Independent quality and testing consultant Isabel Evans has more than thirty years of IT experience in the financial, communications, and software sectors. Her work focuses on quality management, software testing and user experience (UX), She encourages IT teams and customers to work together via flexible processes designed and tailored by the teams that use them. As well as her consultancy and project work, she is currently researching into the UX of testing tools for the tester, as a part-time, mature, postgraduate student at the University of Malta. Isabel authored Achieving Software Quality Through Teamwork and chapters in Agile Testing: How to Succeed in an eXtreme Testing Environment; The Testing Practitioner; and Foundations of Software Testing. A popular speaker and story-teller at software conferences worldwide, Isabel is a Chartered IT Professional and Fellow of the British Computer Society, and has been a member of software industry improvement working groups for over 20 years. In November 2017, she was presented with the EuroSTAR Testing Excellence Award for services to the industry. She has a website: www.isabelevans.uk. She has two blogs: https://isabelevansconsultancy.wordpress.com/ and https://isabelevanswriting.wordpress.com/. Her linked in page is at https://www.linkedin.com/in/isabelevans/. She tweets occasionally as @IsabelE_Test.

We work in teams. Teams that have goals, that work together to solve problems, that sometimes squabble and make up. How people in the group behave depends on the styles of leadership, management and followership adopted in the group, and on each of our individual behaviours. In order that we work together as efficiently and effectively as possible, we need to understand the range of approaches or styles for leadership and management, what styles we feel most comfortable with, and how we react to both being leaders and being led. It’s not just humans who work in groups. Other animals can tell us about how we interact with individuals, teams, and groups both as leaders and followers. Isabel discusses animal behaviour, predators, animal groups, parasites and epiphytes, and the richness of symbiotic partnership. Regardless of the project model/software life cycle model you use, you’ll need to understand these interactions, and when to adopt a leadership, mentoring, coaching, following or learning attitude in order to help your group thrive.