Building a great culture in an organisation starts from each and every employee, each and every team member. When each member of the team contributes in maintaining a collaborative, respectful and conducive environment in the team, it in turn becomes the culture of the team and then penetrates the whole…

Automated functional/UI tests are a necessary evil in any project. I call it evil because reaching a stable state and maintaining it is a difficult feat to achieve. As the size of a test suite increases, there are two main issues that arise: time taken to the run the tests…

I have worked with a couple of legacy codebases in past years. Based on my learning, I have attempted to gather a few high level tips to help work with such code to ensure productivity and help in continuous improvement of the code base to make it more manageable. Understand the context: Know the history of code The…

A desk check or dev box testing is an informal manual process for verifying the programming and logic of a story in the developer’s environment, before pushing or merging the code. “Quality is not an act, it is a habit.” — Aristotle Regular and methodical dev box testing reduces defects…

Breaking the bias. As they say, small steps matter. It starts from your own family and home. I have witnessed it, lived it, experienced it and definitely recommend it. I am not going to share a single story but a bunch of small significant stories. Listening about these or being…

Higher collaboration creates successful products — In my first job, I had no exposure to Agile. I was part of a product development team which mostly worked on defects and enhancements on a legacy codebase. After completing development of every ticket, the ticket would move into the testing lane. If the testing team found an issue…

Forum for technical discussions and collaboration — Technical huddles are known by many names, tech huddle, dev huddle, dev meeting or daily huddle. These are all nothing but quick discussions amongst the team members to talk about design approaches, resolve technical blockers etc. They can also be used to do group code reviews and code walkthroughs. Tech…

In one of my previous stories I had written about supportive culture. One of the high level points I spoke about was the importance of on-boarding new members to the team. In this story I will try to elaborate on specific points about it based on my experience. Given the…

Unit Testing, Clean code and more (Part 1) spoke about what is clean code, its importance and how do tests, especially unit tests, ensure clean code. It also mentioned different types of tests: Sociable and Solitary tests. Let’s continue from here. Solitary tests attempts to isolate the unit under test…