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 […]

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 […]

Are we Done? Really Done?

A couple of weeks ago I had a discussion with my manager whether we can set an initiative that we worked on to “Completed”. We had developed our part and handed it over to another team to consume the changes. But there were good chances that they would come back to us with further suggestions, […]

How does Quality fit in CALMS?

Recently, I was asked to give a 15 minute introduction on Quality Strategy in DevOps for our upcoming “Efficient DevOps with SAP” course and I happily accepted. And then, to my horror of horrors, I realised that I needed to figure out what a Quality Strategy is and what makes it unique in a DevOps […]

Cheat-sheet for More Laws, Principles & the Such

A couple of months ago, I wrote up a cheat-sheet for laws, principles & the such, as a quick reference to theories or adages that I often heard referenced in software development discussions. Here is the second part, for things that I needed to look up since that first post.

Keeping Up with Compliance in a DevOps World

This post first appeared at the DevTestOps community on October 4, 2019. About 5 years ago I was working in a small product that was doing (almost) everything the DevOps way. We had the works: code and tests versioned in git, trunk based development, building the code once (more or less), feature toggles, daily deployments, […]

Some Ideas for Reducing “Release Decision” Time

“Can we release this feature?” is usually a question answered by humans, not machines. From what I have seen around, even teams that practice continuous deployment seem to take a step back to consider whether they are ready to expose new functionality to their users. My impression is that “release decision” time might vary from […]

Cheat-sheet for Laws, Principles & the such

Have you ever been in a conversation where somebody ends an argument with something like “But as we all know this will never work because of Conway’s Law”? And even worse, have you found yourself thoughtfully nodding even though you are not 100% sure what Conway’s Law exactly says? I for one admit to have […]

Quality Indicators

One of the questions I get very often as a quality coach is “how can we measure quality?” If I were to reply right off the bat, my answer would be “No clue!” as I find it very hard to quantify something as abstract and ever changing as quality. Nevertheless I think the premise of […]

Have you Tried Turning it Off and On Again? – Appreciating Your Customer Support

A long time ago I was working in customer support, spending my days speaking to unhappy customers who had purchased some sort of electronic device. People generally didn’t pick up the phone to tell us how pleased they were with their purchases. Sometimes they would call to ask for a technician, others to ask how […]

The Surprising Diversity of Password Retrieval

In the last weeks of my pregnancy the “nesting” instinct kicked in. Since I was no longer working, I had the time to do important chores, such as trying out all the pens in our household to get rid of the ones that were empty. Once I was done with the physical world, I went […]