TL;DR Go without a separate QA team by default Hire engineers that write tests on the proper level and own the quality aspect QA sometimes make sense when applied carefully as detailed below Intro I just read a very nice post by Regina Gerbeaux and Case Sandberg about “Setting up … | Continue reading
Peter Drucker and one question Peter Drucker is likely the founder of the science of management and leadership. His research centered around one question: “What makes leaders effective?”. That question sounds simple, but leaders come in all shapes, sizes and with many many differ … | Continue reading
A reorganization that went well I recently completed a reorg of an IT department for a client. This reorg went surprisingly well. Let’s checkout some potential reasons for that. The status quo The client was in growth mode. The whole department was still thinking of itself as one … | Continue reading
Agile makes the organization slower. Wat? Klaus Leopold is an experienced agile consultant. He made the observation that changing your teams towards an agile methodology like SCRUM won’t make your organization faster. In many cases your organization and delivery gets even slower … | Continue reading
Intro Go and Rust are some relatively new languages not that widely used languages that compile down to native code for a platform. That’s a difference to languages like Java / Kotlin that run on a JVM and use a middle layer called bytecode that then gets executed on the host pla … | Continue reading
Caveat: By “leader” I equally mean leadership on CTO level, but also experienced engineers on an individual contributor level. And make no mistake - I am an engineer by heart and made many mistakes along the way. This article is just a way for me to learn from my mistakes. Your t … | Continue reading
Intro Accelerate became a classic book describing what makes a high performing IT department. Most IT books talk about successful concepts, but not many of them have science to back their claims up. Accelerate is different in that regard - it has a more solid scientific grounding … | Continue reading
Intro As part of my management assignments I am often tasked with strategy-related topics. Hamilton Helmer’s book “7 Powers” is a great way to think about business strategy. Especially for startups this is an excellent framework. Earning money and product-market-fit is important … | Continue reading
Intro Recently I had a very interesting discussion with a colleague about why to test software at all. Doesn’t it make us slower? Isn’t it more important to get feedback from users quickly by drafting the software and then adding tests subsequently? At first I was: What the hell? … | Continue reading