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5 Tips for Mentoring Future Mentors Being a mentor is a big responsibility. It becomes a greater one when the person you're mentoring is set to become a mentor to someone else. What advice would you impart to your mentee? What do you wish you'd thought of when you were starting out as a mentor? Payson Hall distilled his experience into five principles. |
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Testing Centers of Excellence and the Return of Silos Testing centers of excellence aim to be R&D labs for software testing, experimenting, and innovating new testing techniques and then piloting them on projects and analyzing the results. But that's not always the reality. Some CoEs merely isolate testers, taking a step back to the days of silos. What's your experience? |
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Looking beyond the Tester-to-Developer Ratio Many companies have some notion of an ideal tester-to-developer ratio, or the number of testers they need for every certain number of developers. It may seem like a superficial standard, but it's rooted in a very real need to understand staffing requirements and budgets. Let's dig deeper into the team balance. |
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If You Want Training to Take, Explore Experiential Learning People typically think of training classes as passive activities, where the instructor talks and the others listen. But experiential learning, where you learn through hands-on activities and then reflect on the experience, often gets the lesson to stick in people's brains better. Consider using interactive lessons. |
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Communicating to Customers That You Care How can you communicate caring to your customers if your job doesn’t lend itself to demonstrating in person how hard you’re trying? Fortunately, showing evidence of caring is not about scurrying around; it’s about interacting with customers in a way that says you’re listening to them and taking their needs seriously. |
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How to Be a Team Player Some people think of themselves as team players because they're technically savvy, hard workers, and strong contributors. But these traits alone don’t make someone a team player. Teamwork, after all, is the process of working together to achieve a shared goal. Team players collaborate to solve problems. |
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Creating a Company Culture Where Agile Will Thrive A so-called generative culture has all the characteristics necessary to support self-directed teams, shared responsibility, experimentation, and continuous process improvement. But what about the rest of us? Most large organizations don't have a culture where agile will take hold so easily. Here's what needs to change. |
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The Importance of People in Software: A Tribute to Jerry Weinberg Gerald Weinberg's work inspired many to be better engineers and better leaders. Although he’s no longer with us, his message about the role of people in building quality software lives on in his writings and in those who have learned from him. Here, Steve Berczuk recalls some of Jerry Weinberg's most influential books. |