Five for Friday – September 6, 2019

As you may or may not have noticed, I took a few weeks off from FfF. I moved houses, then I traveled, then I went on a short vacation, and then I got sick. But now I’m mostly settled in and back on my regular routine.

Here’s some stuff I found.

  • I’m reading Drift Into Failure – and it’s fascinating. Here’s the first of what probably won’t be the last of quotes I’ll share from the book.
    But in stories of drift into failure, organizations fail precisely because they are doing well – on a narrow range of performance criteria, that is – the ones that they get rewarded on in their current political or economic or commercial configuration. In the drift into failure, accidents can happen without anything breaking, without anybody erring, without anybody violating the rules they consider relevant.
  • For numerous reasons, I’ve been talking more and more about testing without testers. This is a post from a few years ago (but new to me) that speaks to my cause. The Breakup
  • Most of you know this, but a lot of teams do bad things under the guise of ‘Agile‘, and fail. Here are some reasons why – How Agile Fails In Practice
  • Now that you know you have things to fix, read John Culter’s post on So You Want To Fix Something
  • While I recommend you just read all of Johanna Rothman’s posts, her post on the fit of management in Agile recently is quite good and worth reading.

Similar Posts

  • Eurostar 2012 – Slides

    I uploaded my Eurostar keynote slides to SlideShare. As with most of my talks, the slides don’t read well on their own (I sort of hate bullet points). I rarely repeat talks, but given timing and audience, I may consider giving this again as a webinar at some point (I’m also done travelling for a…

  • …and Now I’m Back

    My interlude is over, and I’m back to blogging – at least that’s the plan, and I don’t see any reason why I won’t be back on the blog-waves on a semi-regular basis. My summer was crazy with work. I probably let myself get spread too thin, and I paid the price of context switches…

  • Leadership

    When I was 9 years old, I’d play pick up soccer at recess. A couple of kids – the “leaders” would pick teams, and then we’d play. Since we were kids, the leaders of the teams were sometimes the best players, but usually the loudest kids. Leadership was short-lived, but effective for the purpose. I…

  • Roles and Fluidity

    I had a twitter conversation this week about roles this week. I’ll recap it – and expand on my views; but first I’ll tell a story. Very early on in the Windows 98 project, I was performing some exploratory testing on the explorer shell and found an interesting (and slightly weird bug). At the end…

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.