Improving your quality and testing skills with gamification - Spring 2021 Online Testing Conference - Ben Linders

•

1 like•703 views

For the first time, I’m doing a session at the Online Testing Conference. I’ll be playing games with the Agile Testing Coaching Cards and Agile Quality Coaching Cards to help people explore how things are going and to improve their way of working. Improving Your Quality and Testing Skills with Gamification So many challenges, so little time. As testers we need to sharpen the saw, but how? Gamification can be a way to look at how you’re doing and find out where to improve. It’s a great way to have everyone involved and get the best out of people. In this presentation, Ben Linders will play games with the Agile Testing Coaching Cards and Agile Quality Coaching Cards to show how you can explore your current quality and testing practice and decide in your team on what to improve or experiment with. Players can use the coaching cards to discuss quality and testing values, principles, and practices. In teams, people can use the cards to share their experiences and learnings. Different game formats can be used to share experiences on testing and quality principles and practices and explore how they can be applied effectively. Takeaways Show how to use gamification to self-assess your current way of working. Play games with the Agile Testing Coaching Cards and Agile Quality Coaching Cards. Explore how to facilitate games to enhance quality and testing in agile teams. \ Online Testing Conference OnlineTestConf was the first 100% online conference to provide all the advantages of attending professional QA related conferences: personal learning, networking etc. without the shortcomings of scheduling, expenses and travel. The conference has been running for the past 5 years on a semi-annual basis, long before COVID-19 forced all live events online. Our next event will be our 10th OnlineTestConf! Conference attendees are from all parts of the world, we host well known speakers as well as young presenters, and discuss everything that relates to Testing and QA. Attendance is and will remain free of charge and we invite anyone who sees themselves involved in testing and the testing community to join.

Presentations & Public Speaking

benlinders.com - @BenLinders 1
Ben Linders Consulting
Ben Linders

benlinders.com - @BenLinders 2
Ben Linders Consulting
Trainer / Coach / Adviser / Author / Speaker
Agile, Lean, Quality & Continuous improvement
Freelance Editor for InfoQ.com
BenLinders.com
Books: Valuable Agile Retrospectives Problem? What Problem?
What Drives Quality Self-assessments Continuous Improvement
Games: Agile Self-assessment Game Retrospectives Bingo Impediments
Quality Coaching Agile Testing Psychological Safety Culture

benlinders.com - @BenLinders 3
Ben Linders Consulting
Coaching
Unlocks a person’s potential to maximize their
performance. Coaching helps them to learn
rather than teaching them. (International Coaching Community)
 Help people change in the way they wish
 Supporting people in becoming who they want to be
Not: Mentoring, training, consulting

benlinders.com - @BenLinders 4
Ben Linders Consulting
Gamification
Applying principles and practices from
gaming in a non-gaming context
 Solving problems/challenges together,
 Share stories, travel journeys
 Progression or emerge structure
Enabling Improvement

benlinders.com - @BenLinders 5
Ben Linders Consulting
Agile Quality/Testing Coaching

benlinders.com - @BenLinders 6
Ben Linders Consulting
Health Check

benlinders.com - @BenLinders 7
Ben Linders Consulting
What can gamification bring?
 People like to play games
 Encourage and involve people
 Provide different perspectives
 Stimulate collaboration
 Build relationships
 Visualize what’s happening
 Establish safety to fail and learn

benlinders.com - @BenLinders 8
Ben Linders Consulting
Agile Self-assessment Game
Started as Agile Coaching Cards
Many game formats/exercises
Expansion Packs for Scrum, DevOps, …
Book: Exercises & Experience Stories
Testing, Quality, Psychological Safety
Kanban
Scrum
Business
DevOps Agile

benlinders.com - @BenLinders 9
Ben Linders Consulting
Angel’s Advocate

benlinders.com - @BenLinders 10
Ben Linders Consulting
Sharing Challenges

benlinders.com - @BenLinders 11
Ben Linders Consulting
Key Takeaways
• Testing and quality challenges are largely impacted by
the way people work and how they collaborate
• Coaching, both technical and on team working, can lead
to higher quality
• Self-assessments and gamification can be used to
enable and foster continuous improvement

benlinders.com - @BenLinders 12
Ben Linders Consulting
Links
Agile Self-assessments benlinders.com/game
Quality Coaching Cards benlinders.com/shop/agile-quality-coaching-cards/
Testing Coaching Cards benlinders.com/shop/agile-testing-coaching-cards/
Contact me for a discount code! benlinders@gmail.com

benlinders.com - @BenLinders 13
Ben Linders Consulting
Questions?
Questions?
Ben Linders
Trainer / Coach / Adviser / Author / Speaker
Agile, Lean, Quality & Continuous Improvement
info@BenLinders.com
info@BenLinders.com
@BenLinders
www.linkedin.com/in/benlinders
www.facebook.com/BenLindersAdvies
www.benlinders.com

