We do not all have the same job

Joep Schuurkes — Sat, 15 Nov 2025 23:00:00 GMT

At the first conference I ever attended - or I think it was the first, in any case it was Let's Test in 2012 -, I asked someone "So what kind of applications do you test?" And the reply was: "One of the onboard computers of a Saab fighter plane." While at that time I was the test lead for an enterprise service bus.

We do not all have the same job.

In a recent episode of the Quality Remarks podcast hosted by Keith Klain, Paul Holland told the story of an organization where running the test automation took 13 people two weeks. And no, I'm sorry, they didn't go into any detail about what happened in those two weeks. In my current project our pipeline takes 0 people about 17 minutes to run.

We do not all have the same job.

Thinking about quality: management paradigms and quality

Joep Schuurkes — Mon, 15 Mar 2021 08:32:08 GMT

On 30 January 2021 I participated in the Quality Acceleration Peer Conference organized by Huib Schoots and Joost Voskuil. Participants were Alan Page, Areti Panou, Ash Winter, Bart Knaack, Conor Fitzgerald, Rouke de Jong, Gwen Diagram, George Dinwiddie, Janet Gregory, Joost Voskuil, Joost van Wollingen, Martijn Meijering, Rob Meaney, Vincent Wijnen - with Huib Schoots facilitating the peer conference. The main topics mentioned in the invite were: "How can you sell quality?", "How can you convince people that quality can accelerate software delivery?", and "What limitations or barriers do you hit?"

Reflecting during and after our discussions on these topics, I realized there are some interesting things going on about how we talk about quality and how to sell it. Enough interesting things to fill more than one blog post, so this will be a four-part series. And I might expand on some ideas in the series after that.

This is the third part, exploring five different management paradigms as identified by Carol Sanford in her book "The Regenerative Business" and how they affect quality. The first part was about choosing your value system can be found here. The second part about selling quality can be found here.

Psychological cover and psychological safety

If the challenge of quality is getting several things right (perception, desire, and means) and getting to an agreement among people, how we organize ourselves becomes a crucial topic. As W. Edwards Deming said: "A bad system will beat a good person every time." Or as Kurt Lewin said in a more neutral way: "Behavior is a function of the Person and the Environment." An important part of any environment is psychological safety. In episode 155 of their Troubleshooting Agile podcast Jeffrey Fredrick and Douglas Squirrel make an interesting distinction between psychological cover and psychological safety.

Joep Schuurkes (Posts about paradigms)

We do not all have the same job

Thinking about quality: management paradigms and quality

Psychological cover and psychological safety