Last week we held the Indianapolis Workshops on Software Testing panel on time management. The panel of speakers included:

• Robby Slaughter - Founder of Slaughter Development, a workflow and productivity consulting company


• Francine Carter - Founder of Action Coaching & Training


• Chris Wingate - Principal Software Engineer for Liberty Mutual


• Brian Ball - Software Engineer with Software Engineering Professionals (SEP)


• Cory Mausolf - Career Coach with Authentic Business and Career Coaching

I've posted the audio from the workshop on the IWST website. I posted the complete workshop audio for those who would like to listen to the entire discussion start to finish. And I've also broken the audio out by question for those who only want to listen to specific topics:

• Speaker introductions (introductions were done in the order listed above)


• Only tester at a new company


• Email management


• Dealing with interruptions


• Getting commitments from others


• Dealing with micromanagement


• How avoid becoming a micromanager


• Effective meetings


• Switching to Scrum


• General time management techniques

I've also pulled together a list of books/links mentioned during the workshop:

• Crucial Conversations by Kerry Patterson, Joseph Grenny, Ron McMillan, and Al Switzler


• The Five Temptations of a CEO by Patrick Lencioni


• The Five Dysfunctions of a Team by Patrick Lencioni


• Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity (aka GTD) by David Allen


• Flow by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi


• The Cult of Done Manifesto blog post


• Personal Kanban blog post


• 43Folders (inbox zero, etc...) website

Overall I think the panel talk went really well. If while listening to the audio you have any insights to the questions or the speakers responses, please come back and post a comment or two.

For this month's IWST we have a panel on time management. It's a topic we've had several request for, and thought it would be a great topic to open up to everyone. The event is free and open to everyone, so we hope to see you there. The room holds around 60, so we should be able to accommodate everyone.

You can find details on the website or you can download a simple flier.