LLEWT 2025
The format of LLEWT encourages proposals for experience reports on the theme, takes feedback on the proposals, and then asks the conference's content owner to curate a schedule that will hopefully open discusion over an interesting range of topics.
Each report lasts around 10-15 minutes and is followed by open discussion for as long as there is energy. The four reports that we had time for on the day were:
- The Anna Karenina Problem (Maaike Brinkhof)
- Take it From the Bottom (me)
- Defining Done (Elizabeth Zagroba)
- Academic research topics: blockers or enablers to industry progress? (Isabel Evans)
Maaike talked about a consulting gig in which a company filled with well-intentioned people seemed to want change but were reluctant to change, had no way to gauge success, and had probably self-diagnosed the wrong problem anyway.
I described how making and documenting explicit working practice agreements in a team had led to a positive cultural change, how this had been destroyed almost instantly by company actions, and the emotions that had brought out.
Elizabeth covered a situation in which the goals were clear (the implementation of a set of nominated rules) but the route to implementation, the complexity of the task, the skills of the people working on it, politics, and the ground truth of the situation mitigated against success.
I think there were two threads that overlapped in the first three talks:
- the impact of organisational dysfunction on people trying to do a good job
- the difficulty in nailing down what good looks like, and who decides
Bubbling under, but never really becoming the focus of the room for long, were topics such as:
- specific rules or constraints that we'd had success with
- the extent to which people determine the success of any rule or constraint
- when to step outside your role, and how far, to achieve what goals
- comparison of top-down and bottom-up constraints
- accounting for the greyness that's inherent in the world, but often hard to codify in a rule
Isabel's talk on acadmic research around testing highlighted the silos to be found generally inside software development (specifically focussing on test tooling) and the huge gulf in philosophy, approach, and results between academia and business.
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I haven't been at conferences or meetups much recently so LLEWT last year was the last time I made sketchnotes. I did feel rusty, but I think these ones came out OK. I redrew the mindmap at the top to centre "What does good look like?" which turned out to be connected to a lot, but the others were taken in the moment.
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A handful of quotes stood out particularly from the rest of the wisdom that was flying around the room.
On focusing on the thing that matters for the problem at hand:
When I ask a plumber to unblock my toilet I want the toilet unblocked, not new pipes in the kitchen.
On getting to consensus (from Sociocracy), we need to find something that is:
Safe enough to try, good enough for now.
On tactics for navigating the politics of toxic organisations:
Perhaps it can be worth throwing someone under the bus, if you can find a good bus.
On leaving a project about quality processes with a flourish:
I am the definition of done.
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We had a Signal group running in parallel with the conversation. Where someone shared a specific link I've included it here, otherwise the references are taken from my notes and I've tried to find an external source that represents what I understood was being suggested:
- Tom Gilb on software metrics
- Gwen Diagram's Happiness is Quality (sketchnotes by Marianne Duijst)
- Wicked problems and Peter Checkland's thinking in that area (Soft Systems Methodology)
- Causal loop diagrams and related diagram system modelling approaches such as diagram of effects, stocks and flows, etc
- James C Scott's Seeing Like a State
- Jerry Weinberg's Secrets of Consulting
- Adam Grant's Give and Take. In particular being a disagreeable giver: gruff, want to help, have ideas for improvement, won't continue with the status quo
- Erin Mayer's The Culture Map (and notes by Pat Kua)
- Sociocracy 3.0 (and patterns from it: "A pattern is a process, practice or guideline that serves as a template for successfully responding to a specific kind of challenge or opportunity.")
- Joop Schuurkes, From tension to agreement with Sociocracy 3.0
- Jutta Eckstein and John Buck's Company-wide Agility with Beyond Budgeting, Open Space & Sociocracy
- Hillel Wayne on Defense of Design: All languages and projects do "odd" things that make no sense to outsiders
- Esther Derby and Matthew Carlson's There Are No More Early Adopters of Agile
- Edward Tufte's, The Cognitive Style of Powerpoint (and my notes from it) with a contrasting view from Yiannis Gabriel: Against the tyranny of Powerpoint
- Heuristics for Test Tool Design from Isabel
- B. Ardic, C. Brandt, A. Khatami, M. Swillus, and A. Zaidman, The qualitative factor in software testing: A systematic mapping study of qualitative methods
- A. Salahirad, G. Gay, and E. Mohammadi, Mapping the structure and evolution of software testing research over the past three decades
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I'd like to thank and credit The LLEWT organisers and other participants: Chris Chant, Joep Schuurkes, and Elizabeth Zagroba; Maaike Brinkhof, Oliver Brinkhof, Gwen Diagram, Isabel Evans, Berwyn Mure, Duncan Nisbet, Vernon Richards, and Neil Younger.