1. Curiosity drives real organizational change
2. You have the knowledge right now to do much more than you think
3. Falling down is a great opportunity to examine the ground

Rick Tracy works as a Software Engineer at Rabobank, as well as participating in various work groups, workshops, and presentations about testing as a skillset. With an academic background in Organizational Psychology and Business and a career background in IT, sales and management, Rick tries his best to tie his various interests together and present new tactics and opportunities whenever the chance arises. Aside from biographies Rick avoids talking in the third person and welcomes a lively, creative, and open debate in interpersonal and large group discussions.

This talk is paired with Working Smarter – How to do more with less time and be happy about it! as part of a conversation track on Skill Changes

 

 

Three years ago we were asked to become self steering Agile Development teams. This came as a surprise to many, since most didn’t know what Agile was and we were happy working with our Testers, Developers, and Business Analysts, thank you very much. Nevertheless, change came and we moved with it, learning to work together in small production teams and giving Operations a whole new set of headaches (and hopefully a few solutions to make up for it!)

A year ago we were asked to change once more, this time to DevOps. Despite our previous mutterings we had created quite a name for ourselves as Agile Development teams, and we were happy in our Agile Teams, thank you very much. Nevertheless, change came once more and we moved with it, working to incorporate Operations into our Development process.

But a strange thing happened along the way: we got curious.

In order to integrate Operations, we had to take a look at what we did, how we did it, and why we did it that way. Gaps in our process revealed themselves, opportunities that we hadn’t spotted were suddenly clear, and bridging activities, ways to help out other specializations, moved from a luxury for high energy colleagues to a daily must-have.

This is the story about what we discovered and what we are still discovering about the interlock of specializations that make up the Development and Production processes in our world. We’ll discuss pitfalls, victories, and motivations for learning more. My hope is that this story inspires lively debate, ideas for action, and above all curiosity about your own systems, processes and teams.