Anne-Marie Charrett: An MVP in progress

quality coach descriptor - annemarie charrett

What is a Quality Coach?

Defining the term quality coach and explaining this role in software engineering in contemporary organisations

Create a Quality Coach Job Description

For clarity, I'm going to use the term quality coach (QC), though in your world you may prefer Quality Advocate (QA), but personally I find that gets confused with Quality Assurance and often people default to that term. Imagine you or your company has decided to transition to a Quality

Quality Engineering

Team Topology & Quality Engineering

As director of quality engineering, part of my role is structuring how and where quality sits within a company that's scaling in customer numbers, in terms of architecture and software engineers. Team Topologies written by Matthew Skelton & Manual Pais suggests reversing Conway’s law and providing structures that facilitate

Quality Engineering

About that quality coaching book...

"So Anne-Marie when is that book on quality coaching coming out?" is the question I dread. The time has come to do something about it.

anne-marie charrett

More than a maverick tester

Some of you may know I've changed the title of my blog from Maverick Tester to AnneMarieCharrett.com. But why the change? These days I write about a lot of things, and some of them are outside of software testing.. I write about quality engineering, leadership and sometimes about women

Quality Engineering

Habits and Shu Ha Ri

Whatever happened to Shu Ha Ri? It was the bees-knees of learning processes about 4 years ago. Now crickets...or perhaps I'm not moving in the right circles. Anywhooo, had a lunch chat with the lovely Paul Hughes from CultureAmp. (If you're wondering, he ate healthy carrots and tuna, I

Quality Engineering

Habits in Quality

I often get asked as a quality coach, how do you get teams to do more software testing? It's a tricky one, because as quality coach you don't have any direct authority over anyone in the team. You could try and tell them to do it, but in my experience

Quality Engineering

It's all one elephant

Recently, I posted on twitter a representation of how I see the differences between coaching, mentoring and training. The lens I chose to look through was that of direction. How much the person coaching, is actively providing guidance. Its just a question of quality - quality strategy https://t.co/

Quality Engineering

3 Amigos - a sequel

In agile, the 3 Amigos is a collaboration event that takes place between QA, Product and Engineering right before the start of software development. The purpose is develop a shared understanding over what is being built, and what will be tested In this new version, the 3 Amigos still keeps

Software Testing Content

The 3 Amigos in agile

I’m exploring the 3 Amigos in agile at the moment, as I feel it may be in need of a makeover. But first, the traditional view of the 3 Amigos. I know, there’s already loads of articles on the 3 amigos, but I thought it might be useful

Leadership

Supporting the whistleblowers

WhistleblowersI’ve written before on how software testers think differently and play a different role to others in a technical team. In the past, a typical non testing view of the role was gatekeeper. This really didn’t turn out so well. The history of quality and software testers, is

Leadership

Be your best self

Leadership is being your best self. Easy to say, harder to implement. For starters, what the hell does ” be your best self” mean? And why is that leadership? For me, being my best self, doesn’t mean achieving goals. It doesn’t mean going to the gym, eating the right

Software Testing Content

The Scab Picker

As I child I received the usual number of knocks and bumps, cuts and the inevitable scabs that grew as my body healed itself. I enjoyed nothing more than spending time picking away at these scabs. I wanted to explore and uncover, pick and observe in fascinating as the pink

Quality Engineering

Creating a Culture of Quality

A culture that is embedded figuratively eats everything around it. Once a culture is defined, it takes on a life of its own. Slowly, bit by bit, more bricks are laid on top of those early foundations, those decisions. And, before you realise it, your culture has been set.

Leadership

Questions over Answers

Growing up, I remember listening to Bob Dylan on the radio with perplexment. He would sing: “the answer my friend is blowing in the wind”To a twelve year old, this made little sense. How could wind, something invisible, fluid and uncontrollable provide any solution, any answer? And because the

Leadership

Look for the helpers

Its not about winners and losersIt’s not about right versus leftIts not about good or bad, right or wrongIts not about pass or fail, testing versus checking, manual versus automationIts’s about the helpers. Always look for the helpers. It’s scary at the moment. Hell, everything seems to

Quality Engineering

Keynoting Remotely Selenium Conf 2020

I had the absolute pleasure to be invited to keynote at SeleniumConf 2020 in Bangalore. I had decided in February to talk about test leadership and how to lead through uncertainty. And that was before COVID-19 came on the scene! It’s the first time I’ve spoken ‘live’ online

Quality Engineering

Outcome over output

I discovered the concept of outcome over output in 2014 through Jenny Mar’s work on OOPSI . This led to Teresa Torres awesome work on outcomes and opportunity This blog post is tagged #qualityhack. A quality hack reminds us not to get overly precious about quality. I know, sounds like

Quality Engineering

The Software Mechanic

Having explained the role of a software tester to a non IT person they replied: So it’s like I’m taking my car to a garage to get serviced by a mechanic and all that the mechanic does is to find everything that needs to be fixed, tell me

Quality Engineering

Good Enough (Perfectly Applied)

This is a series of blogs posts tagged quality hack. Quality Hack is a phrase I’ve coined to emphasise the importance of focusing on delivering “good enough” software, and embracing the cult of imperfection. If you wish to contribute a post, contact me either on twitter, by comment below,

Leadership

Coaching Upwards

I struggle to complete blog posts. Lena Wiberg suggested we do pair-blogging on a same topic. It’s a great idea. Here’s my version. Lena’s angle is more personal and I love it. You can read it here. Thanks Lena for the suggestion. This topic has been on

Quality Engineering

Inflicting Help

Pain is our bodies way of telling us to stop doing something. Stop putting your hand on a hot stove, stop hammering your thumb, stop walking into lampposts… Like it or not, our profession, software testing, unwittingly creates pain in others. Shattering illusions does that. Have you seen that look

Software Testing Content

The beginning of discovery

Lisa Crispin picked up on this small seemingly innocent sentence about the importance of ‘shallow tests’ in discovery “These [shallow] tests are often essential beginnings to discovery”Anne-Marie Charrett “Shallow Testing gets a bad rap”I’m glad she did, thanks Lisa! The idea that cheap easy confirmatory tests are

Quality Engineering

When the rubber hits the road

Anyone who has attempted to create and then implement a strategy, will know there’s a big difference between what is intended when the strategy is written, and what is realised on implementing a strategy. To the point in software testing, there’s been a push away from writing formal

Leadership

Test Management Revisited

The concept of test management sits awkwardly in agile, mostly because it’s a construct derived from the time when testing was a post-development phase, performed by independent testing teams. These teams were often of significant size, to reduce the time required to perform test execution. A test manager was

Anne-Marie Charrett (aka Maverick Tester)