Influencing Quality

Welcome to episode 133 of the Testing Peers podcast.

In this episode, the Peers (Chris, Callum, David and Russell) explore the complex and often subtle art of influencing quality within teams, organisations and wider cultures.

The team share stories from early careers to more recent consulting and coaching experiences. The conversation examines how influence operates in practice and what it truly means to be a voice for quality. This is a discussion about mindset shifts, not mandates. About patience, not prescriptions.

Topics covered include:

• What influence looks like in quality-focused roles
• The difference between being responsible for quality and being a voice of quality
• Building credibility and rapport in complex environments
• How time, language and context influence
• Coaching versus prescribing solutions
• Making invisible work visible to gain traction
• Overcoming cynicism and staying curious
• How influence can ripple beyond the testing team

Whether you are coaching, testing or leading, this episode is packed with practical insights and thoughtful discussion on how to support quality in meaningful, lasting ways.

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Transcript

0:01: Hello and welcome to the latest episode of the Testing Peers podcast. 
 0:06: Today we are going to be talking about influencing quality and what that means for us in the workplace. 
 0:12: We have got today, they are all actually regular co-hosts, really, we've got Callum. 
 0:17: Hello there. 
 0:18: We have Chris. 
 0:19: Hello, and Russell. 
 0:21: Hello, and myself, David. 
 0:22: Hello. 
 0:23: We are really pleased to be sponsored by our sponsor NFocus. 
 0:28: They are a UK based software testing company and they've been supporting the testing business for 24 years, providing services that include burst resource, accelerated test automation. 
 0:39: Performance testing and a fully managed testing service. 
 0:43: In 2021, they launched the Test Automation Academy to create some amazing testers, and so far they have now created jobs for 48 people in our testing industry in just under 3 years, which is brilliant, well done and focus. 
 0:57: In order to contact EFocus, please go to the website at www.nfocus.co.uk or contact them at info@nfocus.co.uk. 
 1:08: So. 
 1:09: As is usual on the podcast, we're gonna go to banter, and King of banter, Chris is gazing round his room looking for inspiration. 
 1:17: Hit us with it, Chris. 
 1:18: We know where we're going already. 
 1:20: Now, friends, and what I would like you to do is get out your musical playing device and tell the room what the last song you listened to was. 
 1:30: And we're now frantically looking for our. 
 1:32: Mm. 
 1:33: OK, mine was actually from the soundtrack of the video game Resident Evil Code Veronica. 
 1:40: It was the original soundtrack from that game, if that helps at all. 
 1:45: Wait, what's the track though? 
 1:46: What's it called? 
 1:47: It was the whole OST. 
 1:49: Just in one big mega bla. 
 1:51: Yeah. 
 1:51: One big megalo. 
 1:52: I was listening to it as I was concentrating on  writing nonfunctional requirements. 
 1:58: Beautiful. 
 1:58: Mine is something you'll never have heard of, it makes no sense to anyone called Set Me Free by Kale, Catching sunrises and Deep Madge. 
 2:06: I've never heard of either. 
 2:07: Yes, I like that. 
 2:08: Madge. 
 2:09: David deeply searching. 
 2:11: So I was doing my running basically, so it's a running playlist, which is why I didn't know what it was, , but it, it's Dog Days Are Over by Florence and the Machine, which is not a bad running track actually because it's quite upbeat. 
 2:24: Good beat for the pace for the running, I like it. 
 2:26: I had Cha Cha Cha by Kaa from Finland's Eurovision . 
 2:33: Why doesn't that surprise me? 
 2:35: I was gonna be really disappointed had it not been a Eurovision entry. 
 2:39: Or some musical number from High School Musical, some good musical numbers. 
 2:43: High School Musical is is an extra special musical, but this was a Eurovision track and . 
 2:48: It was very loud and uplifting, and on my trip home from B and Q, gosh, you know how to live. 
 2:55: I do. 
 2:56: It was the most exciting thing. 
 2:58: The DIY stores are available. 