What's hot

Keynote Need for Continuous Improvement - Agile Tour Kaunas 2016 - Ben Linders

Ben Linders

Mini workshop Retrospecting your Retrospectives - Agilenext 2019 - Ben Linders

Ben Linders

Nowadays, many agile teams are doing retrospectives regularly. They are investing time to reflect, learn, and take action to improve their way of working and deal with problems that they are facing in a structural way. Organizations are seeing the benefits from this: teams that are becoming empowered, being able to deliver more value, happy employees, and fewer people leaving the organization. It’s time to take retrospectives to a higher level, and use them to reveal and solve systematic organizational problems. Problems that exist at a project or product level are related to the collaboration between teams and their stakeholders. Agile retrospectives can be used to do that, but you need a different approach. In this session, Ben Linders will show how we can use retrospectives to improve the agility of organizations.

Organizational agility: Taking retrospectives to the next level - DevOpsCon M...

Ben Linders

Let’s Play a Game to Self-assess Your Agility Every team, every organization is less or more agile. But how agile are you, and how can you increase your agility? Methods or frameworks don’t tell you how to become agile or increase your agility. The Agile Self-Assessment Game is an “agile map” with coaching cards for Scrum, DevOps, Kanban, and Business Agility. Playing the game inspires you with ideas and suggestions on where to go next on your agile journey. Join this session to experience different playing formats in teams, learn how you can discover how agile you are, and get fresh ideas to increase your agility.

How agile are you - Agile Tour London 2020 - Ben Linders

Ben Linders

If your organization wants to become agile and lean, your teams need to be able to handle impediments quickly and effectively. In this game, you will practice how to recognize and analyze impediments, understand how they can hinder your team, and decide what can be done and who can take appropriate action by deploying agile and lean principles and good practices. The impediment game played in this session teaches the five steps for handling impediments effectively.

Problem, what problem? Agile Impediment Board Game - ACE conference 2019 - B...

Ben Linders

Becoming agile is a journey, which can be difficult to travel. Assuming that you know why you want to become agile (a first but crucial step) you start looking for ways how to get there. Questions like "what do you want to keep from your current way of working" and "what would you like to change" will come up. Then the next question is "what are ways to do this". There isn't a silver bullet or standard route to become agile, you have to find your own way. A fixed route description won't help you. You need an "agile map" that inspires you with ideas and suggestions on where to go on your journey. The Agile Self-Assessment game is here for you to travel your agile journey. Come play the Agile Self-Assessment game in teams to discover how agile you are and what you can do to increase your agility. Players will receive a link to download the card game so that they can play it in their own organization (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 License).

Agile Self-assessment Game - XP Days Benelux 2016 - Ben Linders

Ben Linders

Agile talks a lot about self-organized teams, where developers and testers work together to deliver software. But what can you do to make teams succeed? Ben Linders will explore why you want to work in a team, the benefits that teams bring, and how to (not) manage teams. What is an agile team (and what not) Why would you as a developer want to work in a team, what’s in it for me Which benefits do teams have for organizations, stakeholders, customers, etc How to manage teams, the do’s and don’ts How developers, managers, and business people, can effectively communicate and collaborate

Teams what is in it for me - GrowIT 2018 - Ben Linders

Ben Linders

Valuable Agile Retrospectives: Continuously Improve your Agility - Agile Tour...

