Five Tips for Effective Teams

Time after time, whenever I start working in a new team, I find myself gravitating towards the same five practices. I find that once they are in place, our day-to-day work seems to become smoother. Single backlog for all work items One of the first things I do when I start in a new place […]

Prerequisites for Teams Without Testers

For the past three years I am working in development teams that don’t employ a professional tester. Even though there are skills I miss working without testers, still these teams manage to deliver software in good quality. Nudged by a Twitter conversation, I started thinking what were the things that needed to be in place […]

Being an Unremarkable Content Creator

From time to time I get asked why I named this blog “uneremarkabletester” or why my Twitter handler is “unremarkableQA”. The first reason is obviously lack of any knowledge of good branding principles. The second one is that I strongly believe that not all of us are remarkable at what we do but it is […]

From Internal Tools to Internal Platforms: Getting Started

As a product owner of an internal development tool part of my job was to talk to developers to find out how our tool could help them in their day-to-day work. To identify developers’ needs and provide solutions to them by means of our tool. And we were doing pretty well, I must say. Our […]

Pair Product Management

Pair programming is by now a quite well known development technique. Developers that have tried it out and chose to go with it, report that they learn more, feel more productive and in general get more satisfaction out of their work. Since I am not a developer I thought I would never be able to […]

Product Owners Participating in Daily: Some Benefits

Even though the team I work in does not do Scrum, we do have a daily short get-together (our Daily) where we give each other an update on the topics we are working on. It’s pretty close to the definition of a Daily Scum. The purpose of the Daily Scrum is to inspect progress toward […]

Skills I Miss Working Without Testers

For the past two years I am the Product Owner in teams that don’t have a dedicated tester. Within the team, we discuss in depth the implications of anything new we plan to develop and test before releasing a feature. Everyone has the best interest of our end users in mind and we all strive […]

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 […]