The focus on automation and “continuous everything,” from integration, deployment, and now all the buzz about continuous testing, makes the daily activities of a tester in DevOps challenging. Testers may be used to controlling quality—or thinking they do—but they need to pivot to assuring their teams focus on quality.

As modern software processes become automated, one might argue that nearly everything in software development is code. Obviously, our software applications are comprised of code, but that’s only the start of it. Our tests, delivery orchestration, and someday even our software production could be automated.

For decades brainstorming has been our go-to method for ideation, yet it holds back our success when the environment doesn't encourage everyone to contribute. Instead, try brainwriting—writing ideas on paper and letting teammates iterate on them. It improves not only the quantity of ideas you get, but also the quality.