In my previous post, I explained the strategy I envisioned for the team. Comparing it to a boardgame.

What this post lacked thoroughly, was a clear focus on team learning. I feel like an idiot for not noticing this earlier.

Learning Objectives as part of the sprint

What has become abundantly clear to me is that the Team Members are the heart of your team. They need to be nurtured, grown.
In our team, we’ve been actively investing into people to become more confident and knowledgeable. ‘Learning objectives’ have become about 50% of our sprint stories.

I add in: Spikes, Proof of Concepts, Blog Posts, Challenges,… to have people work through material and produce reports, concepts, demo’s or anything that reproduces the acquired knowledge. After that, they ask feedback from other team members, discuss or teach. The aim is to achieve two things: new learnings and something valuable for the team, project or product. This keeps our stakeholders happy and our team in learning-mode.

But 50% is a lot of time… how do you explain this to stakeholders?
Test Automation is a valuable endeavor. Though in uncertain conditions it can be rendered useless, time consuming or time wasting even. That’s where we are now with the team. Many different things are changing. The application, the architecture and the development teams are all getting a good shake. This is not a good moment to heavily invest in UI or even API checks. Instead, I shift the focus of the team in a different direction.

Whereto now?

I see a lot of opportunities to coach, train and pioneer automation strategies, as a team.
Once the dust settles from all the management decision-making and architecture workshops it’ll fall on the automation people to strongly improve our release pipeline.
To achieve this, we need to become better at what we do, need to become more confident in what we say and become more respected for the value we bring.
As a team.

Instead of building more automation, our focus shifts to coaching, training and knowledge sharing. The issue, however, is that we first need to do knowledge gathering and train ourselves. The good thing is, we’re more of a team now than before and we can help each other out. We also have some time to invest in ourselves, which will pay off tenfold in the future. Hopefully.

In congruence to the team building up their skills, I’m monitoring progress of these changes and looking for opportunities to help out. Whether it’s now or in the future, I want to know where we can add business value fast. Additionally, I’m collecting examples of good practices in our context and using those as a basis to build an automation strategy.

Changes are coming our way, but we’re preparing to deal with them.

The Automation team, at sprint kickoff