Your path to business agility
Browse curated reading for engineering professionals.
Please note: In this post, I will refer to all design practices, User Experience Design, Interface Design, Visual Design, and Design Research as design. Much has been written about Lean UX and the role of design in Agile development. Design’s primary role is reducing the risk that the team is building the wrong thing or...
Testing Tasktop Integration Hub’s user experience is a rather complex undertaking. As my colleague Rebecca explained in her blog last week, “Tasktop suffers from an interesting, almost paradoxical problem: the users who benefit most from our product often have no idea that it exists”. To address this problem, we devised a Usability Testing Program —...
Tasktop Integration Hub suffers from an interesting, almost paradoxical problem: the users who benefit most from our product often have no idea that it exists. They’ve never seen its user interface (UI), never done any configuration, and probably couldn’t even name our product if asked. When our product functions as it should, there’s no reason...
When you come in to work, do your teammates greet you? Are jokes told on your team? Especially bad ones? Do you chat about anything besides work? Trust is essential to teams. Literature like The Five Dysfunctions of a Team and The Phoenix Project remind us of this, as well as how important it is...
The following defect is to some extent typical of those encountered by connector developers1 at Tasktop, inasmuch as there exists a typical defect. The ‘to some extent’ qualifier is there as most defects are either too straightforward to write a blog about, or conversely too complex and/or delve too deeply into our code internals to...
The beginning of my experience as a Junior Software Engineer on one of Tasktop’s ‘Integrations Teams’ marked a definitive transition in the way I learned and practiced computer science and software development. With just a year at UBC’s Computer Science program and a couple of personal projects under my belt, I was initially uncertain of...
Ask any avid cyclist about the importance of their wheels. If their bike is highly customized, ask them if they consider the number of spokes, lacing pattern, or manufacturer of the hub and rim that make up their wheel. If the cyclist is a world-class professional, ask the same question to their Tour Manager. The...
Agile transformations are complicated endeavors, especially for large enterprises trying to keep pace with today’s fluid digital marketplace. Add the additional difficulties of having to orient delivery teams around products and bridging entrenched organizational silos – well that is quite a challenge that requires uplift across multiple dimensions. Many teams have begun their transformational journeys...
We’ve all seen those projects that start with fast builds. Fast builds that build everything and run all of the tests are a great way to get feedback on your code review, whether it be Travis commenting on your GitHub Pull Request or Jenkins voting on your Gerrit code review. It’s almost inevitable that successful...
I have been fortunate enough to work on a variety of teams and companies in the software industry, each with different methodologies and varying efficiency. Throughout my career as a software developer, I’ve thoroughly enjoyed the problem-solving aspects of working in a development team, and would like to share a couple of the challenges that...