Ben Linders

Why What and How of Agile Retrospectives - Agile Tour Lille 2015 - Ben Linders

Ben Linders

Agile Retrospectives can be used to deal with problems in teams, at a project or product level, or those related to the collaboration between the team and stakeholders. But you need a different approach compared to team level retrospectives to do organizational-wide improvement. This session shows how to use agile retrospectives to reveal and solve systemic organizational problems and to increase the company’s agility It explores different approaches, formats, and techniques for agile retrospectives that are done beyond the development team. Extended Abstract Nowadays many agile teams are doing retrospectives regularly. They are investing their time to reflect, learn, and take action to improve their way of working and deal with problems that they are facing in a structural way. Organizations are seeing the benefits from this: teams that are becoming empowered, being able to deliver more value to customers and stakeholders, happy employees, and fewer people leaving the organization. It’s time to take retrospectives to a higher level, and use them to reveal and solve systemic organizational problems. Agile Retrospectives can be used to do that, but you need a different approach. In this session, I will show how we can use retrospectives to improve the agility of organizations. Note: Some might call the above approach scaling retrospectives. If that goes towards imposing how teams do retrospectives with some kind of framework, then I believe it doesn’t work. Increasing agility with retrospectives is about creating an environment where teams not only focus on their own improvement needs but also on the company as a whole, and get support from management when improvements go over their team borders or outside their autonomy.

Agile Retrospectives to the Next Level - Organizational Agility - OOP 2020 - ...

Ben Linders

Teams what is in it for me - Agile Portugal 2019 - Ben Linders

Ben Linders

Agile Retrospectives can be used to investigate quality issues or to agree upon actions that can improve the quality of the software that is delivered. They complement testing and provide solutions to learn and build quality in from the start. An agile retrospective is a practice for teams to reflect, learn, and to continuously become better in what they do. They focus on the process to help teams to improve products and deliver more value.

Talk improving software quality with retrospectives - TestCon Moscow 2019 - ...

Ben Linders

The mini-workshop Retrospecting your Retrospectives at eXperience Agile 2020 provides you with ideas to debug your agile retrospectives, find out why they aren’t working and learn how to spice them up and bring the energy back in the team. Are your retrospective meetings not helping teams to improve? Same actions coming up every retro? People skip the retro, or find them boring? A lack of energy in the room? Chit-chatting instead of discussing real issues? No need for that, let’s retrospect your retrospectives! In this mini-workshop, you will experience how to use retrospective exercises to debug your retrospective meetings. People will work in teams to reflect on how their retrospectives are going and will learn what they can do to make them valuable again. It’s a highly interactive session, learning by doing. I’ll bring in my experience from 20 years of doing agile retrospectives, and will set a culture where people will share their ideas and learn. Agile retrospectives should help teams to reflect at the end of each iteration to learn and decide what to improve and take action in the next iteration. Valuable Agile Retrospectives provide the solution for a successful agile adoption at all levels in the organization. They help teams to reflect and learn how to apply agile practices effectively, and support managers with ideas to set conditions for their teams to grow and deliver more value. But sometimes retrospectives don’t live up their expectation. Problems that can happen are: The same questions (what went well, what to improve) are being asked Similar actions keep coming up in every retrospective Nothing happens after the meeting, actions are not done People are postponing or skipping the retrospective meeting Team members complain that retrospectives are boring and a waste of time There’s a lack of energy in the room during the meeting, people are not engaged People don’t feel safe to speak up and share their view Discussions in the retrospective are not about the real problems (elephant in the room) The retrospective facilitator is leading people towards a pre-defined answer/solution In this session, teams will be doing 5 different exercises. In a time slot of two hours, teams rotate to do 2-3 of them. Intended audience: Scrum masters, agile coaches, tech leads, developers, testers, operations, and anyone who facilitates retrospectives. This session includes ideas published in my book Getting Value out of Agile Retrospectives, practices from the Retrospective Exercises Toolbox, and agile coaching tools available in my webshop. It’s partly based on things that I teach in one of my workshops: Increasing Organizational Agility with Retrospectives. Learning Objectives: Learn to use exercises to reflect on your current practice of retrospectives See how to create a safe and productive environment to run retrospectives Practice effective skills for facilitating retrospectives and getting people engaged

Mini workshop retrospecting your retrospectives - Experience Agile 2020 - Be...

Ben Linders

The agile manifesto proposes a “team reflects on how to become more effective”. Agile retrospectives can be used to inspect and adapt the way of working. Ben Linders, co-author of Getting Value out of Agile Retrospectives, will talk about the why, what and how of agile retrospectives, with many practical tips, stories, and examples.The agile manifesto proposes that a “team reflects on how to become more effective”. Agile retrospectives can be used to inspect and adapt the way of working. Ben Linders, co-author of Getting Value out of Agile Retrospectives, will talk about the why, what and how of agile retrospectives, with many practical tips, stories, and examples. Retrospectives help teams to deploy agile practices in an effective way. The retrospective facilitator (often the Scrum master) should have a toolbox of retrospective exercises, and be able to pick the most effective ones. Retrospectives are a great way for teams to improve their way of working, to become more agile and lean. Getting actions out of a retrospective that are doable, and getting them done helps teams to learn and improve continuously.

