teams

Esther Derby has been thinking about trust in the workplace a lot lately, and the absence of trust, too. When she asks people what it's like to work in a group where people trust their managers, they tell her information flows freely, conflict is productive, and that they can tell their managers what they think without fear of retribution. On the other hand, when trust is absent, people hide information, look out for themselves, don't bring up new ideas, and withhold effort.

Back in the day of cross-Atlantic boat travel, luggage that wasn't needed during the long journey was labeled "Not Wanted on the Voyage" and stowed away below decks. In this column, Fiona Charles suggests that testers can also be viewed as heavy baggage and not exactly welcome by some parties during the journey of software development. To understand why others might think this way, Fiona takes a good, hard look at what testers do that could possibly make them undesirable team mates.

Do you ever get the feeling that some conflict just can't be solved? The team members in conflict address the issue, it seems to go away but then it comes back. Maybe all dressed up in a new situation or with a different level of intensity, but the conflict is somehow familiar and you know that it has undoubtedly returned. If the team uses humor as a stress-reliever, you may even hear the conflict turned into a sarcastic half-joke, "OK team, just to put you on notice. Julie hates me again." Sounds almost like a marriage, doesn't it?

If you're working on more than one project at a time or if your managers are asking you to do so, it's time to make some decisions. Not every project should be started or finished, and certainly no one person or team should work on all projects at the same time. The organization needs to make some decisions about whether to commit to a project, kill it so it doesn't interfere with other projects, or transform it so it can succeed in a reasonable time.