August Patterson

Real nuggets in this circa 2000 article by Highsmith. Main message is that we can't use strict planning methods in contexts with high uncertainty. Later, there are specifics about how to. ASD - Adaptive Software Development. I like this better than Agile Software Development; it's less nebulous. Too bad it never caught hold. "form does not follow function, it follows failure" Second page, first two paragraphs are definitely worth noting. There's a whole part that reads eerily familiar to the Agile Manifesto... "____ over ____" x4.

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Testing software is quite a bit more than seeing if it can do something right. Testing is about trying "everything". Most importantly values that are on the edges and especially values outside valid ranges. https://xkcd.com/2928/

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🚀 SCTelcom Earns an Incredible 79 Net Promoter Score by Transforming Rural Living With Calix SmartLife Managed Services! 🚀 SCTelcom uses the Calix Platform and SmartLife managed services to connect homes, public spaces, and small businesses across their Kansas and Oklahoma communities. Six months after expanding their services, they've achieved a 3% ARPU increase and boosted subscriber loyalty. By growing their offerings to address digital equity and strengthen community ties, SCTelcom has achieved an impressive Net Promoter Score℠ (NPS®) of 79, more than double the industry average, and continues to maintain a CSAT in the 90s. They are also improving life in the communities they serve by: 🛜 Delivering unmatched residential subscriber experiences. 🎒 Providing students, teachers, and parents with a reliable community network to stream school sports events and to ensure secure, uninterrupted emergency communications. 👩‍💻 Stimulating the local economy by enabling small business success Carla Shearer, CEO and GM at SCTelcom shares: “We are deeply committed to continue reshaping rural connectivity across our network footprint, proving that no region is too remote for high-quality, reliable broadband services. Our almost two-decade-long collaboration with Calix has been instrumental in this community transformation.” Learn more about SCTelcom’s 18-year partnership with Calix. 🔗https://ow.ly/mGIB50SbiJG #innovation #broadband #Calix

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If you are deciding on PW vs CY for test runner, or thinking about transition, Take a look at: - https://lnkd.in/ehy5iCJk - and if you want to see Pw vs Cy on the same tasks: https://lnkd.in/eGhubPH3

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Over the last few weeks I've been checking out Playwright, and I have to say, I love it. As a tester, who is not an SDET and really doesn't want to be, Playwright seems to remove much of the mystique and pain of traditional, programming heavy automation solutions. I'm sure there are tons of great reasons for using Selenium, including support for the recently deceased IE, but for a tester who just wants to automate a few simple tests, integrate with Git and perhaps a straightforward CI/CD pipeline Playwright is at least 8 million times easier. I needed to put together a proof of concept for testing a sports administration customer site, and I looked at Cypress first, but didn't really like it and I'm not 100% certain why, it just felt cumbersome. With Playwright it took very little time to have a simple test up and running using Codegen, and yes, I know, we used to scoff at people who used recorders for automation but this is different. Codegen captures the locators and gives you boiler plate in a couple of lines of code. No Xpath, no messing with page elements that may or may not be visible when you run the tests. Just makes life a little easier and even gives you the imports you need. Building that generated code into a simple page object model is also dead easy. I have my URLs, locators and actions in a nice clean page file, and the tests in spec files. This ease of use makes adding a new page much easier than doing the same task using Selenium and Java, and loads less code, which makes me happy. Persisting login is also easy using a global setup file to capture login state, and store it in an auth.json file, with Playwright using that logged in state for each test by default. To run tests for logged out use cases you just point that test at an empty noauth.json file. Could not be easier. Assertions using expect are simple and logical, and in general I feel much more comfortable with Playwright, and far, far more productive. And that's also true for API tests, although it won't be prising me off Postman just yet, I'll definitely be further exploring API tests in Playwright. Playwright also introduced me to VS Code and I'm liking it greatly. Simple integration with GitHub, nice and easy to step through when debugging and simple clean layout. So what does the professional tester world think about Playwright? Good, bad indifferent? I'd be interested to garner opinions from more experienced automation engineers.

