Jim Evans

Them: "You work at Sauce Labs... do you make... sauce?" Me: "Well, sort of..." ... I work at Selenium Acceleration Using Cloud Execution [S.A.U.C.E. Labs]. Selenium turns 20 this year & we're giving away Selenium Falcon t-shirts. Want one? Contribute to the Selenium Project (writing code isn't the only way). Answer questions, provide feedback, reproduce some bugs, and share your experiences with us. Want to hear more about Sauce? Watch the Test Automation Experience - with Nikolay Advolodkin & Sauce co-founder, Jason Huggins. Click the link & let's boogie 🕺 🤖 🐞

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I envision a better alternative to Backstage: reusing an existing script and adding an intuitive interface. That's essentially what most people expect from a self-service portal for their software engineers — nothing more. #internaldeveloperportal #devex #developerexperience

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Ever had that feeling - Dilemma Time - your AUTOMATION Strategy is a Fumble? 🏈 Well Sometimes - Navigating the sea of automation tools can feel like running the wrong play - Right? and That’s where we, QA Mentor - Software Testing Expert - 13 Years of Making Products Successful, step in as your trusted coach and turn your testing game plan into a championship-winning strategy. 🏆 So Why QA Mentor and how do we help you? Expert Playbook: 🎯 We can guide and streamline your automation process, ensuring you choose the right tools – no wasted plays, just efficient, winning moves - Let's get this done for you!! MVP Results: 🥇 With our guidance, you’ll achieve testing excellence, saving time and resources while boosting product performance. So, are you - Ready for a Touchdown? In your organization, if you’re facing challenges or need help in this area, email us at support@qamentor.com, call toll-free at 1-800-622-2602, or DM me to schedule a strategic chat. Check out our expert solutions, https://lnkd.in/ekc8hzT and score big with QA Mentor by your side - LETS DO IT!! Let’s turn your automation fumbles into game-winning touchdowns - LETS GOOOOOO! 🚀

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There's an oft-cited stat from Pendo that 80% of software features are rarely, if ever, used. While it's impossible to know the accuracy of that, it's not hard to believe. I've been part of multiple feature factories, where emphasis was put on new features to 'claim' rather than taking time to ensure we've actually solved the desired problem before moving onto the next. If you're a Product Manager/Leader in the Indy area, join us on August 14 for a conversation around best practices for measuring product success. We'll have food, drinks, and hopefully some great learnings! (Registration link in the comments)

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Supercharging your engineering teams doesn’t mean you have to sacrifice quality.  When teams are moving fast, it's common to see an uptick in quality issues making their way to production. The knee-jerk reaction might be to slow things down or intensify TDD/BDD unit tests. While helpful, these measures often don't tackle the root causes.  Consider structural changes to the motions your teams go through with their deployment strategies. Implementing a 3-tiered or 4-tiered deployment model—comprising dev, test, staging, and production environments, all integrated within a robust CI/CD pipeline.  This keeps your teams moving fast without compromising quality.  Here’s a brief rundown of each environment's role and tips to maximize effectiveness: 🛠️ DEV: The playground for developers, either locally or in the cloud. This space allows for unimpeded experimentation and innovation without affecting other environments. 🔍 TEST: Mirroring the production layout, this is where all changes—including non-code adjustments like IaC/terraform, database migrations, etc.—are first pushed. It is the first environment where initial functional testing and  automated test suites help find problems.  🎭 STAGING: Your production's dress rehearsal. This near-replica of your production environment is where the final tests occur, ensuring all changes are polished and stable. It also offers a sneak peek to internal stakeholders and select customers, demonstrating reliability and readiness. 🌐 PROD: The final frontier where thoroughly tested changes are deployed, ensuring minimal disruption or downtime. Pro tips: Sync Your Environments: Keep all environments as close to production as possible. Regularly update your staging environment with recent data to expose your team to real-life edge cases, using data scrambling or mocking for privacy. Automate Everything: Commit to automating your deployment processes across code, infrastructure, and data changes. The investment pays off in faster, higher-quality releases. Embed QA in Your Culture: Integrate quality assurance throughout your process, from ideation to functional testing. Focus on comprehensive, holistic tests that simulate real user interactions for the greatest impact. Expose Scaling Issues:  Operate lower-tier environments with reduced resources to reveal potential scaling issues early. This helps identify and rectify less optimal approaches before they escalate in production environments, ensuring smoother scalability under real-world loads. By rethinking our approach to deployment, we not only enhance our ability to scale but also solidify the quality that our customers expect and deserve.  Unlock your team’s potential and make the investments.  The dividends are compounding! #EngineeringExcellence #QualityAssurance #DevOps #DevSecOps #Agile #Scrum

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Question for engineering leaders (managers, directors, VP's, etc): I'm curious about the current landscape of developer productivity analysis + management tools - things like LinearB and Jellyfish. Which tool, if any, are you using? Any opinions/pros/cons on the tool you're using (or the entire domain overall)?

