Exploring Friction in Quality Engineering

Simon Tomes and Jesper Ottosen recently recorded a conversation as part of the MoT's Call for Insights, where they had a great discussion on both positive and negative types of friction that we can encounter as Quality Engineers. When I read this I'd been having a few tough weeks at work... As the sole tester within a small product team I find that I end up wearing many different hats. This includes hands on testing, making releases and working closely with the developers and product manager to co-ordinate lots of different competing priorities within the team. For me some of the biggest challenges I find are around the cognitive impact of too much context switching, helping to spread knowledge and understanding of the product and the challenges of managing conflicting priorities for the team. In a recent slack post Rosie Sherry very nicely distilled in a mind-map some of these positive and negative types of friction after listening to the call with Simon and Jesper. I'm am hoping in due course to have a more in depth conversation on some of the topics captured here with Jesper. Our plan is use the mind-map as a tool to guide the discussion and enable us to further expand our knowledge and understanding on this topic. If you have not had a change to listen to it I would highly recommend you check it out: https://www.ministryoftesting.com/insights/friction-has-a-complex-relationship-with-quality. And of course if you interested to participate in a chat or conversation on the subject then please do reach out to us!