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Quality engineering managers, dashboards and remote teams.

Ezz El Defrawi — Fri, 07 Jan 2022 11:22:48 +0000

If the last two years have accelerated the shift towards remote work, then it is no surprise that after having moved so swiftly, our remote-ward leap has come with its own share of teething problems. Chief amongst them is how to get the best out of teams that have gone fully remote and have remained that way for extended periods of time. Gone are the in-person meetings, coffee break catch-ups and extended lunch time moans about management that used to keep the workplace machine ticking, and a quality engineering manager cannot refuse to change.

The shift to remote working

Over the last two years there have been hundreds of articles written around the phenomenon of remote working; with swings between celebrating the freedom it offers workers to outright horror at the loss of the creative x-factor found only, apparently, in the area surrounding the office water cooler. Amidst the partisan debate we have also experienced the rise of the hybrid model; with people coming into the office for 2/3 days and then again escaping to the freedom of their homes for the remainder of the week, a concept which the majority of firms are embracing in some form. However for those of us who work on international remote teams we are forced to struggle on as we are; taking zoom calls from whatever corner of the house we can find some small measure of quiet, desperately ignoring our ballooning electricity bills.

Leadership in the new normal

In spite of all of this, as leaders, supervisors or managers, we have a responsibility to our teams to give them the best leadership we can. To recognise when things are going well and react when disaster looms. Based on my experience from the 18 months I have gathered what I believe to be the most salient points in this article.

The first is that we need to be more comfortable with asynchronicity; of reducing the number of hours we spend in mass zoom calls and breaking things out so people can see them when they are free to. If the whole team does not live in the same time zone then a 9am stand-up is meaningless when half the people on it are dialling in during their lunch hour. Childcare can also come with its own set of inflexible time commitments, which can cause unnecessary stress if individuals feel their professional careers are being impacted.

Remote working is more than just Zoom or Teams

We should acknowledge that in many cases, and particularly for regular scheduled meetings, many of the invitees will either not participate or have no reason to. Why not have the discussion in the comments section of a ticket, or on a channel dedicated to the topic. Embrace documentation, charts, video walkthroughs and if you can think of a fourth option then embrace that too. People consume information in different ways and often have the most success when they are given agency to choose for themselves. As with all things though, moderation, age old aphorisms involving babies and bathwater apply here so be wary. While Zoom lectures might be one of the worst ways conceived to process information, there should still be space for verbal discussion, a chance to see and hear other people address an issue.

Feedback is essential

The opportunity to take on board team members’ opinions is also critical to remote working. Unlike in the office where comments can be quietly made or people’s reactions can be observed, the challenge of remote working is that frustrations can go unnoticed within the wider organisation. If people feel that they lack a forum to address their issues or, even worse, that their voices are not being heard, then the team dynamic will begin to unravel. This tends to manifest not as an immediate collapse, but more as a slow regression in work efficiency and a departure of veteran staff.

While by no means terminal, this kind of failure can be easily avoided by offering individuals the chance to lay their case before management. At times this can be included within a sprint’s rituals but must also be present outside of the Agile framework; in case there are macro issues that cannot be addressed by a single team, or within a single sprint.

How neuro can help

As important as it is to have communications flowing up the management chain it is equally important from a manager or team lead perspective to have a top-down understanding of what is going on within each area of responsibility. This should not be limited to a simple recitation of the epics / stories that are being worked on but should encompass the effectiveness of working practices; whether certain people are carrying too much or too little of the workload or if knowledge is puddling around certain members instead of being spread across the group.

While it is possible to trawl through issue tracking software such as Jira or Asana for this, a modern quality engineering manager would prefer to use a tool like neuro, which allows them to collect and blend the data points needed and construct an engineering manager dashboard that give an instant snapshot of team progress, with the possibility to break it down further to the individual level. From here it is up to the respective leader to identify, assess and then act to improve the functioning of their team, encouraging and praising those who have done well, lifting the burden on those who are doing too much and coaching those who need it.