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As per Brandon Suponchick, CTO of Aviture, in his session at the Kansas City Developer's Conference called "The Agile Architect: Building Product From The Trenches, Not The Tower," one of the many insights he shared was the importance of testing but even more foundational is that code needs to be testable. In order to have "architecture that evolves at the same pace as your business requirements," we need to start with code that is easy to test, and tests should be holistic and stable. If code design is poor and difficult test, our ability to change systems and deploy quickly will be limited. We need to be able to ensure our code will not break through sufficient tests. This includes unit tests. #KCDC #KCDC2024

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Here’s a quality we don’t talk about enough, my #technicalhiring manager friends: speaking truth to power. How do we hire for people who are comfortable having incredibly uncomfortable conversations? Whether it’s talking about the downsides of a decision or raising the alarms about a dangerous defect, you want technical truthtellers on the team. Here’s how to get them. #recruiting #talentacquisition #techjobs #technicalhiring #developers #hiring #jobs #boeing

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🇨🇦 A few weeks ago I had a conversation with a former #SystemsThinkingTO attendee who is an experienced, senior software engineer with an enviable resumé. They had invited me out for a drink to ask me a strange question: "Are you seeing what I'm seeing?" What they were curious about was whether some unseen hand was slowly crushing out any opportunity to get work, regardless of one's experience. It could be either by a dearth of gigs to apply to or getting ghosted somewhere in the application process, or a bait-and-switch that gets discovered in the interview, if you were lucky to get one. They were getting concerned because it was now five months since they last had work. The cash was going to run out, eventually. I told them that yes, I was seeing this quiet phenomena unfold with increasing numbers of colleagues popping up on LinkedIn with "#OpenToWork" decorations on their profiles and pleas to get referrals for going on a year. I commiserated with them that I'd been ghosted on applications as well, and was beginning to increasingly see weird distortions in job ads that biased toward junior roles with less than five years experience where once the demand was for ten or more. In short, I assured them something is happening, I couldn't explain what was motivating it, but it was real and they weren't succumbing to figments of their imagination. Whatever world they once knew was likely gone and it was time to adapt to what comes next. I've ruminated on this conversation ever since because I want to describe it better. To me it feels like a quiet and hidden economic depression. We don't have a dustbowl or lineups at soup kitchens, but we do have increasing numbers of experienced people in tech fields who have been out of work for months if not years despite an apparent abundance of job offerings on the boards. And it's concerning. I have no immediate solutions other than to recommend that now is the time to explore other fields, but many of the affected are in their late 40s or early 50s -- not exactly the prime age to get hired into a totally new role. What's certain, however, is that you can't hang your happiness or livelihood on someone else to fulfill. So, I'll pass these questions over to you: Are you seeing what we're seeing? Have you been affected? For how long? What are you doing to adapt?

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Yes, requirements are important. In the tech/software world, we've come to this very strange place in which "requirements" has become an offensive word -- "what, you want me to define the project in advance? Get away from me, you waterfall devil." Even more bizarre, we've come up with all kinds of innovative names for the same thing so as to appear that we don't see the naked emperor. I am proud to say that I've driven more successful projects than I can hope to remember, and each started with -- yes, a requirements document. That is why I was thrilled to see research from the Register indicating "that projects with clear requirements documented before development started were 97 percent more likely to succeed." (1) I promise you, no project has ever failed due to an effort to understand and document the problem first, but plenty of projects have failed by not doing so. Cited: (1)

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Isn’t it funny that 60% of engineering managers see a shortage of qualified candidates while 56% plan to increase headcount? The math is not mathin’. 🧮 Maybe it’s time to rethink what makes a “good engineer”. Skills are evolving with AI and machine learning, and our criteria needs to evolve too. The “passion engineer” coding all night is rare now, and that’s okay — maybe even better — because we can introduce more diverse skill sets, experiences, and problem-solving. Let’s evaluate our talent definitions, invest in training, and embrace diverse paths of excellence. ✨ For more insights like these, check out Jellyfish's 2024 State of Engineering Management report: https://lnkd.in/eKAJ5jZy