 3:00: We are currently relaying the floor of our bathroom, so I needed to get some more. 
 3:05: So actually this is another question. 
 3:07: Where, where did you two listen to your, where, where were you two listening to your song? 
 3:11: Carl? 
 3:12: I was in mine as I was working. 
 3:15: I actually read being an ex-psychologist, read some research that that actually said the, the best music to listen to when trying to get into focus are video game soundtracks, because they, they are deliberately written in such a way as to promote. 
 3:27: Like progression and focus, and not being too distracting of your, the activities at hand. 
 3:34: So that's why I listen to video game soundtracks, not because I'm a horrendous nerd. 
 3:38: But what you did there, Russell was in the car, but where from? 
 3:41: Where to? 
 3:43: I think the most recent journey was to pick a friend up and drop them off, nothing exciting. 
 3:48: From Gosforth one end to Fordden and back, that help? 
 3:53: Fantastic, Newcastle friends, what a place to explore. 
 3:57: OK, so from influencing focus, as Carl was doing, to influencing quality in the workplace, we were talking before we got onto this recording, and Carl was telling us a little bit about what he's doing in the workplace at the moment. 
 4:12: Carl, would you be able to sort of give us a bit of a pitch on what, what your role looks like compared to other leadership roles that people maybe think of when they think of leadership in testing? 
 4:21: Yes, so I work as a staff engineer or a staff quality engineer, which means that effectively I'm an individual contributor. 
 4:29: I have absolutely no people management or pastoral care or line management in my role. 
 4:35: Instead, I am a technical coach and a tech. 
 4:38: Technical leader, forming part of the engineering leadership group, , in the organisation that I work in. 
 4:44: Previous to that, I've been a principal engineer, principal quality engineer, so a very similar position where I've had, yeah, no line management, no people management, , instead, it's technical leadership as an individual contributor role. 
 4:56: And how does that enable you to influence quality in the workplace? 
 5:01: It's interesting cos my role predominantly is around coaching and supporting  an organisation by building a culture of quality. 
 5:12: Because I don't actually have line management authority, , which I imagine, and some of you do have, my role is a lot more about subtle influence, building a culture, showing people what the art of the possible is, and then working as a within engineering and as an engineer to help people align on what looks good in terms of testing and quality. 
 5:34: To that end, where I work at the moment, I'm actually the only testing professional in that company. 
 5:41: So it's me to many developers, , and business people, and, , product people and design people. 
 5:48: I have to be able to work at scale in what I do, which I think is quite different to the traditional leadership sort of roles that people mostly talk about. 
 5:57: I think a lot of our industry probably isn't very good at being traditional, but it is probably less what people think about when they think about leadership and influence in the workplace. 
 6:07: That's very interesting in, in my role at the moment. 
 6:10: Influencing quality is a lot about managing upwards, articulating things that are going on with the individual contributors upwards to gain time, budget and things like that, to be able to enable change, which is an interesting thing as well as the delight of managing some people and other things like that. 
 6:33: Just to ask and unpick a little bit of that, when you said that you were influencing quality, the things that you mentioned there were time and budget, which I'm looking at the, I'm thinking of the old iron triangle, I'm thinking those are those are other things other than quality. 
 6:46: Do you actually influence like the state of quality of part of that, or is the quality you influence through being able to have people doing things? 
 6:55: Like, does your role in itself influence quality? 
 6:59: I will unpack it in a different way because I'm special. 
 7:03: But in many a quality role, I've sat here and I've found blockers, I've found things that have caused things that are. 
 7:13: Unnecessary friction, things that don't enable us to do our job as well as we could do as a whole. 
 7:21: I've, I've mentioned the Markham in the middle story too many times where he ends up underneath his car fixing a garage when his wife comes in and tells him that the light bulb's out and it's because he's found one thing, found the cause of that, and gone deeper and deeper and deeper down the rabbit hole. 
 7:35: And very often the things that impact us in our day job when we're trying to. 
 7:42: Do quality activities to do continuous improvement activities to help achieve our work, things that are frustrating us, things that are getting in our way, things, things that we are perhaps downstream of. 