Also Read: Uses of JIRA Project Management & Reporting Tool

Active quality engineering manager

Team management in-person is not a passive occupation, but with remote working it is even less so. A quality engineering manager must be proactive in hunting out issues within the team, whether they be workflow, team or delivery-related. From a personnel perspective there should be regular sense checks of how people are doing; spaced far enough apart that they themselves are not a source of frustration but in as diverse a set of mediums as possible; group discussions, 1-1s, written feedback and message boards (anonymous or otherwise). For those perfectionists reading this with a growing sense of dread the sad answer is that this process is never complete. There is no final victory to be had here, but instead a constant cycle of trial, adjustment and improved outcomes. People will cycle through the organisation, the time zones they work in will change and project goals will shift along with the technologies in use. You will have to adapt your approach to the one meshes best with the team you have currently, and the tasks assigned. This is often thankless and rarely simple but the payoffs for your remote team can be mighty indeed.

The post Quality engineering managers, dashboards and remote teams. appeared first on Neuro.

A Story of Two CTO’s

Adam Smith — Thu, 15 Jul 2021 12:26:45 +0000

Once upon a time, there were two new digital banks, who wanted to change the world. Both had a great vision of the future, amazing technology teams, and visionary CEOs. One day both CEOs asked their CTOs “How long before I get my new digital bank?”. Each CTO had set out their plans carefully and were confident they had a firm delivery date. One based his decision on.. well you will see, the other used intelligent project management dashboards.

The first CTO decided to ask each stakeholder if they agreed. Firstly, he talked to his consulting team and asked the lead consultant “When will we go live?” The consultant said “Give me a week and I will consult my crystal ball (sorry spreadsheet) and give you the answer”.

One week later the lead consultant came back to the CTO and announced, “Yes we are green for go-live”. The CTO smiled, and then decided to share the good news with the business. But after further talks with the business, suppliers and other teams, the CTO’s confidence melted away. With every conversation it became clearer and clearer that none of the dots had been joined. Team after team raised reasons as to why they would not be ready in time for go live. The poor CTO then had to explain this to the CEO, along with investors and customers – they would not be going live any time soon.

The second CTO being wise, knew that all that glitters is not gold – and the dots needed to be connected from day one. He didn’t need any more spreadsheets, suppliers or consultants – he wanted a shiny wrapper across all teams and products to provide an unbiased single point of truth. Could there be such wizardry out there – in fact there is, neuro, which provides such project management dashboards.

neuro integrates with multiple tools, instances and environments preventing the need for spreadsheets. The CTO asked neuro “Will we go live?” and neuro replied “currently you are on track to meet all of your goals”. Automated project management dashboards provided by neuro, can ask this questions and much more!.

The CTO smiled and lived happily ever after – and became a billionaire when the new bank went public. Unsurprisingly, this single point of truth did in fact turn out to be the truth.

Also Read: 3 techniques to improve your reporting to the C-suite

The moral of the story: connect the dots and invest in a single source of truth and as ugly as that truth may be, you will always know the status of your projects.

With visualisation, intelligence and automation, neuro can help drive your business by consolidating all your reports into one place. See how neuro can help you connect the dots by requesting a demo today. Or you can try to implement Dilbert’s project managment dashboards!.

You might also be interested in our blogs on jira reporting, xray reporting, or zephyr reporting.

The post A Story of Two CTO’s appeared first on Neuro.

Delivery Lead Time and Value Stream Management

Adam Smith — Fri, 18 Jun 2021 13:35:10 +0000

With increasing awareness and adoption of value streams and alignment of companies’ digital transformation, engineering, and quality organisations to value-based models, it is easy to think of value stream management as the next silver bullet for delivery lead time. In many ways, the mindset of being value-driven could in fact be just this – it creates a new focus that is common to business and technology, who can both understand and work to a shared set of values.

