/Leadership

Measuring An Engineering Organization

- Will Larson tl;dr: "There is no one solution to engineering measurement, rather there are many modes of engineering measurement, each of which is appropriate for a given scenario. Becoming an effective engineering executive is adding more approaches to your toolkit and remaining flexible about which to deploy for any given request." Will provides a template to work off of.

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Which Meetings Should You Kill?

- Camille Fournier tl;dr: "I fear that the culprit is a surprising new factor, one that started before the pandemic but has gotten even more out of hand in the world of remote work: 1:1s." Camille discusses how group discussion topics have turned into 1:1 topics in the remote work era.

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Code Ownership And Software Quality

- Abi Noda tl;dr: "Ownership is negatively correlated with the number of bugs, and the more shared the file ownership the higher the likelihood that it will contain code defects. This trend is also supported by the fact that for all projects studied, the number of contributors is positively correlated with the number of bugs." Abi provides 4 management recommendations.

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5 Ways To Increase Velocity By Removing The Bottlenecks  In Your QA Process

- Kirk Nathanson tl;dr: With a recession looming and many companies freezing their hiring plans, savvy teams can look at other levers to increase velocity and improve product quality. Here are five cost-effective changes you can make.

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OKRs Are Hard

- Camille Fournier tl;dr: "In this post, I decided to write down my definition of what a good OKR looks like. My thinking has evolved from what I first learned long ago in half-remembered talks, blog posts, and books, and is now based on my experience using them to set team goals over the past ten or so years."

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Shipping Spotify’s Culture: 5 Plugins (And 4 Principles) For Supercharging Developer Experience At Scale

- Tyson Singer tl;dr: 4 principles are DevEx at scale: (1) Keep squads fast by keeping them small, capable, and aligned. (2) Make engineering excellence and quality an everyday practice. (3) The best solutions come from the bottom up, so empower the teams doing the work. (4) Our fellow developers are our customers, so build with empathy.

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Incident Categories I’d Like To See

- Lorin Hochstein tl;dr: If you’re categorizing your incidents by cause, here are some options for causes that I’d love to see used. These are all taken directly from the field of cognitive systems engineering research: (1) Production pressure. (2) Goal conflicts. (3) Workarounds. (4) Automation surprises.

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Writing Docs Well: Why Should A Software Engineer Care?

- Lorin Hochstein tl;dr: Lorin recently gave a lecture in a graduate software engineering course on the value of technical writing for software engineers. There are 3 goals when writing: (1) Building shared understanding. (2) A tool for your own thinking. (3) Influence in a larger org when you’re at the bottom of the hierarchy. Lorin also advises on how to improve technical writing. 

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Removing Uncertainty: The Tip Of The Iceberg

- James Stanier tl;dr: "You reduce uncertainty until the software exists. You reduce uncertainty by doing: prototyping, designing, writing code, and shipping. Each of these actions serve to reduce the uncertainty about what is left to build." James discusses different methods of reducing uncertainty across a project, at various stages.

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Company, Team, Self

- Will Larson tl;dr: Will discusses his experiences managing and energizing teams. "Rigid adherence to any prioritization model, even one that’s conceptually correct like mine that prioritized the company and team first, will often lead to the right list of priorities but a team that’s got too little energy to make forward progress. It’s not only reasonable to violate correct priorities to energize yourself and your team, modestly violating priorities to energize your team enroute to a broader goal is an open leadership secret."

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