Communities… They’re Great! But Let’s Break The Silos.

Dan Ashby

How good are the communities that you are part of?

Also, why don’t different communities that revolve around different crafts mix more?

I love the testing communities. I also love the Agile communities. I’m also getting more involved with some Leadership communities that are fabulous. And some compliance & regulatory communities. And of course, I’m enjoying the Dev communities too.

A diverse group of people sitting around a round table, with the text "Communities" on it.

Community involvement consumes a lot of my private time (maybe too much time? đź‘€)

But individually, I get a lot of value from each of the communities that I’m involved in. But the fact they each revolve around individual crafts seems to be causing big problems for the holistic industry

The dev communities don’t have the same understanding as the testing communities about what testing is, so are forming some wildly different opinions and strategies, which could be detrimental.
The Agile communities are producing some amazing ways of streamlining our flow, but the compliance communities barely know what Agile is. The leadership communities are finding some intuitive ways for building a better collaborative culture, but testers are still struggling to be invited into the conversations.

Lots of dysfunction, which could be solved if communities just mixed!

But here’s the thing. These communities aren’t exclusive! The communities that I’m part of are the opposite – they’re very inclusive. All are welcome. Anyone can sign up to their slack workspaces, or attend their meetups, or join their online sessions…
So why don’t we?

I think there’s something to be said about our “comfort zones” here, and our thirst for validation. We want to validate that how we see the world (within the confines of our craft) is correct. How we define our craft is correct. We like the comfort of being in our bubble of likeminded people in the same craft. And the community sessions tend to select talks, workshops, blogs, and podcasts that that resonate with our bubble. And that’s perfectly valid as that’s what people from that craft tend to request and gravitate towards – stuff related directly and explicitly to that craft.

But on the other hand, we all talk about the benefits of diversity… So why not diversify our communities across the range of crafts, to include sessions from across the range of crafts? Why not diversify what you choose to attend or view beyond just your own craft? Why not choose to talk about, and share your stories about your craft and your experiences in your role, to a more diverse audience with other people from different crafts? And community organisers or conference organisers, what would happen if you diversified the talks you selected to span across different crafts? Do you think it would diversify your audience?

Image consists of lots of hands from a diverse group of people connecting together in the centre, with the text "Better Together" overlayed on the image.

What do you think the impact would be?
Do you think it’d help solve some of the problems we see with our crafts (and corresponding communities) being so siloed?
Would that help bridge testing and development? Or Agile and compliance? Or any of the other problems we see?

It’d certainly be an interesting experiment.
 

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This has been an interesting thought!
I hope to see you in some other, different communities soon! 🙂
 

4 thoughts on “Communities… They’re Great! But Let’s Break The Silos.”

  1. IMagine if a testing conference had one track focused on coding/patterns/and things testers wish their dev’s knew?

    IMagine if coding conferences had testing talks that weren’t just unit tests and DevOps

    Imagine if Testing conferences had some of those devops talks too

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  3. This resonates particularly strongly with me – but I’ve found a snag.

    I am (or have been) active in a number of different communities, often in widely differing craft areas. In fact, that’s probably one reason I landed my present role. I can often see similarities or congruencies between different communities. But I often find it can be an uphill battle to get one community to take on board lessons from another.

    For example: in a previous life, I was a labour union representative. I spent a lot of my time in the workplace in that role talking to people and managements about things like working conditions, accessibility, job terms and conditions, and issues around workplace health and safety, including stress and the many components that go towards making one particular job or workplace stressful and another, similar role less stressful. It won’t surprise you, then, that I’m a serious advocate for union membership and a role for union representatives within the workplace.

    So I’m gratified when I see the testing/dev/IT community/communities discussing these things, but I’m equally frustrated when I see them trying to re-invent the wheel, or making basic mistakes through not knowing the precise legal framework that employers and employees have to work within – things that the average trade union rep would have at their fingertips. Yet when I’ve suggested that there’s room for a discussion on this subject within the community, I get either incomprehension or even push-back from the very people I think I could help.

    We’re all keen to understand, embrace and accept diversity of all kinds. Perhaps it’s time that the concept was extended to consider diversity of experience, and to benefit from the gains to be made from looking outside our specific silos.

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