Esther Derby has been thinking about trust in the workplace a lot lately, and the absence of trust, too. When she asks people what it's like to work in a group where people trust their managers, they tell her information flows freely, conflict is productive, and that they can tell their managers what they think without fear of retribution. On the other hand, when trust is absent, people hide information, look out for themselves, don't bring up new ideas, and withhold effort.

Instead of focusing on the problems, focus on what works. That is the simple premise of "appreciative inquiry." In this week's column, Ellen Gottesdiener explains how to help your team focus on the processes that work by outlining what should be included in your appreciative inquiries, in order to make more positive organizational changes.

Back in the day of cross-Atlantic boat travel, luggage that wasn't needed during the long journey was labeled "Not Wanted on the Voyage" and stowed away below decks. In this column, Fiona Charles suggests that testers can also be viewed as heavy baggage and not exactly welcome by some parties during the journey of software development. To understand why others might think this way, Fiona takes a good, hard look at what testers do that could possibly make them undesirable team mates.

In this last-day, last-hour session, Jean Tabaka invites you to apply a fundamental practice of agile teams-retrospection. Jean guides you in facilitating your own retrospectives about the Agile Development Practices conference you have just attended. You will mine your experiences by creating a timeline of your conference observations, your high points, your low points, and your conference activities. Each team will then use their timeline of observations, impressions, and actions to interpret how their overall conference experience might impact what they could do differently at the next conference, what they would recommend as changes for the Agile Development Practices conference organizers, and what they might recommend even outside of the conference context. Finally, each team will prioritize their recommendations to be collected and delivered to the Agile Development Practices conference organizers.