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Are you an advocate for your customers? Working at LineOne, one of the biggest values that we aim to embody is integrity, and I personally aim for that by being an advocate for our customers. When you approach the relationship as being an advocate for them versus selling them something, it changes the whole foundation the relationship is built upon. Instead of trying to make a sale, try to find what their specific challenges and pain points are and then build a customized solution meeting that, even if it isn't the highest sale. Doing so ensures a relationship built on integrity and trust, and provides the customer with the perfect solution for them. https://line.one/ #businessintegrity #customeradvocate #serviceoversales #painpoints #customizedtelecomsolutions

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There are two types of mid-level software developers out there: First: Those teaching and sharing how to handle thousands or millions of transactions per second (100K tps). Second: Those avidly watching and reading about how to handle thousands or millions of transactions per second. Meanwhile, both are working on systems that barely handle 10 transactions per second on a good day. #ScalableSystem

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Most Charter/Spectrum Customers Ditch Pay TV—One of the nation’s two largest cable TV providers is reporting that 56% of its customers no longer pay for cable TV. While internet-only service from Spectrum has become the norm, that didn’t stop Charter from shedding 72,000 internet customers as well. Only Spectrum’s wireless business is growing, but that product is a VMNO reselling access to Verizon’s network. Spectrum has been one of the more aggressive big cable players in working to define its post-cable future, driving a hard bargain with Disney, offering virtual pay-TV products, and seemingly prepared to exit the cable TV business all together if the headwinds become too great. Now that these cable giants are confronting stalled internet service growth as well, more new strategies will be needed for them to grow, or even resist hemorrhaging both internet and TV subscribers. No More App Diving > FreeCast entering the picture as the ride-along bandwidth preferred solution. #nextegenstreaming #freecast #streamingwars #ota #nomoreappdiving https://lnkd.in/epMbDZTu 

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It’s time for change. Transform the way you manage your day-to-day operations: https://vzbiz.biz/3vmUZdb #Vteam #GPSTracking #FleetManagement

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It’s time for change. Transform the way you manage your day-to-day operations: https://vzbiz.biz/3vmUZdb #Vteam #GPSTracking #FleetManagement

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I read this amazing blog post over the weekend from Zack Urlocker & thought there were some interesting parallels to empowering decision making on QA teams. My takeaway: Pushing decisions down to the people closest to the work is one of the most powerful ways to increase ownership, accountability, and speed of execution. As QA professionals, we are intimately familiar with the products and systems we test. We understand the requirements, user flows, edge cases, and potential risks better than anyone. By empowering QA teams to make more decisions around testing strategies, prioritization, risk assessment, and quality gates, organizations can unlock several key benefits: Increased Ownership and Accountability - when given autonomy to make decisions, QA teams take greater ownership over the quality of the products they deliver. This drives a sense of accountability and responsibility to ensure thorough testing and high standards. Empowered teams are motivated to proactively identify and mitigate issues. Leveraging Expertise - QA professionals have deep domain knowledge from their hands-on experience with the product. Empowering them to make decisions allows this expertise to be fully leveraged in determining effective testing approaches tailored to the specific product needs. Faster Execution - with the ability to make decisions autonomously, QA teams can streamline testing processes, adapt quickly to changes, and provide timely feedback. This accelerates identification and resolution of issues, enabling faster delivery of high-quality products. Fostering Innovation - when given the freedom to make decisions, QA teams are empowered to get creative and innovative with their testing methodologies. They can experiment with new tools and techniques to continuously improve quality processes. Of course, empowering QA teams requires a foundation of trust from leadership and an investment in training to build decision-making capabilities. But the potential benefits of increased quality, efficiency, and innovation make it well worth the effort. Pushing decisions down cultivates an environment of trust and accountability that unlocks incredible potential. Let's embrace this mindset and empower our QA teams to make more decisions - the quality of our products will be better for it. #QualityAssurance #QATeams #EmployeeEmpowerment #AutonomyAtWork #DecisionMaking

