Seven Things I Learned About AI

As I wrote in my previous blogpost, AI feels to me like a Swiss army knife: capable of many things, but not always clear on which tool is right for which job. This is particularly hard for someone like me; someone who prefers understanding how things work before starting to experiment with them (unlike most […]

DORA Report 2024: Three Ideas to Tackle the Cons of Platform Usage

This year, the DORA report explored the topic of platform engineering. Overall, the impact of a platform is positive: Individuals were 8% more productive and teams performed 10% better when using an internal developer platform. Beyond productivity, we also see gains when a platform is used in an organization’s overall performance, with an increase of […]

How Product Management can Improve Development Experience

Last week, Abi Noda (DX), Dr. Storey (University of Victoria), Dr. Forsgren (Microsoft Research) and Dr. Greiler (DX) published an article on development productivity, identifying three core dimensions of developer experience that have a direct effect on it. I find that Product Management practices largely affect these three dimensions and it is worth writing down some […]

Developer Collaboration Practices

I am not a developer myself, but for the past ten years I am working in development teams doing one thing or another. Over time, I have seen that one of the factors that makes a team effective is that we need to bring everyone along (if you are interested, you can find the other […]

Intentionally “Failing” the DORA Metrics

Many of us evaluating our DevOpsishness, have one time or another, answered how well we were doing based on the four metrics defined by the DORA research. Deployment Frequency — How often an organization successfully releases to production Lead Time for Changes —The amount of time it takes a commit to get into production Change […]

Five Guardrails to Build Up the Confidence to Release

I won’t lie. Every time we release something new to our users, I get stressed. Will they like it? Will they use it? Did we miss something? Did we break something we didn’t expect? And over the years, in order to relieve my anxiety, I often wondered: How can we measure the quality of a […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]