed team

Recently there has been an unexpected change in my work environment. Just after midnight on the 14th of November, an earthquake with a magnitude of 7.8 struck New Zealand. The earthquake caused significant damage across the upper South Island and lower North Island, including in Wellington where I am based. My work building is currently closed due to earthquake damage.

I work with over 30 testers who are spread across 18 delivery teams. In a co-located environment that's a challenging number of people to juggle. Now that everyone is working from home, there are new obstacles in trying to lead, support and coach the testers that I work with.

In the past fortnight I've been doing a lot of reading about distributed teams. Though some of the advice is relevant, most of it doesn't apply to our situation. We're not distributed in the traditional sense, across multiple cities, countries and timezones. Though we're set up for remote work, it hasn't been our go-to model. We're still close enough that relatively regular face-to-face meetings are possible.

Instead of distributed, I've started to think of us as dispersed.

The biggest challenge so far, in our first fortnight as a dispersed team, has been in determining the vibe of the testing community. The vibe of the team is the atmosphere they create: what is communicated to and felt by others. The vibe comes from feelings of the individuals within the team.

In a co-located environment, there are a lot of opportunities to determine the vibe. The most obvious is our weekly Testing Afternoon Tea. This is a purely social gathering every Tuesday afternoon at 3pm. We have a roster for who provides the afternoon tea, all of the testers meet in the kitchen area, and spend around 15 minutes catching up. The meeting is unstructured, the conversations are serendipitous.

When everyone turns up to afternoon tea, stays for the entire 15 minutes, and there is a hum of conversation, the vibe of the team feels happy and relaxed. When it is difficult to detach people from their desks, people grab food then leave, and the conversations are mostly cathartic, the vibe of the team feels stressed and frustrated. Often, there's a mixture of both.

But even when the testing team are not together, I am reading the vibe from our co-location. For example, I'll often wander the floor in the morning when stand ups are happening. I look at how many people from outside the team are attending. When I spot multiple delivery managers and product owners with a single team, that may be a sign that the team is under pressure or suffering dysfunction. If it seems like the testers are not contributing, or they have closed body language, that may be a sign of frustration or despondence.

The vibe helps me determine where to focus my attention. It's important to be able to offer timely support to the people who need it, even if they may not think to ask. It's important to determine whether it's an appropriate time to think about formal learning, or if it's better to give people space to focus on their delivery demands. It's important to recognise when to push people and when to leave them alone.

Facing the reality of coaching a dispersed team feels a little bit like being blindfolded. The lack of co-location has removed one of my senses. How do I find the vibe of a dispersed team?

I find working at home quite isolating, so the first action I took was to try and reduce the feeling of being far away from everybody else. Though our communication is now primarily through online channels, we are only dispersed and not distributed.

At the start of this week, I asked the testers to check-in to tell me which suburb of the city they were working from and whether they had all the equipment they needed to work effectively. Through the morning I received responses that I used to create a map of our locations. We are now spread across an area of approximately 600 square kilometres or 230 square miles:

Working locations of testers before and after the earthquake

The information in the map is specific enough to be useful but general enough to be widely shared. Markers are by suburb, not personal address, and are labelled by first name only. Tribe groupings are shown by colour and in separate layers so that they can be toggled so that it's possible to see, for example, where all our mobile testers are located.

Creating the map was a way to re-assert that we are still a community. I felt this was a pre-requisite of keeping the testers connected to each other and mindful of the support available from their peers.

The check-in format that I used to gather the information at the start of the week worked well. It meant that everyone contributed to the discussion. I plan to start each week with a check-in of some description while we remain dispersed.

Next I started to consider how to create an environment for the informal gathering and conversation that would usually happen at our weekly afternoon tea. November is traditionally a busy time of year for our delivery as we work to release before the holiday period. Even when we're co-located, it can be hard to get people together. Any distraction from delivery had to have an element of purpose.

Communication was emphasised in everything that I read about distributed teams, with the message that more is better when people are working remotely. I wanted a daily rather than a weekly pulse, but it had to be designed for asynchronous communication. It wasn't feasible to attempt to book a daily appointment and gather people together.

I decided to make use of a book of objective thinking puzzles that I purchased some time ago but never completed. The puzzles are relatively quick, have a purpose in expanding thinking skills, are well suited to remote asynchronous communication, create enough interest that people participate, and offer the opportunity for some conversation outside of their core purpose.

The hardest Puzzle of the Day so far!

I've started to share a puzzle each morning with the testers via an online chat channel. This is keeping the channel active with conversation, which is essential for me to determine the vibe. I'm yet to determine importance within the patterns that I see. I don't assume that silence is bad. I don't assume that people who are active aren't under pressure. But I hope that encouraging informal conversations will start to provide rich information about how people are feeling, just as it did in the office.

