Podcast appearances and mentions of alex schladebeck

CTO Series: From Team Lead to CEO, Leadership Challenges and Growth with Alex Schladebeck In this BONUS episode, we hear from Alex Schladebeck, CEO and Quality Advocate at BREDEX GmbH. Alex shares her journey from testing and consultancy to becoming a CEO, offering valuable insights into agile leadership, the importance of communication, and the evolving landscape of technology and quality in software development. The Power of Communication in Leadership "Communication isn't just part of the work; it is the work." Alex reflects on her career, emphasizing that her approach to leadership isn't defined by a single moment but by recurring patterns where communication played a crucial role. She shares how continuous conversation is vital for navigating changes and resolving conflicts, underscoring the importance of keeping communication channels open to manage the evolving demands of the tech industry. "Effective leadership hinges on continuous conversations. Make communication the core of your leadership practice." Aligning Tech Strategy with Business Goals "We need to balance the excitement of new technology with what the customer truly needs." Alex discusses the importance of aligning tech strategies with broader business objectives while maintaining agility. She shares her experience with implementing OKRs (Objective-Key Results) to bridge the gap between engineering teams and business leaders. By using short cycles for experimentation and decision-making, her team remains flexible and responsive to change without becoming reactive. "Use OKRs and short cycles to keep your tech strategy aligned with business goals, ensuring adaptability without sacrificing focus." Fostering Collaboration Between Tech and Business Units "Stepping outside your own perspective is key to understanding what's critical for both the business and the customer." Collaboration between tech and business units is essential, and Alex highlights strategies that have helped her foster this collaboration. By encouraging teams to consider different perspectives, especially when making decisions that affect customers, Alex ensures that her team remains aligned with the business's critical needs. "Take different perspectives into account during decision-making to ensure alignment between tech and business objectives." The Role of Experimentation in Roadmapping "Little experiments can lead to big innovations if we collaborate with customers early on." Alex shares her approach to roadmapping by incorporating small experiments to explore new ideas. These experiments often involve pilot projects with customers, allowing her team to test and iterate on new technologies before full-scale implementation. This method helps maintain a balance between stability in ongoing projects and innovation. "Incorporate small experiments into your roadmap to innovate while maintaining stability in ongoing projects." Overcoming Challenges in Leadership Transition "Stepping up from a team lead to CEO is about learning to take responsibility and adapt." One of the biggest challenges Alex faced was transitioning from a team lead to a CEO. With the guidance of her co-CEO and mentor, she learned to navigate this complex role without a clear guidebook, focusing on transparency, reflection, and adaptability as key leadership traits. "Reflect on your decisions and be transparent with your team to navigate the challenges of leadership transitions." Building Empathy Between Leaders and Teams "Leaders are people too, and sharing our decision-making processes helps build trust." Alex stresses the importance of creating empathy between leaders and their teams by being transparent about decision-making processes. She believes that while transparency doesn't eliminate conflict or disappointment, it fosters a better understanding of the context behind decisions, helping teams to navigate challenges together. "Build empathy by sharing your decision-making process, but be prepared for conflict—it's part of leadership." Embracing AI and Its Future Impact Alex shares her perspective on the rise of AI and its potential to transform software and product development. While she recognizes the opportunities AI presents, she emphasizes the need to remain focused on human-centric development, ensuring that technology serves to enhance, rather than replace, the human element in quality and product development. "As AI evolves, keep your focus on human-centric development to ensure technology enhances, rather than replaces, human contributions." Measuring Success with Meaningful KPIs "Numbers are useful, but context is crucial." Alex discusses her cautious approach to KPIs, emphasizing that while metrics like the DORA metrics are valuable, they must be interpreted within the right context. She shares an example of how a clear KPI—reducing escalation meetings—helped turn around a troubled project by focusing on the underlying issues rather than just the numbers. "Use KPIs to guide your decisions, but always consider the context behind the numbers to drive meaningful change." Staying Updated and Informed "I delegate much of the learning to my team, but I remain curious and engaged." To stay current with industry trends and best practices, Alex relies on a flat organizational structure where team leads are empowered to stay updated. She also participates in conference watch parties, engages in Slack groups, and pairs with colleagues to learn new technologies firsthand, fostering a culture of continuous learning. "Empower your team to stay informed, but stay curious and engaged in the learning process." Influential Reads for Leadership "We work with humans in socio-technical systems, and it's important to understand both the technical and human aspects." Alex shares some of the books that have influenced her leadership approach, including "How to Talk So Kids Will Listen & Listen So Kids Will Talk," "Radical Candor," and "Never Split the Difference." These books have helped her navigate the complex, human-centric aspects of leadership in technical environments. "Combine technical know-how with human understanding—books like 'Radical Candor' offer valuable insights for leaders." [IMAGE HERE] Are you having trouble helping the team work well with their Product Owner? We've put together a course to help you work on the collaboration team-product owner. You can find it at bit.ly/coachyourpo. 18 modules, 8+ hours of modules with tools and techniques that you can use to help teams and PO's collaborate.   About Alex Schladebeck Alex Schladebeck is the CEO and Quality Advocate at BREDEX GmbH. She is an agile leader with a passion for quality and human-centric development. With a rich background in testing, product ownership, and consultancy, Alex now focuses on strategy, team coaching, and customer communication. A frequent speaker at Agile events, she was named the Most Influential Agile Testing Professional Person in 2018. Outside of work, she enjoys sports, music, and exploring new cultures. To learn more about Alex Schladebeck and follow her work, visit BREDEX GmbH and Schladebeck.de.  You can link with Alex Schladebeck on LinkedIn.