Spicing up agile retrospectives - TopConf Linz 2017 - Ben Linders

Ben Linders

Agile retrospectives have become a practice that is used by many teams to inspect and adapt their way of working. They provide insight into the activities performed and show how people are working together to deliver products Did you know that you can also use agile retrospectives to drive improvements in projects and for products? In his keynote, Ben Linders will explain what agile retrospectives are, how you can do them, and how they compare to project evaluations, post-mortems, and lessons-learned sessions. He will explore how you can join agile retrospectives as a project manager or product manager and the business benefits that agile retrospectives can bring.

Driving improvements with Agile Retrospectives - Project and Product Manageme...

Ben Linders

Need for Continuous Improvement in Agile - 1stconf Melbourne 2016 - Ben Linders

Ben Linders

On April 1, 2021, (no joke) I did an Agile 101 for Agile New England where we played the Agile Self-assessment Game online. The Agile Self-assessment Game: How Agile Are You? by Ben Linders The Agile Self-assessment Game is an Agile ” compass & map” to find out where you are and inspire you with ideas and suggestions on where to go next on your agile journey. It’s a cooperative card game to discover how agile you are and what you can do to increase your agility to deliver more value to their customers and stakeholders. In this session, Ben Linders explored how a game can enable people to pull in ideas for change and apply those in a way that best suits their collective needs. And we have played with the Agile self-assessment cards online. Ben Linders is an Independent Consultant in Agile, Lean, Quality, and Continuous Improvement. As an adviser, trainer, and coach, he helps organizations with effectively deploying software development and management practices. He focuses on continuous improvement, collaboration and communication, and professional development, to deliver business value to customers. Ben is an active member of networks on Agile, Lean, and Quality, and a well-known speaker and author. Creator of many Agile Coaching Tools, for example, the Agile Self-assessment Game.

How agile are you? - Agile New England 2021 - Ben Linders

Ben Linders

The agile manifesto proposes that a “team reflects on how to become more effective”. Agile retrospectives can be used to inspect and adapt the way of working. Retrospectives help teams to deploy agile practices in an effective way and to continuously learn and improve themselves. Ben Linders, co-author of Getting Value out of Agile Retrospectives, will talk about the why and how of agile retrospectives, with much practical tips, stories, and examples. Ben will also give a workshop on Valuable Agile Retrospectives on October 22.

Spicing up Agile Retrospectives - Agile Tour London 2015 - Ben Linders

Ben Linders

Valuable agile retrospectives provide the solution for a successful agile adoption at all levels in an organization. They help teams to reflect and learn how to apply agile practices effectively, and support managers with ideas to set conditions for their teams to grow and deliver more value. In this mini-workshop you will experience how using different exercises can help you to spice up your agile retrospectives and get more value out of them. I will also explain the why and how of retrospectives, the business value and benefits that they can bring you, and provide tips for improving retrospectives in your teams. In teams, you will practice exercises from the Retrospective Exercises Toolbox to experience how to effectively facilitate retrospectives.

Workshop Exercises to spice up your Agile Retrospective Agile Cambridge 201...

Ben Linders

It can be hard for agile teams to deal with quality and testing challenges and decide what to do to deliver high-quality products. There are many different approaches and solutions, which, depending on the context, the problem at hand, and how they are applied, can be more or less effective. In this webinar, Ben Linders will show you how can use gamification to self-assess your current way of working and enhance quality and testing in agile teams. Playing games with the Agile Testing Coaching Cards and Agile Quality Coaching Cards make it possible to explore your current quality and testing practice and reach a consensus on what could be improved. Players can use the coaching cards to discuss quality and testing values, principles, and practices. In teams, people can use the cards to share their experiences and learnings. During the webinar, we’ll pick out cards from the coaching decks to go into detail on specific principles and practices and explore how they can be applied effectively.

Webinar enhancing quality and testing in agile teams - PractiTest - Ben Linders

Ben Linders

What's hot (20)