Quality Coach Newsletter 13

This month we have a guest post by Gerard McCann. Gerard talks about those moments when a learning opportunity opens itself up. Of course, as a quality coach, you want to recognise those moments and use them as opportunities to share information, provide training, or suggest a facilitated workshop.

I remember when I first started working in coaching. I'd done a lot of 1:1 training with free students, but never in a formal way at work. So when I was given that learning opportunity, I quickly realised the value of this approach.

It's an excellent post, with some great perspectives I hadn't thought of before. And Gerard clearly has experience in this field. Thank you for writing it.

Teachable moments in Quality Coaching

In his post 'teachable moments in quality coaching', Gerard explains what a teachable moment is:

The term teachable moment comes from education. Wikipedia says it "is the time at which learning a particular topic or idea becomes possible or easiest." Unfortunately, it's not always possible to undertake proactive quality coaching, which can mean we have to quality coach more reactively. I identify and seize teachable moments most frequently when a gap exists between the team's expected and actual performance, e.g. something has maybe not worked out in a sprint. As a quality coach, I'm jumping in quickly to help the team with the following steps and prevention from a quality perspective. The article explains the how and what around this.

Some situational and context-related posts.

Situational Quality Coaching (when to coach, train & mentor)
Like many things in tech, knowing when to coach, when to train and when to mentor depends on the team, how experienced a quality coach is, and the nature of what is to be learned.
Do your bugs only glow when its dark?
I do a lot of offsite exploratory testing in very aggressive timelines and consequently I have to admit, I sometimes start making basic mistakes.

Round the neighbourhood

I found this one through Alan's Page Five for Friday; this one is for you, Michele!

What is ‘Developer Productivity’?
Providing a mental model that informs developers where to focus their time and energy to improve productivity

One of my favourite bloggers, Adam Knight, wrote the article below. This blog is chockers full of excellent articles. So do yourself a favour and head over for a perusal.

Is UX the new waterfall?
‘It’s a real problem’ my host admitted as we walked down to the entrance lobby. I was in the main office of a major social media company…

And some new writers (at least to me!).

Types of API protocols- REST, SOAP, graphQL, gRPC
Depending on the standards and underlying protocols, there are various types of APIs as discussed by Sowmya Sridharamurthy
Integrate Cypress Automated Tests in a CI/CD Pipeline (Using Github Actions) — Part 1
The idea behind CI/CD is to build, test, fail, and fix quickly. This allows for quick feedback and early detection of bugs. Automated…

‌Finally, I wrote a post on leadership when change happens to you.

Dealing with unwanted change (coming to a state of acceptance)
How do you deal with change when it’s something that happens to you? This post explores the sense of loss and anger when unwanted change happens.

Until next month,

Anne-Marie ‌
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