Talk resources
Poking the System
Resources and further exploration from Elisabeth Hendrickson’s session at CAST 2026, the Association for Software Testing’s annual conference.
About the session
Let’s say you want to change something about software delivery in your organization. Maybe you want to improve testing, raise quality, speed up delivery, or leverage AI more effectively. You make a change: introduce a new practice, restructure work or teams, or roll out new tools. Now what? Maybe you got what you hoped for but with a side order of unintended consequences: delivery is faster but costs went up, or quality is better but morale is down. Or maybe the changes backfired spectacularly and the original problem is worse than ever. That’s what happened at a startup where Elisabeth was a Director of Quality Engineering during the dotcom bubble in the late 1990s. She wrote about it in her paper “Better Testing, Worse Quality.” Why does that happen? Software development is a non-linear adaptive system. Any given property of the system arises from a web of influences. There is no single root cause, and no one weird trick that can fix everything. You poke the system; the system pokes back.
Pulling ideas from the book Signals and Levers, this hands-on session uses a simulation of a software delivery system to explore systems thinking tools to reason about that web of influences. Unlike the real world, you’ll be able to see the effects of your policy decisions in seconds rather than months, enabling you to run experiment after experiment. You’ll learn to see the telltale signs of reinforcing loops—both virtuous and vicious—and how to identify possible interventions. By the end of this session you’ll have better tools in your toolbox to reason about the system, watch for surprises, and help others see what you see.
Books
- Donella Meadows — Thinking in Systems from Chelsea Green Publishing Book ↗
- Peter Senge — The Fifth Discipline from Penguin Random House Book ↗
- Gerald M. Weinberg — Quality Software Management Volume 1: Systems Thinking from Dorset House Book ↗
- Donald J. Wheeler — Understanding Variation: The Key to Managing Chaos from SPC Press Book ↗