Semaphore Uncut

Mob and pair programming are meant to ease collaboration and improve communication between team members. Still, other aspects of software development can also gain something from it.
 
This is the case for testing optimization, as well as for preserving an organization’s culture and growing teams. To shed light on these topics, we interviewed Llewellyn Falco, agile coach and the creator of ApprovalTests.

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In software development, testing is a vital part of ensuring quality products. However, how to test and why isn’t always clear or in the mind of developers, who may see it as beyond the scope of their job.

To Gaspar Nagy, the person behind SpecFlow, testing is a matter of collaboration, constant feedback, and handling overconfidence. To discuss the subject, we asked him to answer our question on the importance of testing, his journey as a software developer, and the tools he designed for implementing BDD testing.

You can also get Semaphore Uncut on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Stitcher, and more.

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Imagine those old days of building for the web, when everything was simple. Now imagine that you could have the user experience we have today mixed with the developer experience of yesteryear, of what felt like years ago.

That’s what Remix is, a web framework with laser focus on user experience. In this episode, Darko welcomes Kent C. Dodds, Director of Developer Experience at Remix. Kent explains what Remix is and why it’s so cool.

Listen to the full episode or read the edited transcript.  

If you need to cover a distance of 30 kilometers, you can walk for 6 hours. Or you can learn how to drive a car and get there in 30.

That’s what Shai Reznik, Test Effective Coach, learned the hard way. He worked so hard trying to juggle a 9-to-5 job with growing a startup that he got a panic attack. In the end, he decided automated what could be automated, including testing, is the only way to stay sane.

In this podcast episode, Darko and Shai talk about Shai’s career path from being a full-time developer to growing his startup to consultancy, why writing tests can save developers’ time, and how to write tests the test effective way.

Table of contents:

• How Shai started with business consulting
• How Shai started writing tests
• The most common mistake when writing code
• Shai's transition into consultancy
• Standup and improvisation in lectures
• How to find the balance between confidence and efficiency

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How do people end up in test automation? Is it a skill people can learn at universities or it’s more of a vocation, really?

There is no one path that leads to QA. What’s more important is that testing is just a subset of quality assurance. There're so many aspects to think about when people talk about signing anything off from a QA perspective.

In the most recent episode of Semaphore Uncut, we welcome Maryam Umar, Head of QA at Rezolve, international speaker. Maryam explains what the three Ps of testing are, how to advance your career as a testing engineer, and how to start a new position as a tester. Listen to the full episode or read the edited transcript.

What we talked about: 

• Starting with test automation
• How Maryam ended up in test management
• How to grow a team from 20 to 500 engineers and keep the quality of the processes
• Three pillars of quality assurance
• How to start a new position: checklist

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There's so much more to testing than just writing automated tests that run in CI. Testers on high-performing teams don't just write tests. They work closely with site reliability engineers, ensuring that the infrastructure is tested as well. They get involved in production. 

But how does one introduce this holistic approach to testing to one's team? Even more so, how does one introduce continuous integration to an organization, if it hasn't been adopted yet?

In this podcast episode, we welcome Lisa Crispin, Author, Agile Testing Coach, "tester by trade",  in her own words. Among other things, we talk about a holistic approach to testing, how to shift from shipping many times a day to once a month, and how to help organizations adopt continuous integration. Listen to the full episode or read the edited transcript.

Table of contents:

• What’s more to testing than just writing tests?
• Exploratory testing
• Holistic approach to testing
• Modern trends in testing
• Implementing CI in organizations
• Testing as a practice: patterns and antipatterns

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When your engineering team grows from 10 to 100 engineers in the course of a year, there are so many things that you need to focus on, from operations and developer tooling to testing. Maintaining the health of the application is perhaps the most difficult part of all. Where exactly do you start?

We sat down with Justin Searls, the co-founder and CTO of the Test Double agency. For many years, Justin has been consulting organizations on how to best tackle team's growth and ensure that good practices are in place when teams grow. 

We talked about how to grow engineering teams without losing sanity, how to divide work without stepping on one's toes, and keep your test suite maintainable.

You can also get Semaphore Uncut on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Stitcher, and more.

