“People are the most important asset of any organization.” Even though we hear that a lot, leaders and managers actually spend very little time focusing on the people side of testing. The skills and makeup of a test team are important and must be managed and cultivated properly.

As I reflect on my struggles empowering teams to become self-managing, I am amazed that I didn't understand earlier. Things that seem so obvious after the fact are often difficult to acknowledge in the moment. I failed to recognize that my extensive experience with risk mitigation was preventing the team from taking risks. Tricia Broderick shares the lessons she learned in her journey from manager to leader. Join in and expect challenging self-reflection as you work with Tricia to recognize how your past successes can create limitations for your team. Learn about assumptions and expectations surrounding self-managing teams, common misunderstandings of what you need to do to empower a team, and the reasons why so many managers, despite their good intentions, fail. Leave with a goal to let go of certain skills that helped achieve your professional success.

For the past couple of years, Dan North has been working with and studying teams who are dramatically more productive than any he's ever seen. In weeks they produce results that take other teams months. One of the central behaviors Dan has observed is their ability to embrace uncertainty, holding multiple contradictory opinions at the same time and deferring commitment until there is a good reason. Embracing uncertainty lies at the heart of agile delivery and is one of the primary reasons organizations struggle with agile adoption. We are desperately uncomfortable with uncertainty, so much so that we will replace it with anything-even things we know to be wrong. Dan claims we have turned our back on the original Agile Manifesto, and explains why understanding risk and embracing uncertainty are fundamental to agile delivery-and why we find it so scary.