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A must-listen! Verisk’s Sid Wong joins MSPN's podcast, "Set-Aside Some Time.” Verisk’s Sid Wong, VP of Policy, joins MSPN host Annie Davidson to discuss important state law provisions nationwide and how they can affect your MSA settlements. Listen now and learn how these state laws can impact you: https://ow.ly/fO1130sC6kT #MSPN #MSA #StateLaws #LegalInsights #Verisk

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𝐁𝐞𝐬𝐭 𝐏𝐫𝐚𝐜𝐭𝐢𝐜𝐞𝐬 𝐟𝐨𝐫 𝐈𝐦𝐩𝐥𝐞𝐦𝐞𝐧𝐭𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐀𝐈 𝐢𝐧 𝐓𝐞𝐬𝐭 𝐀𝐮𝐭𝐨𝐦𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧   Listen up, folks! If you're not leveraging AI in your test automation, you're leaving money on the table. Here's how to get started and crush it:   💡𝐀𝐜𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧𝐚𝐛𝐥𝐞 𝐈𝐧𝐬𝐢𝐠𝐡𝐭𝐬: 🔹𝐒𝐭𝐚𝐫𝐭 𝐒𝐦𝐚𝐥𝐥: Dip your toes in with a pilot project. See the magic unfold. 🔹𝐑𝐢𝐠𝐡𝐭 𝐓𝐨𝐨𝐥𝐬: Get AI tools that slide right into your current setup. No friction, just results. 🔹𝐃𝐚𝐭𝐚 𝐐𝐮𝐚𝐥𝐢𝐭𝐲: Feed your AI models with top-tier data. Garbage in, garbage out. 🔹𝐂𝐨𝐧𝐭𝐢𝐧𝐮𝐨𝐮𝐬 𝐋𝐞𝐚𝐫𝐧𝐢𝐧𝐠: Keep your AI models sharp with new data. Stay ahead of the game.   🚀 𝐎𝐯𝐞𝐫𝐜𝐨𝐦𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐂𝐡𝐚𝐥𝐥𝐞𝐧𝐠𝐞𝐬: 🔹𝐒𝐞𝐭𝐮𝐩 𝐂𝐨𝐬𝐭𝐬: Sure, there's an upfront cost. But the ROI? Through the roof! 🔹𝐒𝐤𝐢𝐥𝐥 𝐆𝐚𝐩: Invest in your team. Train them to be AI ninjas. 🔹𝐃𝐚𝐭𝐚 𝐏𝐫𝐢𝐯𝐚𝐜𝐲: Lock it down. Compliance is key. 🔹𝐂𝐡𝐚𝐧𝐠𝐞 𝐌𝐚𝐧𝐚𝐠𝐞𝐦𝐞𝐧𝐭: Sell the vision. Get everyone on board. No room for doubt.   🏆 𝐒𝐮𝐜𝐜𝐞𝐬𝐬 𝐒𝐭𝐨𝐫𝐢𝐞𝐬: 🔹𝐄-𝐜𝐨𝐦𝐦𝐞𝐫𝐜𝐞 𝐓𝐢𝐭𝐚𝐧: Slashed regression testing time by 70%. Faster releases, happier customers. 🔹𝐅𝐢𝐧𝐚𝐧𝐜𝐞 𝐏𝐨𝐰𝐞𝐫𝐡𝐨𝐮𝐬𝐞: Cut critical production issues by 50% with AI-driven bug detection. 🔹𝐀𝐮𝐭𝐨𝐦𝐨𝐭𝐢𝐯𝐞 𝐋𝐞𝐚𝐝𝐞𝐫: Boosted test coverage by 60%. Reliability went through the roof.   AI in test automation isn't the future; it's the NOW. Follow these tips, tackle challenges head-on, and watch your efficiency soar. Don't just keep up with the competition—blow them out of the water!   #pronixinc #aitestAutomation #softwaretesting #techinnovation #qualityassurance #digitaltransformation

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Haven't seen the inaugural Pendo Feature Adoption Report from 2019 yet? Based on 615 subscriptions for customers using Pendo >1 year. 😬 Only 12% of features are frequently used, 8% moderately used. 😩 80% of features are rarely or never used.  Optimizing onboarding and adoption of the most important, core features will get the product-led flywheel spinning and not clutter up the user experience. Link to pdf in comments.

