Stop Testing and Start Teaming for Better Quality Software

About the workshop

In today’s software delivery world, whether you’re Agile, Waterfall, or a hybrid in between, there’s a lot of focus on leveraging hard skills and technology to improve our work and its results. For software testers, this technological focus has long been on test automation. Now AI is the shiny new thing. There’s also a heavy emphasis on following processes. Paradoxically this is especially true in Agile environments, with team rituals like grooming, planning, standups, demos, and retrospectives treated as cookbook recipes for success by transformation consultants, Agile Coaches, and Scrum Masters.

But here’s the thing: none of this really works unless you’ve got Great Teaming.

You’ve probably heard about cross-functional teams and the stages of forming, storming, norming, and performing. Many think building great teams is about team design, good management, and everyone sharing their favourite biscuits with the team. But that’s only part of the story, which is why most teams don’t achieve better results. They miss out because they don’t understand the emotional conditions and the individual and team behaviours that make a team truly click - or how to make those things happen.

 We’re here to give you a kick-start to get your teaming engine running. This isn’t just a sit-and-listen session – there will be some theory – but this is a highly interactive workshop where you’ll get stuck in, have some fun, and learn by doing. To keep it relevant for software testers, we’ll look at it all through the lens of Quality Engineering and help you discover ways that better Teaming will lead to better quality.

You will learn how to

• Better understand team roles and overlaps to spot teaming opportunities to enable everyone on the team to improve quality.
  
  
• Identify individual behaviour changes essential for teaming to happen.
  
  
• Share information and collaborate to crack problems together.
  
  
• Build psychological safety so people feel comfortable speaking up.
  
  
• Give and receive feedback without it getting awkward or emotional.
  
  
• Reach team decisions faster and act on them in a coordinated way.

Key Takeaways

1. How great teams use teaming skills to continuously learn, improve how they work together, and deliver higher quality—and make the work more enjoyable while they’re at it.
   
   
2. Why better teamwork starts with each person adapting their behaviour to help the team thrive.
   
   
3. Practical ways to handle tricky corporate cultures, bad teaming habits, and unhelpful behaviours.

Trainers