Background
Our team has a weekly hour in the diary for a session called "Experiments and Learning." (It pre-dates my joining.) As you'd guess, it's intended to be an opportunity for knowledge-sharing. The sad thing is that I'd estimate only 1 in 5 of those sessions doesn't get cancelled because no-one has anything to share.
One reason for that is that we tend to think of them as demonstrations or mini-lectures which would require preparation. I've done a few myself, including on Inattentional Blindness and on Session-Based Test Management, and they took a lot of personal time to put together.
Rather than waste the opportunity we have every week, I proposed that we try Lean Coffee at one session. If we liked it, then we would always have the option to do Lean Coffee periodically after that.
Lean Coffee, of course, requires almost no preparation. And gets the whole team (or as many as want to be involved) actively involved in the session rather than passively listening.
After proposing the idea to our QA Manager and getting his buy-in, I emailed my teammates to introduce the concept and asked them to let me know if they were interested in trying it out.
I wasn't entirely surprised to find that the vast majority of the team didn't respond at all, but when it was brought up again in our team meeting it seemed that there was interest.
And so, more re-assured that there wouldn't be an empty (or embarassingly quiet) room, I went ahead.
To give everyone a starting point for ideas on what to discuss I shared the list of topics that had been suggested at TestBash 2016 in advance.
The topics on the day
At the session, after combining stickies suggesting the same topic, we ended up with the following on our "to be discussed" list:
- Motivation. Keeping testing interesting
- The testers role. Are testers needed anymore?
- Security testing
- Real-world use cases and environments
- TDD/ATDD/BDD
It was interesting that the first thing we talked about was the one that had been most voted for so - in theory - was the one most people were interested in. Yet I think it was one of the shorter discussions. That may have been because everyone was a bit unsure/reticent about talking and hadn’t got warmed up yet. (Of course, maybe people also felt they weren't able to talk about feeling bored in front of our manager - although he was one of the ones posing that question!)
It so happened that we covered all of the topics we had in our session with just a 5 minute overrun. This was probably a good thing. Whilst in general there should be no pressure to get through all the suggested items, as this was the first Lean Coffee session it was nice that no one was left feeling they had wasted their time coming up with topics.
Reflections and lessons learned
- We didn't have the typical group configuration for Lean Coffee. There were 11 of us, and the room didn't allow us to split into smaller groups at separate tables.
This turned out ok because our group weren't the normal self-selecting Lean Coffee group and some of the people there weren't so comfortable talking. Conversely, I felt I probably talked too much myself. This was partly because as the instigator of the session (and the reason everyone had found themselves sitting there) I felt a need to keep conversation flowing.
- Initially I had intended to take the vote on whether to continue discussing a topic or not after 5 minutes. But in practice that didn't feel long enough - it seemed silly to ask if we should continue with something we were only just getting into.
Throwing myself into doubt about that also meant that I didn't take a proper "roman vote". I tended to ask the group if they wanted to continue and then people seemed to be looking around to see what everyone else was doing before they would risk putting their own hand up. Getting everyone to give thumbs up/thumbs down at the same time would probably have overcome that.
I think next time I might experiment with taking a first vote at 10 mins, and then at 5 minute intervals after that.
- After the session I emailed everyone to ask for feedback, and for any criticism/improvements. (I felt I was slightly more likely to get honest feedback via email than I was by asking face-to-face.)
I got two responses - both positive and interested in doing it again.
It's hard to tell how valuable the rest of the team really found it. But now they know what Lean Coffee is, and they know that it's there as a future option any time we want to make use of it. And it's so simple that I don't need to be there to "run" it.