Was verändert sich gerade im Testbereich? Und welche Skills sind heute wichtiger denn je? Alex Schladebeck, Geschäftsführerin und Leiterin der Qualitätssicherung bei der Bredex GmbH, weiß es.

Today’s episode is sponsored by CodeSubmit – the best take-home assignments for your tech hiring!Links:Alex’s TwitterAlex’s WebsiteMob testing blog postBredex websiteBook reference about “being technical”Subscribe on iTunes, Spotify, Google, Deezer, or via RSS.

This month on the Cucumber Podcast we sit down with Alex Schladebeck who identifies as a Tester. Sal Freudenberg and Steve Tooke - co-founders of Cucumber - ask her about her recent keynote appearance at CukenFest London as well as her thoughts on the role of modern testers on agile teams. Alex can be found on Twitter https://twitter.com/alex_schl

Jorgen Hesselberg and Steven Wolff on Agile Amped, Melissa Perri on Agile Uprising, Eric Elliott on Simple Leadership, Liz Keogh on Being Human, and Alex Schladebeck on Test Talks. I'd love for you to email me with any comments about the show or any suggestions for podcasts I might want to feature. Email podcast@thekguy.com. This episode covers the five podcast episodes I found most interesting and wanted to share links to during the two week period starting March 4, 2019. These podcast episodes may have been released much earlier, but this was the week when I started sharing links to them to my social network followers. JORGEN HESSELBERG AND STEVEN WOLFF ON AGILE AMPED The Agile Amped podcast featured Jorgen Hesselberg and Steven Wolff with host Howard Sublett. I liked what Steven had to say about how new norms can come into being simply through inaction and how we want to be more intentional about creating norms. This comment reminded me of the discussion of norms in the book Influencer: The New Science of Leading Change by Grenny et al., a book I highly recommend. In my own work, I use working agreements with my team to intentionally develop team norms and hold each other accountable for them. iTunes link: https://itunes.apple.com/ca/podcast/change-the-norms-to-change-the-culture/id992128516?i=1000429382285&mt=2 Website link: https://solutionsiq.podbean.com/e/change-the-norms-to-change-the-culture/ MELISSA PERRI ON AGILE UPRISING The Agile Uprising podcast featured Melissa Perri with hosts Colleen Johnson, Troy Lightfoot, and Chris Murman. This episode caught my attention because I enjoyed Melissa’s last appearance on Agile Uprising which motivated me to pre-order her book The Build Trap back in November last year. I learned a lot from the book and it introduced me to the book The Art Of Action by Stephen Bungay, which I talked about in the last podcast episode. I liked Melissa’s description of product managers as bad idea terminators. I see this as more of a behavior during the convergent thinking phase of product design. Lack of focus is definitely a problem I see on product teams, so I can appreciate the idea of having someone to keep people focused on the most valuable problems to solve. iTunes link: https://itunes.apple.com/ca/podcast/escaping-the-build-trap-w-melissa-perri/id1163230424?i=1000429120613&mt=2 Website link: https://agileuprising.libsyn.com/podcast/escaping-the-build-trap-w-melissa-perri ERIC ELLIOTT ON SIMPLE LEADERSHIP The Simple Leadership podcast featured Eric Elliott with host Christian McCarrick. I appreciated Eric’s comment about the myth of the individual contributor engineer because I have seen developers being judged on simple, easy-to-measure metrics like closed ticket counts when a more appropriate metric would be one that takes into account their time spent mentoring and the benefits that such mentoring had on the team. Over the long term, I have seen the damage that judging engineers by closed ticket count does to a culture where everybody is incentivized to work in their individual silo and almost no mentoring takes place even from senior engineers for whom mentoring and coaching should be, in my opinion, a large part of their day. iTunes link: https://itunes.apple.com/ca/podcast/how-culture-can-help-your-teams-scale-with-eric-elliott/id1260241682?i=1000429163879&mt=2 Website link: http://simpleleadership.io/how-culture-can-help-you-scale-with-eric-elliott/ LIZ KEOGH ON BEING HUMAN The Being Human podcast featured Liz Keogh with host Richard Atherton. Liz talked about the Cynefin framework, psychological safety, and real options. I particularly liked her story of a team that invested in making changes easily reversible by creating a rollback mechanism for when a production release goes awry. She remarked on how this technical safety net provided psychological