Invite Me To Speak

I love speaking about how happy, cross functional, well supported teams can deliver great software, and how you can build and support them. My most recent talks were about the topics below; if you don’t see something below that looks interesting then I’m very happy to discuss something more bespoke.

Contact me if you are interested in me speaking at your event or if you’ve seen me speak and want to chat about what you heard.

Incrementally Improving Performance

The way we do performance reviews is broken. The usual yearly cycle doesn’t work and it just ends up de-motivating everyone involved. But it doesn’t have to be like this. Learn how my team improved how we review performance, while continuing to fit within our company’s traditional processes.

Emotions In Software Teams

Delivering software is emotional. It raised emotions within all of us and those that we work with. It affects our relationships with those inside and outside our teams, and if incorrectly handled, can risk the success of both teams and projects.

In this talk I intend to explore the situations that teams typically encounter and how these impact the emotions that everyone in the team faces. I will explore typical dimensional models of emotion such as those proposed by Robert Plutchik and Hugo Lövheim and use these, and others, to help explain how we can better understand the emotions that we face, and the emotions that we raise in others.

Testing – The Good, The Bad and The Ugly

What good testing looks like  is one of the most misunderstood areas of software development. Sadly not only do those outside of the testing industry often misunderstand what good looks like, so do those within testing as well. As tools vendors and service companies push their own agenda’s and universities push out more and more graduates with little formal education in testing then it’s no surprise that the sorts of testing typically talked about at agile conferences is not the sort of testing that fits with the autonomous, cross functional teams that we seek to build. If you’ve seen testers as the blockers to the team’s delivery or the quality police then you’ll no doubt understand why change is needed.

Fortunately there is light at the end of the tunnel. Team’s with empowered, effective testers as a part are teams that can really deliver. Find out how.

Check This – Test Automation, A Development Managers View

Test automation belongs to the testers and as testers they care about quality more than the rest of the development team do, right? It’s easy to think this. I know, I’ve been there, as a Tester and a Test Manager.

But  I made a change. I started managing the whole development team. I started to see how the whole team should use test automation. I saw how we could get more efficient as a team when we all became responsible for quality.

This talk is about that journey.