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Friction has a complex relationship with quality

How is friction helping and not helping software engineering and testing teams?

by Jesper Ottosen, Simon Tomes
20 Feb 2026

Friction has a complex relationship with quality image

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Jesper Ottosen

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Jesper has been around the MoT community from the start, frequently passing by the Club and Slack. For more than 10 years he has provided 300+ blogposts on all things testing. 🌻

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Simon Tomes

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Hello, I'm Simon. Since 2003 I've had various roles in testing, tech leadership and coaching. I believe in the power of collaboration, creativity and community. 🎓 MoT-STEC qualified. I get real joy working with and supporting our wonderful MoTaverse community.

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Comments

Rosie Sherry

Great conversation. I've shared a mindmap on it in the MoT Slack. It would be cool to build upon it. I could imagine curating a collection and then combining it into a list of frictions. I feel a memory post incoming. :)

February 23rd

Neil Taylor

Thank you both for sharing your conversation. The whole topic of the friction that can restrict and holds us back within a development team is definately worth exploring more. For me the biggest challenges I find are around the cognitive impact of too much context switching, managing conflicting priorities and getting a good balance between helping people and knowledge sharing.

February 24th

Gary Hawkes

Great conversation. Engineering often get look at as the sole responsibility for shipping faster. But when we step back we realised that engineering can only go as fast as every process from Product to the customer will allow. I think Quality Engineering and Continuous Quality practices, will be uncovering the friction in each discipline and influencing the discussions on how we reduce unnecessary friction or manage the friction we can do nothing about, better.

March 9th