safety as well. I also liked her description of real options, which I have recently been reading about in the book Commitment by Olav Maassen, Chris Matts, and Chris Geary. Liz told a story about how conference organizers gave themselves options by over-ordering on the engraved trophies. The very affecting second half of this podcast episode was focused on the #metoo movement. Liz shared her experiences of being harassed and Richard confessed to his own poor behavior. iTunes link: https://itunes.apple.com/ca/podcast/47-1-complexity-2-exploring-metoo-with-liz-keogh/id1369745673?i=1000429964823&mt=2 Website link: http://shoutengine.com/BeingHuman/47-1-complexity-2-exploring-metoo-with-liz-keogh-73971 ALEX SCHLADEBECK ON TEST TALKS The Test Talks podcast featuring Alex Schladebeck with host Joe Colantonio. The title of the episode, “How to Listen to Your Tests”, immediately caught my attention since I have been encouraging co-workers to develop this skill ever since I read Growing Object-Oriented Software Guided By Tests by Steve Freeman and Nat Pryce, even going so far as to create a 10-minute YouTube video tutorial on how to Listen To The Tests last April. Joe and Alex talked about how she applies her training in linguistics in her career in software testing. It turns out that such training was actually helpful as it taught her how to move back and forth between detailed and abstract ways of thinking. They got into a discussion of test data management, which Alex likened to continuous integration because it is something that starts out being painful when you don’t address it often enough or when you push it onto the testers and it becomes easier the more often you pay attention to it and when you make it everyone’s responsibility. I also liked Alex’s story of a pelican encounter on an early-morning run coming to represent to her the unknown unknowns that exploratory testing helps you discover. iTunes link: https://itunes.apple.com/ca/podcast/240-how-to-listen-to-your-tests-with-alex-schladebeck/id826722706?i=1000429560907&mt=2 Website link: https://www.joecolantonio.com/testtalks/240-alex-schladebeck/ FEEDBACK Ask questions, make comments, and let your voice be heard by emailing podcast@thekguy.com. 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Today we’ll be test talking with Alex Schladebeck about her views on Software Testing. Discover what linguistics has to do with testing, how to stop hating your UI tests and much more. If you're interested in software testing, you don’t want to miss this episode.

Freunde der Qualität, wir begrüßen Euch zu unserer 5. Podcast-Ausgabe! Christian Brandes, Team Lead Requirements Engineering bei QualityMinds, hat diesmal Alex Schladebeck von der BREDEX GmbH zu Gast und plaudert mit ihr über Qualität, Agilität und Buffy The Vampire Slayer. Viel Spaß dabei! (Technische Randnotiz: Die Aufnahme dieser Folge sah sich gleich mehreren Impediments gegenüber - z.B. einem erstmals zum Einsatz kommenden Recording-Plugin sowie einer instabilen DSL-Verbindung, die während der Aufnahmesession sogar komplett abschmierte und Christian in den Folgetagen noch weitere Offline-Sessions und viele Telefonate mit der Hotline seines Providers bescherte. Das Ergebnis entspricht technisch in vielerlei Hinsicht also nicht unseren Qualitäts-Vorstellungen, und wir entschuldigen uns dafür. Trotzdem wollen wir den unter widrigen Umständen aufgenommenen Content veröffentlichen - ganz im Einklang mit agilen Ideen wie Experiment, Inspect & Adapt und Fail Faster. ;-) Wenn Ihr diese Entscheidung nicht so toll findet, gebt uns bitte entsprechendes Feedback. Und ein Extra-Dankeschön an Sebastian Karg für seinen Einsatz & Support!) Sprecher: Christian Brandes: https://www.xing.com/profile/Christian_Brandes11 Twitter: https://twitter.com/cb_REteam Alex Schladebeck: http://www.schladebeck.de Twitter: https://twitter.com/@alex_schl Ressourcen online: Alex & Christian sind beide live am German Testing Day 2018 zu erleben: https://www.germantestingday.info/german-testing-day-2018/programm/konferenzprogramm.html Training mit Janet Gregory zu „Whole Team Approach for Agile Quality“: https://janetgregory.ca/services/the-whole-team-approach-to-agile-testing-3-day/ Zweiteiliger Artikel zu Architektur & Testbarkeit (Stichwort „Points of Control/of Observation“): https://www.architecture4testability.com Leadership as a host: http://sfwork.com/downloads/HostLeadership2009.pdf Meetups zu verschiedenen Themen an verschiedenen Standorten: https://www.meetup.com/de-DE/ Über QualityMinds: www.qualityminds.de https://twitter.com/qualitymindsde Feedback & Themenwünsche an: christian.brandes@qualityminds.de

