Encouraging team reading in your team

Introducing reading is never easy when it comes to teams, you will find resistance from every team member for very valid reason such as boring, I can't relate to this topic etc; nowadays personalisation algorithms has been recommending stuff as per our needs and taste so my team must have been expecting me to provide tailored reading content for them which I wasn't able to deliver  deliver so I thought of changing the process deliver so I thought of changing the process.

My journey started with a simple objective to inculcate reading habits in my team. Previously I had made various attempts to convince my team members to read by forcing to read using action item, by conducting quiz competitions and it didn't work as per my expectation. finally, I understood

"You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it drink"

So I decided to introduce a reading event called Circle of Testers basically it based on the same concept as This week I learned (TWIL).

I created a planning document with an objective and how I'm gone achieve it. Got it discussed with my manager and it was approved.

Here was my plan

1. There will be two groups of QA team members consisting of 5 members each
2. Each Team member will have maximum 5 mins to share his/her experience, knowledge, Tool or Article which could be beneficial for team members,
3. A slide will be reserved for team member which should be updated by team members prior to presentation day.
4. It is mandatory for all team members to present and to participate in this session
5. The presentation will be shared with participating team members 3 days prior to the presentation day.

The response was really amazing how team contributed to making it a success.

 What was changed?

1. I allowed team members to choose what they wanted to read and let them discuss their opinions in the team which in turn helped other team members to clear their doubts.
2. They found a purpose of reading as they could select topics which were related to taste and what they have learned, the topic range from AWS outage to how can we use CSS selectors for automation?
3. The most Important part when you introduce any process in a team or company is getting constant feedback and letting the team know that we care for their feedback and really blown by my team's feedback.

"COT created a good knowledge base among us as testers. Individually I came to know lots through few topics which helped me in my automation for e.g the CSS selectors session. As a suggestion, it would be better if we could make it 10mins per individual as 3-4 give presentation per that allotted time period."

Here is the slide Circle of testers 5th April

I have retrospected and now working on the circle of testers 0.1, How did you try to improve reading habits in your team? let me know with your comments in comments section.