 7:54: They often are influenced by humans who perhaps have nothing to do with us. 
 8:00: In their day job, they're not thinking about us, not thinking about their product quality necessarily. 
 8:04: They are thinking about time and they're thinking about money. 
 8:08: And so learning to speak their language in order to influence them, empower people to do their work in in a better way is often where I find myself sort of trying to intercede. 
 8:21: If you don't have any money, you don't have any people, that means you don't have any people coaching like yourself, Callum, or doing any specific activities. 
 8:30: So it does often all come down to dollars, doesn't it, or pounds just British. 
 8:35: But without it you can't, but with it doesn't influence it. 
 8:39: It's an interesting perspective, I guess. 
 8:41: I guess it's interesting to me, and again, you, what you say that Russell is like, you need money and people to, to do that influence. 
 8:48: I guess I'm. 
 8:49: At a level where I influence on the quality, but I, because I don't sit within that sort of management side of things, I completely away from thinking like the budget side of things, so I, I do influence. 
 9:04: Quality purely as, as a, as a quality index, so, you know, I don't have people to to help me with that, so I don't think to budgeting and staffing in that way. 
 9:15: But it is an interesting point because like your role to get coaches into a business often is an influencing job, to get someone to decide that the role is valuable and adds, and that's where the influence starts often it creeps down. 
 9:28: And that sounds horrible, but it creeps to different areas, , in the sense that once you've got someone in, then that, that enables you to have the capacity to then start doing other activities and. 
 9:39: To be more influential in many ways and starts going to do other things, but like a lot of these things, I've worked in companies that the conceptual idea of a coach. 
 9:48: No, I want someone to do, don't want coaches, which is ironic when they will pay a fortune for you to go and do training or other things, or then complain about people who don't know what to do. 
 9:57: It's like, well, if you don't train them, maybe you should expect them not to be able to do what they're doing because tech's changing constantly. 
 10:05: Oh, we haven't got time for them to do any learning. 
 10:07: Yeah, that might be a fundamental problem. 
 10:09: If you've got no time to learn but expect people to have learnt. 
 10:13: There's a conceptual problem there and influencing those people is, I guess strategically one of the things probably me and Chris and others may have done a bit more of because actually getting that headroom, I think I'll call it rather than budget, to actually start doing that because let's say people spend 10% of their time on learning. 
 10:31: That's 10% of their time others think they're not doing on delivery. 
 10:35: It's the classic one. 
 10:36: In my head, you start if you're a senior leader influencing that capacity side. 
 10:42: And then it trickles down into then the what you do with that capacity. 
 10:46: You know, how you coach people, how you influence that quality is an important factor, how that you consider the three amigos that we talked about, and so on. 
 10:54: I don't think it's just  siloed to or or limited to like things like training and and capacity there. 
 11:02: Even in as much as as thinking about depth of quality, when you start thinking about that, any time that you start pushing into do we care about performance? 
 11:12: Do we care about maintainability, scalability, deployability, deliverability, and especially as an engineering team, you might find yourself up. 
 11:21: Odds to the product side of the business or the board who just want features, deliver, deliver customer value, it can also fall into that. 
 11:30: David, I saw you. 
 11:32: Yeah, this is a really interesting conversation actually. 
 11:34: The whole thing about quality, I think sometimes, I think we might have mentioned it before, that test is sometimes seen as a cost. 
 11:42: To the project. 
 11:43: And so we are in a, a bit of a conversation about quality rather than testing, which is seen as traditional. 
 11:51: The other thing that you just mentioned, Callum, is that, you know, you do have your stakeholders and obviously as a consultancy, we also have our clients, the end client that are paying for it as part of the. 
 12:02: The quality question or the, the conversation. 
 12:06: For me, part of this is the fact that we often look at the output that is produced, the actual work that the developers and everything else, rather than the outcome. 
 12:17: We would love to have delighted stakeholders, so therefore they are then happy with the work we've done. 
 12:23: And the difficulty is that. 
