InfoQ Homepage Coaching and Mentoring Content on InfoQ
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Transitioning to Modern Testing: How Testers Can Stop Being the Training Wheels for Teams
Traditional testing, where testers act as safety nets and testing is separated from implementation, can have a detrimental impact on quality. Testers can instead act as coaches, collaborate in teams, and foster change, to stop becoming the training wheels for teams. Culture is key, particularly in that the environment provides psychological safety.
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Becoming a Better Tech Leader with Coaching
Coaching, both personal and professional, can help to understand your potential and discover ways to exercise that potential in your daily work. For Maryam Umar, coaching has proved to be highly useful in her tech work of leading testers and engineers.
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Experiences from Having Developers Write E2E Tests
Developers writing e2e tests can make code testable, provide fast feedback, and prevent bugs. Wix worked with their product managers, developers, and QA engineers to transition from QA-only testing, to having developers write e2e tests to shift QA left and deliver faster.
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Agile Approaches for Building in Quality
Built-in quality is a core pillar in agile. However, if we want to build in quality at scale, we need to look at the whole development life cycle. Quality awareness needs to be increased at multiple layers of the organization; agile coaches can help by boosting quality thinking by embracing an agile way of working.
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Team-Level Agile Anti-Patterns - Why They Exist and What to Do about Them
A good scrum master or coach can address team-based anti-patterns, for instance by explaining what less than optimal outcomes arise and what is likely to happen if the anti-pattern remains unaddressed.
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Establishing Change Agents within Organisations Using Shu-Ha-Ri
Shu-Ha-Ri provides us with a learning path toward being agile by mastering the basics and understanding the fundamentals to gain incremental success. By having their own change agents, organisations can adapt quickly to changing market needs and get a competitive edge.
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How Leaders Can Foster High-Performing Teams
A leader can act as a coach, provide opportunities for ownership, and find out what motivates people to foster high performing teams. It also helps teams if leaders have powerful and meaningful conversations with team members and give vocal feedback face to face to team members.
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Lessons on the Competencies of Coaching from Spotify and ICAgile
Erin McManus and Fiona Siseman of Spotify presented a talk at AgileAus in which they explained how Spotify's Agile coaches follow six principles and can provide "full-stack coaching" at all levels. Shane Hastie, ICAgile's director of learning, has also recently written about the competencies required of Agile coaches as they begin their journey to mastery.
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Systemic Coaching as a Leadership Approach
Leadership and culture drive every transformation. An organization will not accept structural or process changes without being open and ready for such changes, said Matthias Gebhardt at Agile Leadership Day 2019; the way to go with a transformation is to transform your leaders first.
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Experience Building a QA Team in a Growing Organization
Shifting the test team to the left brought the whole team closer together, enabled faster learning, and improved collaboration, claimed Neven Matas, QA team lead at Infinum. He spoke at TestCon Moscow 2019 where he shared the lessons learned from building a QA team in a growing organization.
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Experiences from Getting Started as a Lead
Having a transition period to lead teams together with a mentor helped Dan Persa to have a smooth switch from senior software engineer to engineering lead. At Codemotion Amsterdam 2019 he shared some of his experiences and learnings, in order to inspire other developers to take the leadership path.
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Progressing with a Gender-Blind Attitude
Individual skills should determine success; we should not distinguish people by gender, said Oksana Afonina at Women in Tech Dublin. In her talk, she explained how she focuses on her own skills and performance, those being the main traits to benefit from career-wise. Change starts with you, she said; there are always opportunities to empower others around you and scale your impact.
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The Tech Coach Strikes Back: The Value of Mentoring and Mob Programming
Technical coaching is all about helping developers grow by finding ways to increase their technical excellence and to work with softer skills, like the ability to be able to communicate and listen to other developers, argued Tobias Modig at GrowIT 2018. The softer part is closely connected to traditional coaching, but it also comes with a tech twist.
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Reflections on Technical Leading: Q&A with Julia Hayward at Agile in the City Bristol
Employers need to adopt fluid structures for people to find balance in their role, technical and managerial paths should lie side by side, you can’t have genuine effective growth without psychological safety, and a good mentor to talk about problems and scenarios is invaluable; these are some of the reflections on technical leading brought up by Julia Hayward, technical lead at Redgate Software.
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Defining the Competencies of Agile Coaching
The International Consortium for Agile (ICAgile) hosted a panel discussion at the Agile2018 conference about the Agile Coaching profession. The panel discussed what an agile coach is, the coaching competencies, where the career has been and the future direction of coaching.