ALF Innovation and Testing Adam Knight

Editor's Notes

• #2: Hello and welcome. For those of you who don’t know me my name is Adam and I am currently head of Product and Testing at River I’m going to talk about a subject that is often not associated with testing, that is innovation. In this session I’m going to share some personal experiences around innovation and why we as testers may suffer from being excluded The format will be that I’ll present through some slides, and at key points I’ll open up the discussion to the room with a question around testing and innovation. I’ll try to be open around the discussion but if it’s veering off, particularly into a later section, I’ll reel it in and I may need to move on to keep to time.
• #3: So why would we want to be involved in innovation? Well – in my recent work I’ve been particularly focussed on the area of employee engagement. [Clikc] And it turns out there is a strong correlation between innovation and employee engagement. The landmark 2009 Mcleod report on employee engagement devotes significant content to highlighting the correlation between employee engagement and innovation. [Clikc] It’s easy to see why. Looking at classic psychological theories of human motivation such as Maslow’s hierarchy of needs or the work of Fredrick Herzberg who presented a ‘two factor’ theory of motivation separating motivators from more basic ‘hygiene’ needs – being involved in creative work is intrinsically motivating and something that we naturally aspire to. [Clikc] Innovation is also typically something that receives greater recognition in organisations , and recognition for our work is again a strong motivator that fulfils our desires for self-actualisation.
• #4: It’s natural then that, given how engaging it is being involved in innovation, some folks might want to keep it to themselves. One reason that testers may be excluded from innovation is that, to put it simply, most people in the company are excluded from innovation. Can anyone tell me what this is? [Click] Yes it’s a silo - (this is not a discussion break by the way) interesting phenomenon in the US where trees grow in disused silos, protected from the environment outside. Similarly I’ve seen a number of situations where innovation within a company is siloed off and protected from others, with pretty damaging results.
• #5: One situation I’ve seen in startups is where one of the founding members takes the job of ‘research’ scientist (sometimes as CTO) [Clikc] They are seen as fundamental to the existence of the company and they therefore are afforded the freedom to go off and try new things. [Clikc] I’ve encountered this and one of the challenges here was that, each new creation was assumed to be brilliant, even when they weren’t for a more inexperienced tester the onus was on me to prove that these new innovations were flawed. I remember having to test and retest a new data importer module for a previous product to prove that it was less performant than the one that we already had, which was daunting when the developer was one of the company founders.
• #6: Architects. Give an architect enough time and they’ll develop a framework. Whilst often the role of a more established company than the research scientist, architects are still often afforded a lot of slack and have the remit to create new architectures as they see fit. [click] I’ve encountered more than one situation where these frameworks were developed away from testers , and The code is often prototype level, [click] Yet presented to leadership as release ready. [click] Usually what then happens is some poor testers and developers are delegated the task of releasing the new framework into product, Inevitably this is the point at which all of the problems are found and inevitably those poor individuals are the ones that come under pressure for the poor quality
• #7: An interesting one I discovered at River was where we have a creative comms team who worked exclusively with an external agency on ‘creative’ work including design. [Clikc] All the ideas and designs came in via that team and were handed to the development teams to deliver, [Click] This was done without any consideration for whether the designs were practically deliverable
• #8: So what are the consequences for those people who are not part of the innovation activities. They end up with all the responsibility of delivery but no ownership of the ideas They resent the products and the flaws in them They feel that their own ideas are suppressed They feel emotionally detached from the product they are working on Interestingly Risk has an inverse relationship to perceived value - This detachment from the value actually results in a higher perceived risk around delivery of those products
• #9: I’d like to look more specifically at Testing now. I’m going to open it up to the room for my first question. It’s a common complaint amongst testers that they are not included in innovative activities. Why is it that testers are excluded from innovation?
• #10: Here are some of the reasons that I came up with
• #11: Are these reasons valid. I read a great book last year entitled the “Myths of Creativity” by Steven Burkus. In it Burkus examines some of the false beliefs that propagate around innovation he identifies 10 The first is the idea of the lone creator… Included light bulb here as one of the most famous stories of innovation relates to the first myth. Thomas Edison didn’t invent the light bulb alone. He’d created a facility called Menlo park from previous earnings in which he employed many people who innovated and tested inventions which he then put his name to. .
• #20: I’ll bring it up here as an aside – Keely’s 10 types of innovation provides a great canvas to understand the different areas that your company might innovate.
• #22: QUESTION POINT? If these 10 myths don’t drive innovation What do we think are the elements needed to support effective innovation?
• #23: Well Burkus quotes extensive studies into innovation by Harvard professor Teresa Amabile She suggests what we really need for innovation are 4 factors Domain Expertise are the domain relevant skills that will navigate us through the creative process People Willing to Engage and are motivated to innovate A company acceptance of New ideas – is our social environment set up to accept and promote new ideas? And processes that are supportive of creativity None of these are exclusive to specific roles or people, and only the company culture sits outside the domain of things that can be learned or adopted by any individual.
• #24: I’ll at this point also refer back to the link between engagement and innovation. Whilst causation has not as far as I know been proved either way What we can say is that people who are regarded as ‘engaged’ in their work are far more likely to feel that they are able to provide creative ideas to their work than those that are not As this stat from Gallup neatly demonstrates.
• #25: So now we have a better understanding of what actually is needed to drive innovation What do we think that testers specifically can offer?
• #28: So my final discussion point is this Given that we can clearly offer so much How can we get more involved in innovation in our companies?
• #29: I’ll finish with one idea. At River we set up an open group called the River Innovation Group or “The RIG” I run the group – however it’s an open group that anyone in the company can join , and we encourage them to do so. We try to meet once a fortnight. But we don’t meet to innovate. What we do is meet to try to promote innovation in the company. Here are our principles….
• #30: Read – 1 - 6 So if you are struggling to think of ways to promote inclusive innovation in your company Consider setting up a RIG of your own.
• #31: Thanks