 12:26: As I see it is the understanding of what quality looks like, and because we've got so many different stakeholders, and, you know, within the company and then the client, that the decision on, on what, Acceptable quality is right for that particular project is lost in translation rather than have an acceptable level. 
 12:48: Mhm. 
 12:48: Yeah, it's a really interesting conversation. 
 12:50: I don't necessarily have the answers, but I've thrown thrown a lot of thoughts out there. 
 12:53: And that's a really interesting position to be in as well, because I, I find where I've been in organisations that haven't had a quality  professional before, part of my role is to help organisations build a quality culture and start to think about. 
 13:08: What quality looks like. 
 13:10: And rather than sort of thinking about the sort of, oh, we'll know it when we see it, which is the easiest way to do it, but it's the longest feedback loop to doing it. 
 13:19: It's been very much a space of trying to ask people, what does good look like? 
 13:23: Or what does good enough look like in this space, and helping people to define what they want rather than how they want it, because it's so easy to be outcomes led. 
 13:33: And, and Russell, just as you were saying there, you were talking about, , talking about Quality rather than testing. 
 13:41: And that's important because testing is the how, quality is the what. 
 13:46: I was talking to Jash, principal engineer at the BBC the other day, , and he's an awesome peer, and he was thinking in a very similar space of, how do I talk about something that's the, like, what we want rather than the activity that takes us there as well. 
 14:02: And he was thinking very much in that same space of not talking about testing, which is a very loaded term. 
 14:07: But more towards quality, which is the, what do we want as an outcome of these things, , which is interesting because we all seem to be in that similar space. 
 14:17: , here's a hypothetical question for you, Carl and for everyone else. 
 14:20: Agile. 
 14:21: This idea that you deliver something like done almost every iteration, get feedback on it. 
 14:26: From where I've done it in a what I would say quite good way, I'm not gonna say perfect way cos nothing ever is, but where you've actually had something to show to stakeholders, be it a sketch, be it a diagram, be it a a button that works, being able to get their feedback on it has helped me. 
 14:42: In quality sense, guide the next thing we do, not just the current thing, but get feedback and know, oh I suppose it's important. 
 14:50: Oh actually no, it isn't really. 
 14:51: Oh, there's 16 bugs we've raised with the fact this one page doesn't look right, it's got the wrong text, got no alt texts, blah blah blah. 
 14:58: Oh, don't worry about fixing them. 
 14:59: , OK, so accessibility isn't a priority then. 
 15:02: Using that kind of iterative feedback loop with the actual customers there has been one of the most beneficial things I've ever found as a tester, because I actually learn what matters. 
 15:12: And therefore what quality to focus on that then drives my techniques, my choices, and everything else that I can use my skills. 
 15:20: To then aid the team to help get the customer what they want faster. 
 15:24: This goes back to one of our podcasts fairly recently, which is getting qualityer seats at the table, is that the reliance on that is making sure that there there is a quality advocate or quality coach in that meeting where they are discussing what acceptable or good quality looks like, which is often early on in this situation. 
 15:44: So if you don't have the quality advocate in that particular thing. 
 15:47: Then actually the tester or the person that that's looking at quality is hearing it secondhand. 
 15:53: And so therefore misses out on the key important information from the start. 
 15:58: In most agile processes though, it's the team that built the work, including testers that get that feedback to help them be more effective. 
 16:06: It doesn't always work like that, and often you have big programmes and you have lots of other complexities and other things like that, but it's generally always worked best where you've actually got that feedback loop to be as close knit as you say, David, where actually the people involved get it, not just. 
 16:21: A project manager, for example. 
 16:24: And Russell, what you're talking to there is music to my ears. 
 16:28: You're talking about observability and actually learning from what we're actually putting out there into the wild and using that as a feedback loop to shape things. 
 16:37: Most of Agile is just reacting to what we learn from things across different feedback loops, rather than as a series of ceremonies or as a series of tests. 
 16:46: Validation testing, which is what most people end up doing, which is. 
 16:51: Correctness testing only goes so far. 
