Fluent Agile teams are very good at building quality into their code, but nobody’s perfect. Every team has blind spots. How do you discover your team’s unknown unknowns? Janet Gregory and Abby Bangser join us to explore this question.

Janet Gregory is co-author with Lisa Crispin on three books on Agile Testing. She consults with agile teams to help them integrate testing activities into their daily work. She is also co-founder of the Agile Testing Fellowship, offering holistic and agile testing courses around the world.

Abby Bangser is a Principal Engineer with a passion for bringing product and software engineering practices to internal infrastructure and tooling. Currently Abby is working with Syntasso to enable platform teams to build the secure, scalable and usable platforms. Outside of work, Abby co-hosts #CoffeeOps London meetup, is a SLOConf global captain, and hobbles around a tag rugby field as much as she can.

Reading:
📖 Blind Spot Discovery

🎙 Discussion prompts:

• Blind spot discovery is ultimately about finding important gaps in your team’s understanding. What are some of your favorite techniques for finding blind spots?

• How is blind spot discovery different from traditional testing activities? Who should be doing it?

• As the book discusses, some of the most commonly overlooked blind spots involve how organizations decide what to build. How can teams discover these blind spots and influence changes?

• The possibility of blind spots can, itself, be a blind spot. How would you suggest introducing blind spot discovery to an organization?

About the Book Club

From October 2021 to August 2022, I hosted a call-in talk show based on the second edition of The Art of Agile Development. The series used the book as a jumping-off point for wide-ranging discussions about Agile ideas and practices, and had a star-studded guest list.

For an archive of past sessions, visit the book club index. For more about the book, visit the Art of Agile Development home page.