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In this podcast episode, we welcome Richard Kasperowski. Richard is an author, teacher, speaker, and coach focused on team building and high-performance teams.

Richard is the author of two books, High-Performance Teams: The Foundations and The Core Protocols: A Guide to Greatness, as well as the forthcoming book High-Performance Teams: Core Protocols for Psychological Safety and Emotional Intelligence. 

We talked to Richard about what core protocols are, how important it is to talk about one’s feelings, and how to help your team achieve new heights. Listen to the full episode or read the transcript.

Things we covered:

• How Richard started his career
• What are core protocols?
• Why psychological safety in teams is important
• Why it’s important to share how you feel, even as a developer
• How big should the team be?
• What is mob programming
• Things to do and not to do as a team leader

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In this episode of Semaphore Uncut, we welcome Aslak Hellesøy, Cucumber Founder, Cucumber Open Source Lead at SmartBear. We walk about TDD and BDD, how to adopt automated testing, what different kinds of tests there are, and what the future holds for Cucumber. 

What we talked about, in more detail:

• Introduction
• The differences between TDD and BDD
• How developer communities evolve
• What is Cucumber?
• How companies started adopting Cucumber
• TDD: patterns and anti-patterns
• How to adopt test automation
• The hexagonal architecture of BDD
• Why do we need different kinds of tests?
• The future of Cucumber

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In this podcast episode, I welcome Emily Bache, technical agile coach, author of "Technical Agile Coaching with the Samman Method" and "The Coding Dojo Handbook". We talk about agile coaching, the Samman Method, peer reviews and various communication techniques and methods. Listen to our insightful conversation or read the edited transcript. 

What we talked about:

• The Coding Dojo Handbook
• Starting a career as an agile coach
• The Samman Method
• How long does it take a team to embrace something new?
• Communication techniques and methods
• How to begin with ensemble working
• How to improve soft skills and team work in an organization
• How to deal with flaky tests and large test suites

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In this podcast episode, I welcome Kris Buytaert, consulting CTO at Inuits.eu, one of the organisers of DevOpsDays. We talk about the conference, how to introduce CI/CD to teams, and what some patterns and antipatterns for infrastructure as code are. We also discuss why teams are reluctant to spend money on testing and operations, and what happens if they don't.

Listen to the full conversation or read the edited transcript.

What we talked about:

• The reality of conferences in COVID times
• How to introduce CI/CD to teams
• Infrastructure as code: patterns and antipatterns
• Drawbacks of tech education
• Why do organisations not spend money on testing?
• How to get budget for DevOps

Learn more about Semaphore: https://semaphoreci.com 

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In this podcast episode, I welcome with Jan Giacomelli, Staff Software Engineer at Ren Systems, previously with typlessAPI. We talked about test-driven development, unit tests, flaky tests, and much more. Jan shares some exciting war stories from the trenches of testing, explains how he was able to reduce the feedback loop from 45 minutes to only 8 min, and advocates for TDD. Listen to our insightful conversation or read the transcript.

Key points:

• The benefits of TDD and good test coverage
• TDD at typless
• TDD: patterns and anti-patterns
• The problem of testability
• Unit tests
• Flaky tests

Listen to the full conversation or read the edited transcript.

You can also get Semaphore Uncut on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Stitcher, and more.

Like this episode? Be sure to leave a ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ review on the podcast player of your choice and share it with your friends.

In this podcast episode, I welcome David Burns, Head of OSPO at BrowserStack, Chair person for the W3C Browser Testing and Tools Working Group, core contributor on the Selenium Open Source Project. We talk about the past, present and future of browser testing, how to eradicate flaky tests and why it's important to invest more effort into testing pyramid from the very beginning.

Key points:

• David Burns on browser testing
• WebDriver BiDi specification
• How flaky tests are born
• How to start new or migrate existing projects
• Testing pyramid and how tools support it (or do they?)
• Going BiDirectional with testing

Listen to the full conversation or read the edited transcript.

You can also get Semaphore Uncut on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Stitcher, and more.

Like this episode? Be sure to leave a ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ review on the podcast player of your choice and share it with your friends.