 16:54: I was using the example the other day of a toothpaste sandwich. 
 16:57: If a product owner came to you and said, I want a toothpaste sandwich, your verification, , testing can only tell you, like, well, yes, I've made a toothpaste sandwich. 
 17:07: It isn't until you hit things like exploratory testing or the, , observability feedback loops that actually tells you, nobody wants a toothpaste sandwich. 
 17:17: It's disgusting. 
 17:18: And that's always a missing part, and when we're thinking of quality, those, those are really important factors  to bring into things. 
 17:25: I'm gonna go for a complete tangent now, but it's Colgate where it's got the stripes and not a toothpaste sandwich in itself because it's layered toothpaste. 
 17:31: That's that's Aquafresh. 
 17:33: It's Aquafresh, OK, let's see, there you go, I don't know my toothpaste brands. 
 17:36: But but also it would doesn't a sandwich need to have bread involved. 
 17:40: You you could. 
 17:40: Not necessarily, sandwich is something is sandwiched ice cream sandwich doesn't have bread. 
 17:45: Yeah. 
 17:46: This this is the whole, this goes into the whole thing about testing, about without some context, God knows. 
 17:51: But anyway, I, I sidetracked us too much, sorry. 
 17:54: Ah, tangents. 
 17:55: So we talked a lot about things here. 
 17:58: So what actually do we do, I guess, other than we talked about iteration, in effect, feedback loops and so on, getting customer's perspective, using that to help drive conversations because if I'm honest, the framing of a customer telling you what they want. 
 18:13: Is by far more valuable than any Tom, Dick and Harry just saying that I think this is right. 
 18:19: I think this is right. 
 18:20: Actually getting the customer to tell you, best solution ever. 
 18:23: But what other things do we do to help, I guess, guide the people we work with, the teams, the leaders, the the doers, the everyone else around us, the project manager, you know, you name it. 
 18:35: How do we influence them better? 
 18:38: What do we do that works? 
 18:39: What do we do that doesn't work? 
 18:41: Context, ha ha. 
 18:42: Understanding what matters to people, understanding what motivates people, what drives people, what grinds their gears, understanding the context of decisions that were made and where we want to be heading, understanding those things within a culture that we exist that will enable us to be able to tell relevant and compelling stories to people in our companies in a language, in a level of technical understanding or ability. 
 19:11: Or to be able to bring people on your journey, sell them on something that makes that relevant to them as well, so it's not a, here's my thing that you need to get on board with it. 
 19:23: He's the thing that's our thing, and this is why it's important for you. 
 19:27: It's like we talk about it sometimes in terms of like impact, don't we? 
 19:31: How we can have that and, and again relating it to them really. 
 19:35: Yeah, in my role very often. 
 19:37: I try very hard not to make it a me thing anyway, not least because I don't want to be a single point of failure, but also because if it's an us thing, I find greater success comes when we are all bought into something together. 
 19:50: We all understand cause and effect, what good looks like and all those sorts of things and where we have a chance to play a part in that success. 
 20:00: To me, that, that speaks a lot to this idea of being a trusted advisor within an organisation. 
 20:07: You, you spoke about bringing people on a journey and helping and and basically meeting them where they are in something. 
 20:14: What I found works the best when influencing the view of quality is to show the art of the possible, but being ruthlessly pragmatic about that. 
 20:24: It's about taking steps forward, not trying to jump to the bar for quality being too insurmountably high for people to ever understand and That's something that is a trap that a lot of testers fall into of seeing models or talking too much in the community of the perfect view of the world and trying to jump straight there rather than taking the steps to get there. 
 20:46: And then can I just use my, my super favourite quote that I like to use about from Vince Lombardi? 
 20:52: Brussels says no, but I'm gonna do it anyway. 
 20:54: Vince Lombardi, who is the man for whom the Super Bowl trophy is named after, has a quote that I'm gonna paraphrase because I can't. 
 21:02: Get the exact words, but he does say, gentlemen, we cannot attain perfection, but on the way we can. 
