Leadership

Articles relating to leadership in technology written by Anne-Marie Charrett

Dictator or Liberator

Leadership

What's your org optimising for?

💡This is a work in progress. The thoughts are a bit rough and not fully formed. I'm sharing because I'm keen to hear other perspectives to help my concepts take shape. Comments welcome.  I've got a hypothesis around organisational structures. It's half-baked and not ready for release. I talked about

Leadership

Supporting the whistleblowers

Whistleblowers I’ve written before on how software testers [https://mavericktester.com/2020/05/23/inflicting-help/] 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.

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

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 losers * It’s not about right versus left * Its not about good or bad, right or wrong * Its not about pass or fail, testing versus checking, manual versus automation Its’s about the helpers. Always look for the helpers [https://youtu.be/-LGHtc_D328]. It’

Leadership

Coaching Upwards

I struggle to complete blog posts. Lena Wiberg [https://twitter.com/LenaPejgan] 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

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

Leadership

#NoBlogPost

Today I woke up early determined to return to my blog on the bus series. A couple of reasons why. 1. I’ve found it liberating to not worry over being a perfectionist on writing the perfect sentence, phrase, or point. 2. Loads of people at Agile Testing Days told

Leadership

The 'Do Nothing' heuristic

Sometimes the thought of making ‘big’ decisions gives us that ‘rabbit in the headlights’ look. ‘Big’ decisions often have outcome can have a significant impact to either ourselves or our company. Lack of information can make these decisions harder to make. Constant decision making over sustained periods of time, and

Leadership

Test Leadership is here to stay

In his article “What leaders do” [https://www.google.com.au/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0ahUKEwj316Sl0MLSAhXHtpQKHSnUAMgQFgggMAA&url=https%3A%2F%2Fhbr.org%2F2001%2F12%2Fwhat-leaders-really-do&usg=AFQjCNHJk95brQjOtTMk0v_UbvXacx2yaA&sig2=FETZ5sH4zRIlgpL6oFoUiw] , J.P Kotter makes the following distinction

Leadership

Agile Australia and Intent based Leadership

Today I went to Agile Australia as an attendee. That’s a first for me, usually, I’m speaking. It was wonderful to go with a different purpose, which is to learn from others. Typically, if I’m speaking I’m so focused on ‘my talk’ and getting ready for

Leadership

Nobody — calls me — chicken

One of the morals of the Back to The Future [http://backtothefuture.wikia.com/wiki/Chicken] series is being able to walk away from a fight. It took three movies for Marty McFly to learn this self-control. Walking away from a twitter stormOne thing that the scriptwriters failed to predict

Leadership

How will Continuous Delivery affect network traffic?

I was recently in New York and had a chance to walk along the High Line. The High Line is a disused overhead train line converted into a walkway and park. It’s a really lovely walk. I was interested to learn that the train line had been built in

Leadership

Dropping the Ball

Does the thought of ‘dropping the ball’ fill you with dread ?  Perhaps you feel you will let people down, or more importantly yourself? Here’s a thought experiment: What if you actually let the ball drop? Do you know what might happen?  Will the sky fall?  Are people let down?

Leadership

Why waterfall kicks ass

I read a blog post about why waterfall is NEVER the right approach [https://www.netobjectives.com/blogs/waterfall-never-right-approach] and I feel compelled to respond to what’s touted as the waterfall mindset. Here’s a copy of the paragraph, but you can read the whole post on the above

Leadership

In pursuit of coaching excellence

When you coach a tester you’re working in an environment that dynamically changes as both the student and coach work through a coaching task.  If you look at the diagram below you can see all the different attributes that might change throughout a coaching session. Anne-Marie Charrett & James BachAlso,

Leadership

What drives your learning?

What drives people to take up my offer of free Skype coaching? Most testers when asked give on of the following reasons: 1) they want to pass an exam 2) They are having difficulty at work and need to get over some particular obstacle 3) They want to test themselves

Leadership

Where do I go from here?

In two months to this day, I will be giving my tutorial on Career Management for Software Testers [http://www.associationforsoftwaretesting.org/conference/cast-2011/tutorials/]at CAST 2011 [https://www.associationforsoftwaretesting.org/conference/cast-2011/], in Seattle, USA. Any self respecting software tester has asked themselves at least once in their

Leadership

From Little Things Big Things Grow

One thing that I get occasionally complemented on is my writing. People write and let me know how they appreciate my writing style. Initially this surprised me, because I do not consider myself a naturally gifted writer. In fact, quite the opposite. Reading and Writing was always a bit of

Leadership

It's time to grow up and ditch the security blanket

One of the hardest parts of working as a software tester is keeping on top of new technologies, techniques in testing and development and software testing tools.  I can sometimes feel quite intimidated at the amount of information that I need to absorb in order to keep on top of

Leadership

Is automation the new documentation?

Have automation tools become the new templates in software testing? The cornerstone on which all our testing hangs on? Its starting to look that way. Think about it. The traditional method of testing was to use a software testing process identifiable by test templates. These templates were (and in many

Leadership

Some days Scarlett, I just don't give a damn...

It doesn’t happen all the time, but some days its just hard to be motivated and inspired. Today is one of those days. Perhaps its because it's a grey day, or that yesterday in Ireland was a public holiday and its hard to get motivated after a break, but