Where agile is going wrong, value stream management can succeed

Squads, cohorts, tribes are among the many terms now applied to how teams are re-organising themselves to be ‘agile’. But as we are all far too aware, change is as much about people as it is technology. Too many organisations focus on the term ‘agile’ without establishing the fundamentals.

But by far the biggest oversight is recognising that the majority of enterprise-size companies are bound by legacy constraints – their technology functions may be agile but their business counterparts are often waterfall. Technology practices such as devops, devsecops and open devops are often missing in the business-world. Rather like analogue and digital TV, both deliver but with very different experiences. The very nature of value encourages teams and individuals to be more agile as it focuses the mind (or collective minds) on what is important and removes the noise that inhibits team and organisational agility. By focussing in on delivery lead time, organisations can centre themselves on value streams.

Where to start with the adoption of value stream management?

Like most things, organisational change is never straightforward. Each organisation will have strengths and weaknesses that make the introduction of value stream management more complex for different parts of a business. Do not be put off though, breaking the process down to bite-size chunks makes change very achievable.

Stage one – connecting the dots with value stream mapping

Knowing where to start is essential and often this can be as simple as identifying an unhappy customer or highly visible or costly problem. Get back to basics and walk the floor. Talk to teams and individuals and understand the flow of data, information, material, and ultimately, the problem. This is value stream mapping in its basic form. It is not complicated and does not require an army of consultants. There is a wealth of information out there so simply search ‘value stream mapping’. Remember the goal is to understand the reality of the flow of delivery. The delivery lead time between a requirement being envisioned and delivered to the customer is the core focus of lean.

Also Read: Uses of JIRA Project Management & Reporting Tool

Stage Two – Understand value ‘customer demand’

All parts of the business have customer-demand both internal and external. For technology, delivery engineering, and quality teams, demand is mostly internal but can occasionally be external. To understand your customer’s demand, creating a persona is a highly effective way of mapping and understanding what is important to each.

For example, if we look at the four basic personas of Engineering, Quality, CXO and Product, each will have different customer asks and demands. An engineering manager may view feedback from the quality team as important, while a CXO values accurate and timely reporting for senior meetings. The company may have the goal of shipping software (value) to the customer faster (shortening delivery lead time). The key to this is then to understand how each persona uses and consumes the value, and how this supports and maps to the business goal of shipping software (value) faster. Just try and remember everyone has a customer who demands value. While you are building your personas talk to someone from each persona type to gain feedback. This is a great way to engage them in the process.

Stage Three – Scaling up value stream management

Up to this point you have not been relying on your existing management tools for your research. Now is the time to assess whether your current management tools like Jira can support your value stream management needs for each persona. And at the heart of this is your data model – critically whether this supports what you are trying to achieve and whether this is achievable with your current – ‘as is’ – set up.

Conclusion

Congratulations on building your business case for moving to a value-based model. Now you need to make a choice; re-engineer your internal systems and data models to support a value-based model or wrap a value stream management platform like neuro around your existing toolstack to avoid the need for major system changes and large-scale organisational changes.

As we know the cost from time and resources to drive organisational change is high – with no guarantee of success. A value stream management platform like neuro offers a fast and cost-effective way of measuring and improving the flow of value. neuro offers complete flexibility across all personas and can be up and running within 30 mins.

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3 techniques to improve your Jira reporting skills

Adam Smith — Tue, 11 May 2021 13:14:24 +0000

Status reporting is a crucial aspect of project management and provides invaluable insight into the progress, quality and efficiency of delivery. However, most project management reporting is undertaken at a set level of detail and a more high-level C-Suite focussed report is often overlooked. Discover 3 tips to improve your Jira reporting skills. Don’t miss the opportunity to keep the C-suite up to date with relevant and concise dashboards.

Here are 3 killer techniques to help your C-Suite reporting:

Make sure you understand the business objectives and challenges

Understandably, usually due to time pressures, many people will simply use the standard options such as those found in the Jira reporting tool. The number of tests passed, the type, priority or root cause of defects, or similar measures provided in a Jira reporting dashboard are only truly meaningful to the C-Suite if you’re able to apply a business-focussed lens that translates the lower-level test metrics into how they’re impacting, or might impact, the business.

