Letting the ideas settle
After a conference-heavy few weeks, I’m taking time to turn notes on leadership, AI, culture and quality engineering into something more useful.
No full Quality Engineering Newsletter post from me this week.
The last couple of weeks have been conference-heavy. I spoke at Agile Manchester and TestCoast in Gothenburg, and this week I’ve been at LDX3, formerly LeadDev, in London.
I’ve taken in a lot of talks on engineering leadership, AI, culture, onboarding, incidents and organisational change.
So rather than rush out a half-formed post, I’m going to let the ideas sit for a bit.
One thing I am still thinking about from LDX3 is how little of the conversation was really about technology.
Even the talks about AI often came back to people, systems and decision-making.
How do we onboard people well when AI changes the skills they need?
What happens to Engineering Managers if they are expected to become more hands-on again?
How do we learn from incidents without reducing everything to a timeline?
Why can teams improve delivery performance but still fail to shift the wider culture around them?
The thread running through a lot of the talks felt like this:
Better engineering outcomes rarely come from pushing individuals harder. They usually come from improving the system people are working within.
For me, that feels very connected to quality engineering.
Quality is not only created in code. It is created, maintained and sometimes lost through the decisions people make, the constraints they work within, the feedback they receive, and the culture around them.
While I’m letting those ideas settle, this might also be a good time to point newer readers back to a few free posts from the archive.
If you’ve joined recently, these are probably the best places to start:
It’s about quality, not testing
Why shifting the conversation from bugs to quality changes everything.What is quality engineering?
My starting point for explaining what quality engineering is, and why it is more than testing earlier.The Three Mindsets of a Quality Engineer
How curiosity, humility and empathy can help shift the role from inspecting for quality to shaping a culture of quality.
And if you’re already a paid subscriber, there are deeper dives in the archive on testing, automation, feedback and uncertainty.
I’ll be writing more about the LDX3 ideas once I’ve had time to turn the notes into something more useful.
For now, I’m taking the win that LDX3 has given me a lot to think about.
More soon.