The truth is, no one will care as much or be as interested in your developing testing career as you are. There are studies that say that Software Testing is one of the Happiest Jobs there is. Does that sound weird, or does that sound spot on? In this episode of “The Testing Show” we welcome back Alex Schladebeck and welcome for the first time QualiTest’s Elle Gee to discuss software testing careers and how they differ or are similar depending on the organization in question. Regulars Perze Ababa and Justin Rohrman also riff along with Matt Heusser on the unique challenges in developing and sustaining a career in software testing. Also, in our news segment, what happens when Automation and a software glitch makes it impossible to do a task we often take for granted? 900 Shell stations in Malaysia discovered exactly that, and we certainly have opinions about that, too.   Resource by QualiTest Group

This is Part Two of our discussion with Alex Schladebeck and Joel Montvelisky. We tackle regression testing and share a few stories from the trenches (and a ghostly Michael even makes a contribution to this topic), discuss the idea that perhaps continuous testing is a concept that’s time really has come, and look to see if we can possibly break out of the “hardening” process at the end of sprints in favor of more testing up front, so that discoveries can actually be addressed sooner rather than pushed off to later. Resource by QualiTest Group

It seems that 2017 is shaping up to be the year of the two-parter, as we are back with another two part episode. This is Part One, in which the Testing Show regulars chat with Alex Schladebeck and Joel Montvelisky about the way that testing is practiced globally. Joel has some insights on this in that he steers the State of Testing Questionnaire that runs in January and February each year, and gathers statistics about how testers actually work. We look at some issues that were discovered with the survey, such as how many organizations claim to do automation versus how many actually are making a solid go at it, as well as where those organizations choose to, or choose not to, apply their efforts. Also, in the news, what happens when TSA’s computers go out on one of the busiest travel days of the year (the day after New Years)? The Testing Show panel and their guest weigh in, and they have plenty to say, both on the outage and the process in general. Resource by QualiTest Group

Alex Schladebeck is both a tester and a Product Owner. Who'da thunk that a tester (i.e., the person constantly trying to think how the user might experience a product) and a Product Owner (i.e., the person responsible for ensuring that the user gets the value they want) could perhaps have similar ideas about product design and development. Alex is at AATC2016 to turn "potentials" into "slayers" (and, yes, that is a Buffy reference). The goal of her session is to promote the concept of taking the testing responsibilities, which are often quite difficult and unreasonable ("You never have enough testers to do all of the testing"), and spreading them out across the team to make it more manageable. Alex Schladebeck is the head of Test Consulting at BREDEX GmbH and is also Product Owner for Jubula, the open source test tool. Within both roles, shes responsible for making sure that customers needs are satisfied, be it in terms of quality assurance services for their projects or features for implementation.  SolutionsIQ's Leslie Morse hosts. About Agile Amped The Agile Amped podcast series engages with industry thought leaders at Agile events across the country to bring valuable content to subscribers anytime, anywhere. To receive real-time updates, subscribe at YouTube, iTunes or SolutionsIQ.com. Subscribe: http://bit.ly/SIQYouTube, http://bit.ly/SIQiTunes, http://www.solutionsiq.com/agile-amped/ Follow: http://bit.ly/SIQTwitter Like: http://bit.ly/SIQFacebook