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One of the coolest components to my line of work is seeing how quickly technology evolves. Many of the legacy systems that I started with in telecom have already been phased out or are being phased out. As technology keeps changing, the importance of a future-focused mindset, like the adoption of cloud communications, becomes more and more evident. Even though cloud communications have been around for a while, they’re still the future of business communications because they offer businesses, employees, and their customers an incredible number of features and benefits to optimize business operations. Seeing big names like Nortel, Mitel, and NEC struggle with the switch from on-prem to cloud communications systems proves that cloud communication tools are much more than just voice. Head to LineOne to see how cloud communications can transform the way you work! https://line.one/ #cloud #cloudcommunications #technology #futurefocused #communicationtools #lineone

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During my time at LoopQA, I've found that an effective model for leveraging automation involves a clear division of responsibilities between development and QA teams. I'll caveat this by saying, I generally advocate for developers to refactor the automation they break, but the reality is that most organizations aren't willing to invest their time into it. Hence, having a dedicated QA team for E2E tests often proves more practical. Here's a typical and highly functional workflow: Local Development: -Developers work on their local environments. -They run unit tests and integration tests to ensure their code is functioning as expected. Dev/Test Environment: -Code is merged into a shared Dev/Test environment. -Unit/Integration Tests: These tests must pass before any merge can occur. If they fail, the merge fails. -E2E Sanity Tests: These are also run, but they can fail for both valid and invalid reasons. Developers need to be adept at identifying actual bugs versus new legitimate failures. -Automation teams step in to refactor failing E2E tests to ensure stability. A common problem here is when dev teams opt not to refactor failing tests, leading to false negatives and potential issues down the line. Stage/Pre-Prod Environment: -After passing all tests, the code moves to the Stage/Pre-Prod environment. -Any merge to this environment is contingent on passing E2E tests along with unit and integration tests. Production Environment -Finally, the tested and validated code is merged into the Production environment. Key Insights: -This model ensures that unit/integration tests act as crucial gatekeepers, providing immediate feedback to developers. -E2E tests, maintained by the QA team, ensure overall system validation and highlight integration issues early. -Collaboration and clear division of responsibilities between dev and QA teams maximize the value of automation, leading to robust and reliable code delivery. #SoftwareDevelopment #QA #Testing #DevOps #SoftwareQuality #Automation #ContinuousIntegration #ContinuousDeployment

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Kyle does a great job to highlight the pains of translating a shared design system into shared styles between React web and React Native. I do like the use of types to enforce existing style primitives compared to hard coding numbers, but I understand that native mobile developers are not used to the compositional nature of the first design system, compared to shared styles via StyleSheet, NativeWind, or similar. Fusing mobile and web beyond the data layer becomes more and more tricky. react-native-web often isn't the answer. As "headless" components grow to help fuse HTML vs React Native components, we still have a need for sensible styling.

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🔜Over the last few months, Debosmit Ray (debo) has interviewed dozens of engineering leaders, asking them questions about structuring their teams, measuring productivity, developer experience, and hiring. The outcome "IF/THEN" podcast...stay tune📻

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Not sure why the Vue community was and (pretty much) is, scared of the composition API. I was too, to be honest. But I have loved it for the past few weeks as I use it more and more. If you are still hanging in limbo, there is a great series on Laracasts by the great Jeffery Way, himself. There are also a couple of free courses on Vue School for Vue3 composition API. You should be up and running in 2-3 days if you have used Vue 2 in the past. #vue #vue3 #compositionapi

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This week's Brief is out. In a hat tip to yesterday (May 4), we discuss T-Mobile's Lumos transaction - why it makes a lot of sense. Also, many other items in the market commentary... More inside #sundaybrief

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When you think about it, most everyone has a mobile communication device within arm's reach 24/7...it's the very best way to communicate with internal work force team members and external customers alike; and using rich communication methods (text/audio/visual) for both notifications and conversational messaging is key if your organization wishes to build a reference database in which AI can draw best pathways for the future. #A2P, Syniverse, #CPaaS, #Mobile Messaging

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