Balancing Between Stream-Aligned and Enabling Teams

Over the years, swinging back and forth between positions, I found myself often thinking of Charity Major’s The Engineer/Manager Pendulum blog post. The best frontline eng managers in the world are the ones that are never more than 2-3 years removed from hands-on work, full time down in the trenches. The best individual contributors are the […]

Two Things I Practised in 2021

As the year is coming to an end, I started looking back at the things that helped me in my day-to-day work in 2021. I found that two particular ideas were always in the back of my head, stirring my actions and improving what I did. Thought I shared them in case they can help […]

Overcoming the Fear of Talking to Users – Understanding the Background

A couple of weeks ago I wrote down the reasons that make me uncomfortable talking to our users, as well as how I try to overcome them by analysing how our tool works. Soon I realised that just by looking at the situation as it is today that didn’t help me much understand why it […]

Memories of Agile Testing Days 2017

Back in 2017, I wrote an internal blog post about my first visit at Agile Testing Days, called “Are Testers Obsolete? Spoiler Alert, They Aren’t”. Besides the occasional obsolete link, my inability to find the reference to the images (if they are yours please let me know), and my shifting away from testing I still […]

Trying Out the New GitHub Projects

I have been a huge fan of project management with GitHub issues since about 2013. There are two things that make it really appealing to me: The proximity to the code and the overwhelming simplicity that forced you to stay honest when you set up your process. Of course, the lack of a Kanban board […]

Overcoming the Fear of Talking to Users – Learning about the Product

As I wrote in my previous post I am not very comfortable talking to our end users. What helps me become more confident, is to have a better understanding of what I am actually talking about. To that effect, I started analysing our product to find out how its individual parts are working. Here is […]

Overcoming the Fear of Talking to Users

When I got my first position as a product owner, it didn’t take me long to start contacting our users. I was eager to find out what they were doing and how our tool could benefit them. My calendar was full of meetings and there were more opportunities to explore than the day was long. […]

Small Tips for Organising GitHub Labels

When it comes to project management tools, my favourite is GitHub issues. I find them simple to use and I like the issue-code proximity. Since adding a label to a repository is so easy, you might lose oversight of all the labels you have and why you have them. Here are some tips for anyone […]

Small Wins: The Little Things that Make our Days

Every now and then, I like taking note of all the small things that make my days at work a bit better.

Returning to the Office

A couple of weeks ago I went back to the office after 14 months. Entering the building I met two colleagues I talk to on the phone all the time. And yet, meeting them in flesh and blood I had no idea what to say. I mumbled something weird and quickly rushed to my desk. […]

My Product Owner Onboarding Checklist

When I started working as a Product Owner in the beginning of 2020, I didn’t know where to begin. There were the challenges of fitting in with the team as well as adapting to the new role. But besides that, there was simply too much to learn. To get started, I created a checklist of […]

Broken Pipelines? Somebody Else’s Problem

This post first appeared at Ministry of Testing on November 16, 2020. One of the cornerstones of Continuous Delivery is to establish a reliable deployment pipeline. Each step of the pipeline aims to provide confidence and feedback on the quality of our changes in a timely manner. Removing any blockers from the pipeline should be the […]

Decoupling Deployments from Releases: in Other People’s Words

One of the discussions I keep on having is how practices like Continuous Delivery can jeopardise quality, not allowing enough time for “proper testing”. If every code change can be deployed to production how can we possibly know if the end user experience will remain good? A technique for maintaining a certain level of quality […]

Balancing the Quality Scale

Huib Schoots and Joost Voskuil, had the idea to bring together people with an interest in Quality and ask them questions like “How can you sell Quality?” and “What limitations or barriers do you hit?”. On January 30th, 2021 the first (of many?) Quality Acceleration Peer Conference took place and I was lucky enough to […]

Etiquette: Declining Work Meetings

Since I started working as a Product Owner last year, the quantity of meetings that I needed to participate in increased exponentially. In the beginning I accepted every meeting request without a second thought. But as time went by, I realised that going to every meeting without thinking of the implications was not only un-productive […]