 21:10: Achieve excellence. 
 21:12: And it's that whole continuous improvement point where if we're focusing on a goal and moving towards it, we can capture that excellence on route, even if we never actually attain full perfection. 
 21:23: And I like that sort of approach of focusing on the end goal. 
 21:26: Like, I have a project and I want to achieve this end goal, but if that's all I have in my project, there's a big distance between what that thing is. 
 21:34: Whereas if I, if I understand everything I need to do to achieve those things and who's impacted by those areas, I can then make a general sort of path. 
 21:42: And as long as I'm continuing facing wherever that light is that's drawing me in, like I can still sort of focusing on that. 
 21:51: That was a terrible end of sentence and it made good, good looks on faces. 
 21:55: But the, the, the point is. 
 21:58: Moving forwards, continuously look to improve and iterate small bits. 
 22:02: David today said to me, and I'm gonna quote you, he wasn't expected to be quoted today, it's exciting, isn't it? 
 22:10: It's, it, these are important. 
 22:11: He said, what can you do today to make your life 1% better? 
 22:15: What is it we can do to just step forward and improve something? 
 22:20: As part of being a trusted advisor, this is just me to like, not to poo poo what you've just said there, Chris, but part of being a trusted advisor is also to know which days to not try and push for 1% better. 
 22:35: Because some teams are snowed under. 
 22:38: Some teams have a lot on their plate. 
 22:40: We always say that if you teach a starving man to fish, he'll feed himself, but starving people can't learn to fish. 
 22:48: So you have to know when it's appropriate to push. 
 22:51: Context and context evolves. 
 22:54: It doesn't persist as the exact same thing all the time. 
 22:57: So to your point, K, is when, when to push, when to pull, when to ask, and then if you, if you appreciate the context, your expectations of people and yourselves changes. 
 23:09: That's the beauty of context and being aware of those things, and, and folks will look to take that model to a point like, here's a great and exciting model, let's say apply it directly into our workspace despite the fact that. 
 23:23: Our end goal might look different. 
 23:24: Our context, our constraints, our humans, our customers may well all be different. 
 23:31: Therefore, a measure of success that you might have won't necessarily be a measure of success that old bobbins over there has, and understanding context is really important. 
 23:41: That works in terms of what quality looks like in your company. 
 23:46: It works when you are doing line management of human beings. 
 23:50: And you are doing 1 to 1 to those folks. 
 23:53: Their development, things that they want, things that they need, are going to be different because they're different. 
 23:59: One thing I was gonna say, going back to Russell's original question of what we might do to make things different, and this is something that I'm gonna to employ, is that rather than concentrate and bang on about we need more testing or the number of test cases and things like that, which is quite. 
 24:17: Important for me and testing is put it back onto their court. 
 24:21: So tie in our language into what means something for them. 
 24:26: So highlighting the risks, highlighting the, rather than talk about testing, talk about the quality, talk about, you know, the value you're adding. 
 24:34: So changing the message from a personal story about my concern about the testing. 
 24:40: And turn it into something that's important to them. 
 24:42: And so that's what I'm trying to change is, is the language of not just myself but obviously the people I'm influencing as well. 
 24:49: So we're all on the same page and can talk about  that thing consistently. 
 24:54: What you've just described, the group of you, is in my head what I would consider to be building trust, in effect, is all the activities that that go around in building trust, being authentic, understanding the context, having empathy for people, putting it and framing it into the way that they are working, showing that you're authentic and being consistent with that kind of viewpoint, being reliable and not kind of being consistent with stuff. 
 25:17: It's the way that you become that just advisor comes on about is that you are. 
 25:21: You are reasonable. 
 25:22: You are sensible. 
 25:23: You are practical, pragmatic. 
 25:25: All these lovely words that all add up to that kind of building of trust, because no one's going to listen to someone they don't trust. 
 25:33: Whether they should trust you or not is another question altogether. 
 25:36: But you know, there's a lot of people out there that love some weird politicians, but let's not go into that. 
 25:41: They built trust with people, God knows how. 