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I've long struggled with calling saying something has "Good" or "Bad" Developer Experience (DX) because it's extremely binary and doesn't really help product teams improve their DX. For that reason when I started the Developer Advocacy program at Twilio and began to work with product teams on improving their DX we ended up creating the "DX Spectrum" framework that is helping product teams evaluate their DX better and helps to answer the question "How do we create a magical developer experience?" https://lnkd.in/ggMmCx_e

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I was talking to a non-technical business executive recently about his frustration with their software development leader for their 30+ teams. They have a major issue right now with integrating products as they acquire new companies. "They just keep telling me that 'It's complex' and 'It's going to take a long time' and in the meantime, quality is so low everyone's spending most of their time fixing bugs. They've never hit any of their dates." He sighed as he continued, "I've explained that I need more than that. I need a level of confidence that they can do what I need them to do, and I need to know how long it's going to take." He shook his head and said, "This seems like it should be much more straightforward." Software development *isn't* straightforward, but that's not an excuse for not providing what's necessary to drive the business. I told him he should expect four things from the engineering organization--and his leader, specifically: 1. Options 2. Tradeoffs 3. Cost 4. Recommendation The technical leader should be able to outline specific paths forward and the tradeoffs for each. I gave him an example of what I think his leader should be able to tell him: "We can address this integration issue in three ways. The first way would involve some minor work and will likely get us by for a quarter or two, but it's more of a band aid solution. Development and testing should take 4 to 6 weeks, which will require pushing off work on one of the upcoming features. "The second path is to rework some of the fundamental communication architecture. I believe this will address our needs right now, plus handle the three acquisitions we have in the works. This is probably the 2-to-3-year solution and should take 10 to 16 weeks. I've earmarked the Happy Smiles team to take this on, since they have the most experience in this area of the system. This will require reworking the plan for the features they would otherwise take on. "Finally, we can rewrite the entire communication architecture from scratch. This will solve every problem we have today and add extensibility we didn't know we needed when we built it 12 years ago. This is the '10 year' solution but the costliest. Based on the teams' estimates, this will require three teams for 6 to 9 months, including full testing and validation with our current products and all products from our upcoming acquisitions. We'll have to move work off their plates and/or contract with external development partners to backfill the work. "I recommend the second option as the best balance between addressing our needs and delaying additional development. We can likely chip away at adding additional extensibility to work our way to the '10 year solution' over time without taking a big hit right now."

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I just sent this email to #BigBasket #bbdaily about inconsistent billing. Some (like I) would call it fraud. I had a customer experience and fraud confrontation with #Flipakart a couple weeks ago. What's going on with me? Really... Is it me or them? When will they really get serious? I understand that there can be software errors. In digital world, or technically - a software, N number of things can break. But there are few things that cannot be compromised. OK, here's that email 👇 Dear Grievance Officer at Bigbasket, I am writing to bring to your immediate attention a serious issue regarding incorrect billing of products on my account between <redacted> and <redacted>. This matter is not just a simple error but constitutes financial fraud, which cannot be taken lightly. During the specified period, I noticed that the billing for one item (<redacted>) was inflated. For <redacted> milk, the correct billing was <redacted>. However, between <redacted>, both dates included, <redacted> was charged. Although I have been promised by the customer support that the additional amount has been refunded to my account, I am concerned that other customers might have been similarly affected. This issue likely extends beyond my account and could have impacted numerous other customers. I am also worried that these things might just be occurring and will continue to occur. Out of 100 customers impacted, a few may notice and the remaining may not even know that this happened. Bigbasket is making money in unscrupulous ways. Given the gravity of this situation, I urge you to initiate a thorough investigation into the matter. It is imperative that corrective measures are implemented promptly to ensure that all affected customers receive appropriate refunds. Additionally, robust measures must be put in place to prevent such issues from occurring in the future. Please provide me with detailed information on the steps you are taking to resolve this issue for other customers and the preventive measures you plan to implement to avoid such incidents in the future. I also intend to bring this matter to the attention of the concerned government authorities to ensure that appropriate actions are taken. I look forward to your prompt response and resolution of this matter. Trying to do the right thing Saket Modi

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I very rarely post, but this is worth amplifying: https://lnkd.in/gBWmAqf2 Everything in balance. If you do adopt agile, be sure to stay practical, take the good bits, ignore the bits that don't fit your workflow, and avoid being dogmatic. Testing matters, and can't always be sacrificed on the altar of velocity. Requirements matter, and can't always be deferred or amortised.

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How good is ZoomInfo Copilot? I think these customer reactions say it all. 💪 To see what ZoomInfo Copilot can do for you, head to our landing page to request a demo 👉 http://bit.ly/3UMYe6U #ZoomInfoCopilot

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