In this podcast episode, I welcome Amjad Masad, co-founder and CEO of Replit, the collaborative browser-based IDE. We talk about how Replit started, the technologies behind the product, but also how accessible tools change lives and help to make programming a passion.

Key highlights:

• Making accessible tools as a life goal
• Replit doing magic
• The technical side of Replit
• What happens when you start a REPL?
• Interactive programming as a way to converse with a computer
• Prybar by Replit
• What does a user journey with Replit look like?
• What is Nix?

Listen to our insightful conversation or read the edited transcript.

You can also get Semaphore Uncut on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Stitcher, and more.

Like this episode? Be sure to leave a ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ review on the podcast player of your choice and share it with your friends.

In this podcast episode, I welcome Gleb Bahmutov, Senior Director of Engineering at Mercari. We talk about about Gleb's engineering experience at Cypress.io and Mercari US, discuss the testing pyramid and why it makes little sense, and talk about what we can use instead.

Here's what we talk about:

• Gleb's story with Cypress.io
• Testing pyramid makes little sense; what can we use instead? Gleb's talk at the TestJS Summit
• Why is the testing pyramid shapes this way?
• Testing matrix vs testing pyramid
• The cost of bugs and how to set boundaries within teams

We hope you enjoy the show!

About Semaphore Uncut
In each episode of Semaphore Uncut, we invite software industry professionals to discuss the impact they are making and what excites them about the emerging technologies.

In this episode, I welcome Adam Gordon Bell, Developer Advocate at Earthly, host of CoRecursive podcast. We talk about what Earthly is and how teams can adopt it. We discuss whether being a late adopter is a good or bad thing. Adam also shares his experience with starting his own podcast.

What’s in the episode:

• Introduction to Earthly
• When do you want to start using Earthly?
• What technologies Earthly supports
• Earthly vs Bazel
• How to start with Earthly
• CoRecursive podcast
• Is being a late adopter a bad thing?

About Semaphore Uncut
In each episode of Semaphore Uncut, we invite software industry professionals to discuss the impact they are making and what excites them about the emerging technologies.

In this episode, I welcome Keith Smiley, Principal Engineer and Lead Maintainer of Bazel's iOS support at Lyft. We talk about how the Lyft team is using Bazel and what the advantages are of using this build tool. Keith also shares his team's experience with the Bazel adoption.

Key takeaways:

• How the Lyft team is using Bazel and monorepos
• How Lyft adopted Bazel
• How the Lyft team maintains its build configuration
• What is Bazel
• How to get into Bazel
• Handling flaky tests in Bazel

About Semaphore Uncut
In each episode of Semaphore Uncut, we invite software industry professionals to discuss the impact they are making and what excites them about the emerging technologies.

In this episode, I welcome Adam Bradley, co-creator of Ionic Framework and StencilJS, currently with Builder.io. We chat about Ionic and Stencil, Adam's new projects Qwik and Partytown as well as how Builder.io works and how is it different from other drag and drop website builders.

Key takeaways:

• What is Ionic?
• How StencilJS was born
• Making fast websites with Builder.io
• The challenges in e-commerce and how Qwik solves them
• How Partytown runs third party scripts from a web worker

About Semaphore Uncut
In each episode of Semaphore Uncut, we invite software industry professionals to discuss the impact they are making and what excites them about the emerging technologies.

In this episode of Semaphore Uncut, we welcome Jeffrey Fredrick, co-author of Agile Conversations, organizer of CITCON.

🎧 What we talked about:

• How CITCON Conference was born
• How to bring business metrics to microservices
• Technology adoption lifecycle
• Is Agile dead?
• The art of productive conflict and the Four R's framework

About Semaphore Uncut
In each episode of Semaphore Uncut, we invite software industry professionals to discuss the impact they are making and what excites them about the emerging technologies.

In this episode of Semaphore Uncut we welcome Filip Hraček, developer relations engineer at Google, and talk about what's great about Flutter, how to out as a developer, and the importance of keeping your motivation up.

🎧 Key takeaways:

• The art of finishing projects
• The pros and cons of tinkering with side projects
• How to keep motivation up and keep learning
• What are unicorn developers?