 25:43: It is about building that trust with whoever the stakeholders, whoever the person you need to influence is. 
 25:49: And then for framing things in ways to influence them, to your point, David, their language, to Chris, you know, the money and all the rest of it, what's the impact it's the outcome I'm getting. 
 25:59: And a developer is gonna see things differently to a project manager, to a customer, to a, so you've got to change your language to the context, cos that's how you'll persuade people to kind of get on board what you're doing and sometimes it means you've got to zig and zag, not go to Cans point, straight to the end goal, you've got to actually 6 steps to get towards the outcome you want. 
 26:21: Like I love and I'm sad regression testing, but there's a time and a place where it doesn't have value. 
 26:28: Building great regression packs of tests doesn't always have value if you're going to throw away the thing. 
 26:33: It's an experiment. 
 26:35: It's not worth necessarily doing, so you've got to understand that and just saying, oh well, we should always automate our tests at the end, it's not always valuable. 
 26:43: So you've got to be able to be adaptable as a human being and sadly. 
 26:47: I don't think as testers, we are the top rung of doing that most of the time. 
 26:53: I think we're not necessarily the bottom rung, but I think we get caught up in our own world of what good, and I think every area of business does this, what good practise is and forget the fact that it applies in the context. 
 27:05: So we end up becoming less trusted because we're just banging on about test cases or banging on about automating everything. 
 27:12: And we end up becoming less than trusted advisors, we become noise, waste. 
 27:17: This to my mind, and this really resonates with with me, Russell, speaks a lot to testers themselves, not knowing the art of the possible. 
 27:26: So can't use that to influence things. 
 27:29: To be a good testing advocate and to advocate for quality, not testing but quality, does mean understanding a huge breadth of things. 
 27:39: So much stuff, you have to understand saleability, marketing, psychology, code, architecture, products, design philosophy. 
 27:49: There's so much that needs to be crammed into your head to holistically advocate for quality and to be a trusted advisor to all the people you know. 
 27:58: And the more you advance in your career, and the more senior you become as a tester, the wider your sphere of influence needs to be. 
 28:07: To the extent that when you get to like the very top levels, whether it be as a line manager or  a head of, or a staff or principal engineer, you then start having to think about social architecting. 
 28:19: How do people work with each other and how do you influence in those ways. 
 28:23: Your context becomes so very broad that it becomes something that's almost untenable for a lot of people to consider. 
 28:31: And when we see a lot of the, the attempts that influence that come along, it comes from a, a stilted or or a small view of the art of the possible. 
 28:40: It comes from people's context. 
 28:43: If all you've ever known is test cases, then of course what does more quality, or what, what does, you're not even talking about quality, you're talking about more testing. 
 28:52: What does more testing look like? 
 28:53: bigger numbers of test cases. 
 28:55: Automate everything. 
 28:56: Of course that's the thing we do. 
 28:57: We need more of the thing I do. 
 28:59: And then couple that with people's ego taking control, which is to make sure it's like, well I need to keep my job. 
 29:07: I need to make sure that I have a job, and I'm a, I'm an automator, therefore, everything needs to be automated, that's the only solution to everything. 
 29:14: Do you like that? 
 29:15: Doesn't matter. 
 29:15: I can automate. 
 29:17: That's where we end up with the problem is, is ego driven or, or small contexts or  not understanding the art of the possible and focusing on the how and not the what. 
 29:28: So you hear a great point, which is one of the things again, I don't think testers are good at and I consider senior leaders is included, myself included, is. 
 29:38: Actually, the basics. 
 29:40: cos you talked about the breadth of knowledge there that you need, you're right, and that's through building allies, conversations, learning, you get there and it's one of those things that I think time helps with versus any kind of shortcuts to many degrees. 
 29:52: There are some, but a lot of it is time in the business, time speaking to people, learning as you go. 
 29:58: But one of the things that you kind of touch on there is, I don't think that we train early on, testers, developers, other people. 
 30:07: What real quality is. 