Take the time to clarify the business’ objectives, any KPIs that are tracked, and the challenges the business is currently facing, and then tailor your C-Suite reporting against these.

For example, let’s say that you’re using the Jira reporting tool to provide the average defect turnaround time. This is informative but using that information to then illustrate the impact on the time-to-market or extrapolating the mean time to resolution (MTTR) to show effort/cost by different systems or root causes will be much more meaningful to the C-Suite.

Test managers will know that the out-of-the-box Jira project management doesn’t cater well for testing and therefore an add-in is required to provide test management for Jira. We recommend Zephyr for Jira, which allows you to bake in several testing-related gadgets into your Jira reporting dashboard. As with the defect information provided by Jira project management, you should look to take the data provided in Zephyr test management for Jira and apply the business lens to make it more meaningful to the C-Suite.

Separate out your C-Suite reporting from your project or programme-level reporting

To reduce the overhead of using the Jira reporting tool, many teams or organisations will take a one-size-fits-all approach and produce a single standard report, either directly within a Jira reporting dashboard or copy/pasting individual metrics into Excel or email. Whilst most of us will be in favour of optimising process and identifying efficiencies, having a single format of test reporting will invariably lead to it having far too much detail to be of use or interest to the C-Suite.

Producing separate levels of data in your Jira reporting tool to also cater for the C-Suite should always pay dividends and lead to a return on that investment in other areas.

Ideally, using a tool that can seamlessly handle multiple levels of reporting will be the most efficient option. Dragonfly’s engineering and quality management platform, neuro, is a perfect example of this. The neuro platform takes a real-time feed of data from Jira project management and Zephyr test management for Jira (as well as Jenkins for Continuous Integration) and provides a level of detail tailored to the individual. This means that a Test Manager, a Programme Manager, and the C-Suite can see the information most meaningful and useful to them. More information on neuro can be found here.

Keep it simple and focus on actionable intel

What is the production defect leakage trend, what’s having a tangible impact on the quality of end products, what could save the company money? Focus in on a few key measures from Jira project management and Zephyr test management for Jira (or neuro 😉), tied in with the business’ KPIs discussed in point 1, and overlay that information with recommended actions for improvement to home in on the value to the C-Suite.

The emphasis there should be on the word ‘action’. You’re aiming for simple, clear recommendations that can be easily actioned.

Also make sure you promote a feedback loop regarding the reporting, so you can continuously improve the quality and relevance of the information you’re providing, whether that’s within Jira project management, Zephyr, neuro, or the commentary and recommendations you overlay.

The post 3 techniques to improve your Jira reporting skills appeared first on Neuro.

What is value stream management?

Adam Smith — Thu, 06 May 2021 13:56:33 +0000

Agile, Project, DevOps – each promises to drive process efficiencies, but as software delivery becomes increasingly complex, organisations looking for their next workflow advantage should look to Value Stream Management.

The accelerated pace of digital change in the working world means that today’s CTO must deliver more with less, making it critical to understand where value lies in an organisation’s software development efforts. Yet existing lean practices track activity rather than value, and without this level of insight productivity-chasing initiatives can often fail.

With an estimated $850bn spent each year on failed digital transformation projects according to McKinsey, Value Stream Management software can help businesses better manage and evaluate success throughout the development lifecycle.

What is Value Stream Management?

Value Stream Management is a business practice that enables greater oversight of the value within a software delivery cycle. By improving the visibility of complex processes, organizations can use these value streams to quickly determine what works and what doesn’t. Time, energy and resources can then be channeled into improving the flow of value to deliver better performance and business outcomes.

Value Stream Management is being adopted among innovators because it goes beyond other lean practices to provide a more granular view of the end-to-end flow of business value within the development lifecycle. As DevOps processes continue to advance, it will be those CTOs that embrace Value Stream Management software who will be best placed to not only understand the value being derived from their development efforts – but to act or pivot accordingly.

