Posted inSoftware development Testing

The Jurassic Park Problem & Software Development (Part 3)

How you can (should?) use them to guide your work In the previous parts one and two we covered the basics of what possible, ethical and legal looks like in software development and looked at 4 challenging scenarios. To finish up, in this part we will try to wrap everything up by giving some suggestions for how you can work on getting “is it legal to build this” and “should we build this” to be…
Posted inSoftware development

The Jurassic Park Problem & Software Development (Part 2)

What happens when the forces are not aligned In the previous part of this three-part article we had a look at three aspects of building software: is it technically possible, is it ethical and is it legal. In this second part we will look further into some conflicts of interest and what can happen when our three powers don’t pull the same way. Finally in part three we will suggest how you can move towards…
Posted inSoftware development

The Jurassic Park Problem & Software Development (Part 1)

Can we, are we legally allowed to and… should we? A lot of the big achievements and progress in human history comes down to someone asking “I wonder if I could…” and gently, or harshly, bending a few direct or indirect rules. If we always played it safe, who knows how many of our species’ innovations we would have missed out on. A lot of these tries end up not being technically feasible (at least…
Posted inLeadership

The Manager’s interview – What does that look like? (Part 2)

This is a two-part blog post (or maybe the format is more of an article…) about what the equivalence of code tests and take-home assignments can look like when you start interviewing for manager roles. In the last half we looked at case studies and dilemmas. When I published that, I got some excellent questions that I’d like to start off with addressing.  “Would this same approach to manager interviews also apply to leadership interviews”.…
Posted inLeadership

The Manager’s interview (Part 1)

When I started out as a developer in the last millennium (yeah ok in 1999...) - my first few jobs were landed just based on interviews. We sat down and conversed about who I was, what the company was looking for and how I might fit into that. That does not seem to be the norm for people starting out today. You go through technical interviews, coding tests or home assignments and maybe even different…
Posted inPair-blog

Co-creating a musical  – Pair blog # 8

Pre-post Note: This is part of my pair blog series where I collaborate with another blogger to write about the same-ish topic. This one is different though, because for now - the pair is not done, or scheduled. This means this post whenever Samuel is done with his post :-) For now - you will have to make do with only my perspective. On the evening of May 12th 2022 - I sent a message…
Posted inTesting

Visual Models: cheat code for your memory

Once upon a time there was a test lead who didn’t believe in agile. She used to nod politely when teams talked about reducing waste, sprints and small deliveries. Then she turned around and did it The Right Way. Which, to her defense, worked. Her projects were typically on time, upheld a great quality standard and the launches usually were calm and fearless affairs.  Then one day, she hit the wall. A “simple” migration project…
Posted inConferences Pair-blog

Diversity in Tech Conferences

The organiser, program committee and program chair perspective On an almost regular cadence, I end up reading about conferences getting heat for their lack of diversity in their speaker lineup. Sometimes I just observe from the sidelines, sometimes I get involved in the discussions. Most of the time - the organisers don't react very well to the feedback given. Let's get back to that part a bit later on.The fact that this keeps happening to…
Posted inWorking life

How to make meetings not suck #2: Filling the meeting with value

(Note: This is a follow up/deep dive from this post) A lot of people hate meetings and claim all (or most) meetings are waste of time. While I certainly agree there are a lot of unnecessary meetings out there - the problem with most of them is the way we do them. We don't plan and prepare, we invite the wrong people and we don't learn from them. There are a lot of meetings that…
Posted inConferences Working life

Agile Testing Days Open Air – How to make meetings not suck

In May 2022 the first Agile Testing Days Open Air took place, and there Samuel Nitsche and I premiered our workshop “How to make meetings not suck”. This post is my reflection on the process of creating the workshop and a slight summary of the workshop itself. Designing a new workshop is always a gamble and kind of nerve wrecking. You work really hard on creating a structure and content that you hope will be valuable…