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Back on the wagon



I reread some of my old blogs and was a bit sad not to be able to read anything from the past three years. So I thought I need to force myself to start writing more again. So here goes.

 Past almost three years I've been working on a really cool team, with a lot of freedom (and some responsibilities) to do a lot of different things. And quite a lot has happened in our team inside the last three years. We have moved from
  • one month sprints TO sort of a one piece flow based kanban with a weekly cadence 
  • one big team TO (semi) self-organizing work groups.
  • lot of solo work TO work in the mobbing style
  • PM led Reviews TO team led show sessions
  • unappreciated monolithic architecture TO appreciated monolith + bunch of other services architecture
  • nebula TO AWS
  • + many many more things TO other kind of things
And I'm thinking of writing on all of these a bit. But also many things have happened in me. 

First of all I have stopped clinging on the thought of hands-on (testing) work to be the only important thing for me to work on. And give in to the thought that the most important thing for me to work on should be the most important thing that needs to be done. Be it communicating, coordinating, thinking process, planning, testing, analysis, coding, teaching, documenting, making coffee, or whatever is needed. Testing is great and a great "tool", but not the solution for every problem. As is not programming either. 

Also of course my thinking of testing has changed, and changes all the time. I gave a talk year ago where I discussed these kind of shifts on my testing skill needs in past 10+ years:

Used to be important to...Has moved into...
Figure out what has been builtBuild together
Test hard thingsImprove testability
Good bug reportsGood discussions
Act like a customerTest with customers
Write test casesUse data to help you while testing
Test requirementsTest ideas
Make test plansDo continuous exploratory testing
Estimate testing effortsEnable fast feedback
Block premature releasesEnable premature releases
Manual regression testsAutomatic regression tests
Do your best in a hard work environmentDo your best to improve the work environment

So a few more things to write about there. 

Also I just gave a talk on 10 tools that I use to aid me in my line of work, that was very fast and think all of those tools should get a post of their own.

And also I wantto start writing about the small big things that happen every day, while mobbing or testing or planning or whatever. That make working as a product developer so super interesting.

But now I'll just publish this, cause otherwise I will never get into doing any of it.


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