Why use Value Stream Management software?

With technology and innovation fuelling the demand for ever greater business outcomes, CTOs and other IT leaders are under growing pressure to deliver at speed and scale while remaining within budget.

But as the number of DevOps tools used in the software development lifecycle grows, it’s getting ever harder to extract the data locked up in these systems, let alone interpret and act upon it. With very few BI tool options in the tech world, Value Stream Management software can help CTOs to gain access to this critical data.

These end-to-end, platform-centric solutions can integrate multiple systems and providers to grant stakeholders a clear view of key flow metric insights, vulnerabilities and business value derived. By leveraging Value Stream Management software to distill such insights, business leaders can optimize organizational development and delivery cycles to avoid potential bottlenecks, accelerate productivity and maximize value streams.

Business benefits of a Value Stream Management platform

Data and analytics are now fundamental to an organization’s success, so it’s essential that IT leaders can both access data from their software development and delivery value streams, but also extract and interrogate such insights in order to implement improvements and mitigate risk.

This is why adopting this kind of approach can be so transformational. The business benefits include:

Data normalization: with multiple systems integrated (e.g. Jira, Zephyr, Jenkins, etc.) in a single platform, complex and disparate data sets can be normalized in one language and location – providing a crucial single point of truth.
Visualization: platforms can empower teams to visualize data and its associated insights in digital dashboards to provide actionable insights across multiple teams and programmes.
Automation: platforms do away repetitive administrative and reporting tasks, freeing up critical project time and accelerating output.
Consistency + optimisation: Tracking multiple value streams, third parties and data inputs in a single location enables teams to aggregate their performance and benchmark themselves to drive ever greater efficiencies.

The need for such tools is growing rapidly. So much so that by 2023, Gartner predicts that 70% of organizations will be using a Value Stream Management platform to enhance value-add in their DevOps pipeline. Those that don’t will be left behind.

Discover how our engineering and quality management platform neuro can drive efficiency, increase value and accelerate your growth by talking to our team today.

The post What is value stream management? appeared first on Neuro.

Help your CEO take great data driven testing decisions.

Adam Smith — Thu, 25 Mar 2021 15:23:31 +0000

In our experience, the majority of CEOs come from non-technical backgrounds. Whilst there is no doubt they know what their engineering teams do, when pushed on specifics most quickly admit the technical nature of the function is beyond their area of expertise. After all, surely this is what the CTO and engineering leadership team are for? Well yes, but in today’s technology-driven business climate, having only a limited understanding of how an engineering and quality organisation works puts a CEO at a major disadvantage. Help your CEO take great data driven testing and engineering decisions.

The buck stops here

To state the obvious, the CEO’s job is hard! They must balance speed to market with funding, revenue and regulatory obligations. The usual constraints of cost, quality, and time apply and the provision of accurate and meaningful updates by business and technology leadership is essential. The CEO must draw conclusions from and make judgments on where they are against the original business case, assess if they are on plan and establish how to best deal with potential issues and roadblocks that will endanger key milestones and business goals.

The messages are often scrambled

CEO’s are generally short of time and have competing priorities meaning they don’t always understand the importance of key issues being brought to their attention or their potential impact. The inefficiencies and complexities of human behaviours, bias, ambiguity and intangible measurement means many messages are mis-translated, mis-reported or mis-understood for a number of complex reasons. These are in effect a melting pot of themes rather than individual factors, making it even harder to understand when management is not providing the value required to reduce the volatility of outcomes.

The value of trusted information

In contrast, effective decisions require true transparency, consistency, and measurable goals coupled with tangible insight. Speaking from personal experience, this kind of trusted information is invaluable as it removes inefficiencies and reduces the emotional energy involved in making judgment calls – especially true after all-day back-to-back Zoom meetings. Making poor decisions based on subjective information can have a high price as every CEO will tell you. Data driven testing and engineering is the future.

