Why We Failed at Building in Testability

This talk is about when I was a test lead in a development team that moved to testability, succeeded but then ultimately failed to maintain the new way of working. I’ll detail how we got started with testability, what caused us to fail in maintaining the approach and how other teams could do it differently. 

How we got started will cover: how we created a joint understand in what testability means for our product. How our team leaders encouraged experimentation, reflection and speaking up which was key for collaboration. This level of collaboration coupled with their joint understanding is what really enabled the team to build in testability. 

Why we failed will cover: what foundational team behaviours were missed by the leaders for this approach to continue beyond the initial implementation. The foundations being establishing psychological safety, how everyone can and must learn from failure, how to work across discipline boundaries and the power of positively framing work. 

What others can do will cover: Why team leaders are best positioned to do this. I’ll detail some basic steps that teams can take towards: creating psychological safety, how teams can get better at learning from failure, what they can do to encourage working across discipline boundaries and what positively framing work looks like