Modern testing for modern stacks

 

If you are looking to implement this habit within your team, here are some topics we have discussed so far, our thoughts and how we related them to our work.

1. MARKET TYPES AND TESTING Thoughts on testing
Think about the different market types listed in this Steve Blank article and how it affects testing in our niche market of startups.

2. TESTING INTERNET OF THINGS Thoughts on testing
Avinash posted a very good interview about testing Internet of things. We really liked it. We think we should try and think about testing problems when dealing with the Internet of things.

3. HITTING THE HIGH NOTES Building a company
Why it makes sense to build a good environment for testing.

4. DOING THINGS THAT DO NOT SCALE Building a company
This is a super famous essay in the startup world. This post talks about a number of lessons that many of the startup companies are not applying.

5. MOVING TO SELLING PRODUCT FROM CONSULTANCY Building a company
We are trying to build a revenue moat around us with our first educational product. These articles by Allan Branch and Richard Banfield gives us good insight about companies moving to selling from consultancy.

6. UNCERTAINITY, SURPRISE AND OUR FIRST INSTINCT Building a company
How do we react to surprises and uncertainty in our jobs? Do we rush to security? This is a useful way to analyze instinctive behavior at early stage companies.

7. LAWS OF SOFTWARE ENGINEERING Software engineering
I like this talk because it addresses a familiar problem in our niche market of startups: engineering and business believe in different laws of making software.

8. THE FIRST MILE OF ANY PRODUCT Software engineering
Think about this from the perspective of the product we test as well as our own service. FWIW, I think we seem to focus a *lot* on the first mile. I just couldn't express it succinctly before.

9. CREATING CONDITIONS vs ACHIEVING OUTCOMES Building a company
As a small company, we are balancing creating good conditions and achieving specific outcomes. Let us think about how our work habits adjust at each extreme.

10. BREAKING WORK INTO SMALLER TASKS Building a company
I liked this talk by Kathy Sierra: Breaking work into smaller tasks

11. THOUGHTS ABOUT AN ARTICLE ON OUTSOURCING Outsourcing
This article gives you one perspective on how clients view outsourcing and it's value. Source here.

12. HOW DID YOU GET YOUR START IN TESTING? Career
This article gives a good idea of who we are and how we have landed in the testing field.

13. WHAT IS THE TESTING OUTPUT? Thoughts on testing
Painters produce paintings we can see. Writers produce stories we can read. We produce artifacts like test cases, automated checks, tools - but they are like the paint brush, type writer and utensils. What is our output?

14. SURVIVORSHIP BIAS Career
We have a tendency to over-simplify what it takes to succeed. This leads to a lot of cookie-cutter practices being adopted and touted without critical evaluation. One bias affecting this tendency to have an overly simplistic model of success is called 'survivorship bias'.

15. WILL AUTOMATED TESTING REALLY SAVE YOU TIME? Thoughts on testing
This discussion gives you different viewpoints on whether automation testing really save you time or not?

16. WHAT IS YOUR LEARNING STYLE? Career
Each of us has a unique learning style. Figure out your learning style. Limit your thoughts to how you currently learn not-how you wish you learned things and how you think other people learn. Please refrain from using Google for this topic.

17. HELSINKI BUS THEORY :STAY ON THE BUS? Career
This discussion gives you an idea of view our career progression and how can we apply this for testing.

18. CAREER CALCULUS Career
This article presents an idea on how to manage your career.

19. SUCCESS HAPPENS OVERNIGHT Entrepreneurship
This article has plenty of examples on why iterating towards a solution is more or less inevitable.

20. SPECTRUM OF TIME MANAGEMENT Career
This article gives different viewpoints about time management.

21. DANGERS OF REMOTE WORKING Career
This article gives a viewpoint on remote working,its downsides and how we can play defense.

22. T-SHAPED PEOPLE Career
This article gives an idea on topic - knowing a lot but being really good at one thing

23. ASKING GOOD QUESTIONS Career
This article is a good starting point to asking better questions ... especially when you are a remote employee

24. INTRODUCTION TO SYSTEMS THINKING Career
This article gives you an intro to systems thinking. These are our thoughts on the systems involved with our work.

25. EXPLOITATION EXPLORATION TRADEOFFS Career
This article gives a very good insight in our life wherever you had to choose between DO IT ON YOUR OWN? or DO IT AS STATED?.

26. DRAWBACKS WITH THE LEAN STARTUP MODEL Building a company
This article lays out the top arguments against the lean startup model.

27. START WITH A GOAL. THE BACKLOG WILL FOLLOW. Building a company
A nice reminder that understanding the problem will lead to varied solutions.

28. WHAT DOES 'GOOD EMPLOYEE' MEAN? Building a company
We hit this problem when we were hiring and thought it would be interesting to hear everyone's opinion on what does 'good employee' mean?

29. STARTUP IN YOUR TWENTIES? Building a company
Think critically about all the points that the author has made and see which of them you agree with and which of them you disagree with.

30. HOW SLACK INTERVIEWS ENGINEERS Building a company
This is a pretty detailed and realistic description of how Slack hires engineers.

31. 10 commandments of egoless programming Career
This article helps us improve the quality of egoless progrmming.

32. A look at the History of sound recording Building a product
This article helps us to know the history of sound recording.

33. Blame and Train response to failure Building a company
This article has nice explanation of the differences between a brittle system and a resilient system and thoughts about blame-and-train.

34. Learning to market yourself makes you dangerous Career
This article nicely explains how learning to market yourself makes you dangerous in a good way.

35. Invite your engineers to talk business Building a company
This article ties code and business goals. It also does a good job of explaining why it is ok to have bugs in early stage software

36. Qualities of successful testers Career
This article explains about some qualities which are very important for success.

37. Are you too busy? Career
This article explains why being overly efficient is not necessarily a good goal.

38. On being a senior engineer Building a Company
This article describes what it means to be a senior engineer.

39. A case of verbosity Career
This article makes a case for being verbose.

40. How to write documentation for people who do not read Career
This article describes how to write better documentation.

41. What problems have you spotted Career
In this article we share out thoughts on the kind of problems we faced in our career

42. 5 ways we build trust on a remote team Building a Team
This is non-tech article and it's about a remote team and how large organizations are against it.

43. Emergence Building a company
This article talks about why you should leave a room for emergence

44. Why you don't have testers Building a company
This article talks about top five (Wrong) reasons you don't have testers

45. Amazon Day1 Philosophy Building a company
This is a letter to the shareholders by Jeff Bezos who sketched out a philosophy that he calls "Day 1" and "Day 2".

46. Some thoughts on interviewing Building a company
This article has a few ideas about interviewing that are worth thinking about.

47. The other half of your job Building a company
Interesting take. Doing the work is only half your job. The other half is to communicate it well.

48. How big sites looked when they started Building a company
This article is a fun read about humble beginnings.

49. Curse of knowledge Building a company
A useful cognitive bias about curse of knowledge