Trusted information therefore is what every CEO wants, rather than wondering how much credence to give to the data and information that is in front of them. For instance, in status reporting many CEOs ask: does green mean green?. When they dig deeper, they often find underlying issues and understandably lose trust in the numbers and narrative being reported from engineering and quality leadership. This is true now more than ever as we are seeing CEOs becoming increasingly data driven.

Three ways to help your CEO

So, when all is said and done, here are three things that you can do to help you CEO better understand engineering and quality and enable value to be demonstrated more easily?

Be data driven – drive your commentary based on facts you can prove not opinions that you cannot
Communicate in quick fire, as CEOs do – deliver measurable statements, anticipate likely questions, and remove ambiguity to make information more easily consumable
Shorten the feedback loop – Answer questions quickly with facts to speed up the decision-making process

Get the most from meetings with your CEO

We have built neuro to enable engineering and quality teams to deliver consistent and transparent reporting to CEOs. We do the heavy lifting, allowing you to be data-driven and answer questions in real time. We shorten the feedback loop and speed up decisions by condensing data points and insights into short meaningful units. Use neuro in conjunction with the three points above to get the most from meetings with your CEO. Empower your CEO to make the right call. If you have any questions, please get in touch.

The post Help your CEO take great data driven testing decisions. appeared first on Neuro.

Three reasons why we built neuro

Adam Smith — Thu, 25 Feb 2021 23:34:00 +0000

Through our work with many technology and business teams over the past decade we have seen significant change and a closing of the gap between business and technology. This has given rise to opportunity as well as new challenges for teams and executives.

Technology is now at the forefront of business, but with business and technology speaking different languages both sides rarely unify successfully to become a single organism that moves in harmony towards a single purpose. On the contrary teams and executives from both sides often experience frustrations more akin to tectonic plates slowly crashing into each other and creating mountainous divides.

Addressing the challenges

Such challenges prevent technology and business teams from delivering transparency and the expected business value, and achieving agreed goals. We have seen this repeatedly and it led us to explore how we could use analytics, automation, and machine learning to answer three questions:

Can modern technologies be combined to eradicate the administrative aspects of management, for example reporting tasks that rely on Excel and PowerPoint, to enable teams to work faster and more productively?
Can we turn the vast and disparate datasets that organisations have into insights which can be actioned to reduce waste and enable executives to make more informed decisions?
Can we align engineering and quality teams with business goals to improve performance and outcomes?

The neuro puzzle

Turning a theoretical idea into a platform that delivered on the three questions above was in the first instance a puzzle. At the start of our journey; cloud, analytics, machine learning and automation were not applied in the way they are for today’s modern SMB and enterprise markets. Applying new technology to engineering management is now a growing area, with increasing organisational importance and investment, as companies look more closely at organisational resilience in the race to digitalise and transform their business models.

We frequently see teams struggling with Jira reporting, then add in Zephyr or X-Ray reports and you have a data challenge. What’s more, data is hidden from management in technical tools like Git. We wanted to make all of this information available for automated reporting.

Realising results

We have been very lucky in having amazing clients who have embraced change, which has enabled us to develop neuro in partnership with them and learn from their first-hand experiences. We benefited from being able to test drive our thinking, refine ideas and develop Neuro to deliver results. A big part of the journey has been helping teams gain greater understanding about what is possible, and helping them educate their CXO and business counterparts on the value of collaborating with platforms like neuro. In a post-pandemic world where every business advantage, cost efficiency and productivity gain is important, we are seeing companies, that embrace the digitisation of functions, win. To quote a CXO around the application and value of neuro: “this changes things” which when you look at it is the foundation of what we strive to achieve.

The future

Our team has worked extraordinarily hard to get us to this point. Launching Neuro in 2021 is a significant milestone and one that is very much down to their hard work, dedication, and vision. Now we look forward to starting a new journey in which we help more organisations leverage their data to turn insight into action and create high-performing engineering and quality teams.

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