 30:10: We train them how to write a test case, we train them how to write a scenario, we train them how to automate something that exists, but the actual philosophical questions, the point, the purpose, the goal. 
 30:22: We are poor at articulating to testers who are more junior, let's call it. 
 30:28: But also to our junior developers, to our other people, because they see the language of test cases and all these other things and they start to see that as the value, not the outcome, and we get lost in that kind of transient phase of just thinking of things as activities. 
 30:45: And we all do it, but the more junior we are, the more inexperienced we are, it's probably a better way of framing it, the more likely to get caught up in. 
 30:52: I've achieved 10 things I was asked to do, yay, rather than actually the outcome of why you did those 10 things, because people are less bothered, and I'm talking about myself when I think of this in this context, by the way, not putting this on everyone else, but less bothered to really articulate strongly the value at that writing these edge cases and these things and doing this exploratory testing it does be more about the skill than the context of it and. 
 31:19: That makes it hard for someone who is coming into the business to actually articulate that value. 
 31:24: And if they're your boots on the ground, if they don't have the knowledge and skill, then the volume they exists of them is gonna influence more of your areas. 
 31:34: It's gonna influence people more, it's gonna manipulate the conversation often more greatly than you can from the top down. 
 31:41: So you need to work at the bottom up, in a sense, you need to work with everyone. 
 31:45: And set out the stall and the context and the strategy in a language that everyone can understand, including often the testers. 
 31:54: Cause I've got testers in my organisation that I would argue probably see testing as a very different skill to what I do and vice versa, and I've got to influence them somehow. 
 32:05: And to your point, Callum, the bigger the orgs, the way you influence and do things changes dramatically. 
 32:10: But anyway, that's a different subject for a different day. 
 32:12: This is like such a key part of things, is most of us  as as testing professionals drive into the how, cos we're taught the how, we're taught to do things, rather than the philosophy behind it. 
 32:25: My role in quality coaching. 
 32:27: Usually falls into actually having to try and help people understand what quality is. 
 32:33: How many of us could go to our teams and say, what does quality mean? 
 32:36: What does quality actually mean? 
 32:38: And not theoretically, also within a context. 
 32:42: I'm sure you'll get some responses and, and there's usually the, the good one of that, it means a person is able to do a thing at a time with a context. 
 32:50: And it basically just boils down to somebody thinks that what we've built is good enough. 
 32:56: To do something. 
 32:58: And that's kind of what it boils down to, and then when you start thinking of that, that's when the pragmatism comes in. 
 33:03: And then you have to start thinking about what good looks like in in your context as well, and then you start having those sorts of conversations about quality. 
 33:11: Is that something that the that the rest of you sort of resonates with? 
 33:15: Lots of silent nodding there. 
 33:16: Just for those who can't see. 
 33:18: It was very, very loud, but I was muted, but it was a very loud nod. 
 33:21: I. 
 33:22: A muted loud no. 
 33:24: No, that makes sense. 
 33:25: So I'm guessing now is probably if there's anyone else wants to add to this conversation, now's a fantastic time for us to wrap up, because I think we could go on and on and on and on and on and on about it, because it is a deep subject and it has got many different aspects that you can do to to do the sort of influencing and to become that trusted advocate as we mentioned. 
 33:44: , but it is a, it's a skill, it's a hard task to do, and it starts everywhere. 
 33:49: I think it's ultimately the point, isn't it? 
 33:50: It's everyone at every place within the quality sphere has some influence to helping put quality on the roadmap. 
 33:57: So thank you for joining us. 
 33:59: We are the testing peers. 
 34:01: We are found at contact us at testing peers.com. 
 34:05: You can find out about the Peon 26 conference, which will be slowly moving forward, and the website will be getting updated as we continue and so you'll find the latest news at testing peerscon.com, which is always a tongue twister for me. 
 34:20: So thank you again to our sponsors and focus. 
 34:22: It's been a pleasure as always. 
 34:23: Thank you for joining us, Callum. 
 34:25: And Alvida. 
 34:28: For now, It's goodbye from the testing peers. 
 34:32: Goodbye.