Joep Schuurkes (Posts about skills)

Five levels of note-taking in meetings

Joep Schuurkes — Sun, 20 Apr 2025 22:00:00 GMT

level 0: no one takes notes

Few things confuse me as much as being a meeting with no one taking notes. Is everyone's memory so much better than my own? Is what's being said just not that important? Are people fine with only retaining a few things and nothing else?

Luckily I'm not alone. Johanna Rothman seems to agree with me, at least for essential meetings:¹

If a meeting is essential, it will have an agenda. It will have minutes. It will have a list of action items, and someone will manage them so that people are accountable for their action items.
- Modern Management Made Easy by Johanna Rothman

That's why it's level 0. There's no reason to ever be at this level. Borrow some pen and paper. use your phone. The least you can do is take notes for yourself.

Three lessons after three months of quality engineering

Joep Schuurkes — Sun, 27 Nov 2022 15:41:25 GMT

Three months ago I started a new job as a quality engineer, supporting two teams. So far it's been an interesting challenge. The two teams were formed only a few months before I joined, although some team members had been working for the company before that. Each team has their own product manager. We also have an engineering manager, but he joined only two weeks before I did. And then I was added to the mix, with a job description that didn't give a lot more guidance than: support the team in things related to testing and quality.

So my first task in my new job was figuring out what my job was. Or rather, figure out what concrete things I could do that fit that job description. This was not made easier by the fact that we're a fully remote company. Not being in the same space throughout the day does make things harder when you're trying to find your place. Reflecting on the past three months made me realize there are three things that are really important: visibility, connections, and patience.

Uncovering Agile micro-skills at FroGS conf

Joep Schuurkes — Mon, 14 Mar 2022 15:56:09 GMT

At the second FroGS conf Open Space on 12 March 2022 I facilitated a session based on my blog post "Four skills to embody the four Agile values". My goal with the session was to uncover more Agile (micro-)skills. In this post I'll share what we did during the session and I'll close off with some thoughts on the biggest challenge of this exercise: too many skills. Before I start however, a big thank you to everyone who participated in the session!

What we value

I opened the session with asking people to add stickies to the board of things they valued in Agile software development. When was I preparing the Miro board before the session, I labeled this part of the board "values". Then I remembered I had decided earlier to label it "what we value", so as to avoid the discussion about what values are and aren't. The topic did come up (i.e. the relation between values, ethics and morals), so I was glad I could respond by saying it's a great topic, but not for this session.

Four skills to embody the four Agile values

Joep Schuurkes — Sun, 06 Feb 2022 16:04:06 GMT

If you're familiar with the Agile Manifesto, you're familiar with its four values:

Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
Working software over comprehensive documentation
Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
Responding to change over following a plan

Recently this made me wonder: how do you apply these values? How do you live them? What skills do you need to embody them? In this post I won't be sharing any definitive or complete answers, but as a starting point I have identified four skills needed to embody the four Agile values.