Finally, I've started to attend meetings that I would usually skip in our co-located environment. This week the coaching team that I belong to attended two of our product tribe gatherings. These focus on sharing information that delivery teams need to succeed and recognising achievements in what we've already released to our customers.

The content is not directly relevant to me, but these events were a great opportunity to determine the vibe of those tribal groups and the testers within them. Having the ability to sense the atmosphere was worth the hassle of arranging transport and balancing calendar conflicts to attend. It was also a way to be visible, so that people remember to call on us for help too.

It's still early days for our dispersed team. These are just a few things that I've done this week to try to lift the blindfold. I'm curious to hear from other people who coach across dispersed or distributed teams. How do you determine the atmosphere of your team? Where do you discover opportunities to support people? What suggestions do you have that I could try to apply?


Sunday 6 November 2016

Can we remove a tester from our agile team?

In my role, I work with over 30 testers who are distributed across 18 different agile teams. If you do the math on those numbers, you'll realise that we don't have the same number of testers in each of our teams. Some have one tester, some have two, and in exceptional cases there can even be three testers working together.

We generally try to match the skills of a team with the type of work that we're asking that team to do. This can mean that as the nature of work changes, the teams shifts in response. I was recently asked for my views on whether a team could reduce the number of testers they had. I found that I was quite unprepared for the conversation.

How do you know whether you can remove a tester from an agile team?

As with most things, I don't think there are definite rules here. However, having though a lot about how you'd decide whether to remove a tester, I think there's value in a general set of questions to ask. I see five areas to consider: team dynamic, support for quality, context beyond the team, measurement and bias.


Team Dynamic


You never remove a tester though, you remove a person and that person is unique.

The first thing to do is make the question personal. You want to consider the real people who will be impacted by the decision that you're making. There may be multiple faces to removing a tester: think about the team that they leave, the team that they move to, and the experience of the individual themselves.

How many testers do you have in the team? Are you removing the only tester?

Are you removing the tester role or testing as an activity? Are there, or will there be, others in the team with testing experience and knowledge, even if not testers? How will other people in the team feel about adopting testing activities? What support will they need?

Are you replacing the tester in the team with another person? What will their role be? How will the change impact specialist ratios within the team?

If the person is being moved to a new team, what opportunities exist for them there? How will their skills and experience match their new environment? What impact do you expect this change to have on the team that they are joining? How will the people in that team have to change their work to accommodate a new team member?


Support for Quality


If you remove a piece from a Jenga puzzle, will it fall? The impact depends on what it supports.

The quality of your product doesn't come from testing alone. There are many activities that contribute to creating software that your customers enjoy. It's important to determine the depth and breadth of practices that contribute to quality within the team that you're looking to change.

What level of test automation is available to support the team? Is it widely understood, regularly executed and actively maintained?

What other practices contribute to quality in the team? Pair programming? Code review? Code quality analysis? Continuous integration? Business acceptance? Production monitoring? To what extent are these practices embedded and embraced?

What does the tester do outside of testing? What sort of impact do you expect on the social interactions of the team? Agile rituals? How about depth of product knowledge? Customer focus? These things may not specifically be test activities or skills, but do impact quality of the product.


Context beyond the team


It would be interesting to understand their motivation behind asking that question.

The wider context to the change you are making will have significant impact on how people feel about it. You should consider what your underlying reasons are, how people will feel about those reasons, and how far-reaching the implications of your change could be.

What’s the context of the movement being made? In Dynamic Reteaming, Heidi Hefland talks about five different scenarios in which you may want to change a team:
  1. Company growth
  2. The nature of the work
  3. Learning and fulfilment
  4. Code health
  5. Liberate people from misery
Is one of these applicable? If not, can you succinctly explain what your reason is? How is this wider context being viewed by the team(s) involved? Are they enthusiastic, cautiously optimistic, or decidedly negative?

What is the composition of surrounding teams? Similar or different? How will that impact the outcome? If I’m part of the only team without a tester, or the only team with a single tester, what impact will that have?

If there are governance processes surrounding release, is the person who approves change to production supportive of the change to the team? Will that person still have confidence in what the team deliver?


Measurement


How do you know what quality is now? 

As with any change, it's important to understand how you'll track the impact. Changing the way that a team approach testing could impact both the quality of software they create and how they feel about the work they do, in a positive or negative way.

What metrics help you determine the quality of your product? If quality decreases, how low is acceptable? What is your organisation’s appetite for product risk? How many production bugs can the reputation of your organisation withstand?

What metrics help you determine the health of your team? If productivity or morale decrease, how low is acceptable? What is your organisation’s appetite for people risk? What impact will the change have on happiness and retention of other roles?


Bias


How would someone else answer these questions? 
Remember the bias we have that impacts our answers.

The final point to remember is that you don't want to consider these questions alone. A manager who sits outside a team may have quite different answers to a person who works within it. The tester who is being moved will have opinions. Whoever is ultimately responsible for the decision should also think about how other people would respond to the previous prompts.


When I'm asked whether or not we can remove a tester from a team, I often have an immediate and intuitive response that is either positive or negative. Now that I've thought about what contributes to this decision, I will be able to articulate the reasoning behind my instinct. Team dynamic, support for quality, context beyond the team, measurement and bias; five pillars that I'll be using in my next conversation.


Thanks to Remi Roques, Kathy Barker, David Greenlees and everyone who responded to the initial thread on Twitter for helping to refine my thoughts on this topic.

Wednesday 2 November 2016

Stay Interviews for Testers

Recently one of my colleagues sent out an article about stay interviews. Basically, a stay interview is the opposite to an exit interview. Instead of waiting for people to resign then asking them why they are leaving the organisation, you try to determine what is making them stay.

Stay interviews are primarily a retention tool. They're a means of staying connected with the people who work with you, and maintaining an environment that they're happy to be contributing in.

I was interested in this idea, so I decided to try it out. I met one-on-one with every permanent tester in my department to ask a set of questions that touched on motivation, happiness, unused talents and learning opportunities. The answers that I collected provided me with a pulse of the team as a whole, and valuable insights into the individuals who I coach too.

The Questions

I pulled all of my stay interview questions from across the internet. There are a lot of articles around that will give you examples. Some that I read as I researched the concept of stay interviews were:

The ten questions that I chose as being most relevant to my organisation and the purpose of my discussions were:
  1. The last time you went home and said, "I had a great day, I love my job," what had happened?
  2. The last time you went home and said, "That's it, I can't take it anymore," what had happened?
  3. How happy are you working here on a scale of 1-10 with 10 representing the most happy?
  4. What would have to happen for that number to become a 10?
  5. What might tempt you to leave?
  6. What existing talents are not being used in your current role?
  7. What would you like to learn here?
  8. What can I do to best support you?
  9. What do you think is the biggest problem in [our testing team] at the moment?
  10. What else should I be asking you?

The Answers

All of these individual conversations were in confidence. However I did create a high-level document to share with other leaders in my department, which summarised key themes through illustrations, graphs, and anonymised comments. What follows is a subset of that, suitable for sharing.

I took the answers to the first two questions, categorised the responses, then created word clouds that demonstrated the common topics. An awesome day for a tester was one in which they are discovering new things to learn, have released software to production, or are simply enjoying the momentum of completing their work at a steady pace:

"I had a great day, I love my job"

An awful day for a tester is one in which their delivery team is in conflict or has a misunderstanding, where they’re in the midst of our release process, or when they’ve encountered issues with our test environments.

"That's it, I can't take it anymore"

What I found particularly interesting about these responses was how general they were. There were not many comments that were specific to test alone. Rather, I believe that these themes would be consistent for any of our delivery team members: business analysts, developers, or testers.

The question around happiness prompted for a numeric response, so I was able to graph the results:

How happy are you working here on a scale of 1-10 with 10 representing the most happy?

This data was interesting in that the unhappiest testers were mostly from the same area. This was a clear visual to share with the leadership in that particular part of the department, to help drive discussion around specific changes that I hope will improve the testing habitat.

When asked what would improve happiness, salary was an unsurprising response. But other themes emerged of almost equal weighting. Time to deliver more automation, a consistent workflow for testers, and the ability to pick up and learn new tools.

In response to existing talents that are not being used, the most prevalent skills were those that sit within the Testing Coach role: automation frameworks, leadership and training. This was a strong indicator to me that I need to delegate even more frequently to provide these opportunities.

Frustratingly, but not unusually, the requests for learning were fragmented. The lack of a consistent response makes it difficult to arrange knowledge sharing sessions that will appeal to a wide audience. But it does allow people to specialise in areas that are of interest to them rather than pursuing shallow general learning.

Overall I found the activity of stay interviews very useful. The structured set of questions helped me to have a purposeful and productive conversation with each of the permanent testers that I work with. I learned a lot from the information that was gathered, each set of responses were interesting for different reasons. The results have helped me to shape my actions over the coming months. I'm hoping to create outcomes from these conversations that will continue to keep our testing team happy.