Published: A Tester's Growth-Path to Test Automation At one client, the topic of how a growth path for Testers in Test Automation would look in their QA Community of Practice. That triggered me to ask that question in the wild. Here's the result. thinkinglabs.io/articles/202...

No, people will sit idly because they are intrinsically lazy. McGregor wrote about this in the 70s... That is, they indeed are if you treat them as if they were.

Solo work is often silo work

Our Work in Progress (WIP) should be at least equal to the number of team members. If it is less, it means someone is idle ... So what? That so-called idle person might be helping out someone else ...

It worries me that we're losing the war against rightwing disinfo. There is no rational reason the shooting of Charlie Kirk made global news while Melissa Hortman's murder barely made national news & everybody has forgotten they blamed this on the left as well www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...

Published another update to: So, Yes, Trunk-Based Development! Now what? Added the questions: - How to maintain multiple versions? - Can we use branches? thinkinglabs.io/articles/202...

Semantic Versioning and SaaS So, Semantic Versioning is absolutely important when delivering a library that others rely on. It is downright unimportant when we are operating a SaaS product. Which version number is deployed does not matter.

Published an update to: So, Yes, Trunk-based Development! Now What? Added the missing reference to the Walking Skeleton when implementing large changes. Thanks to Steve Hallman for bringing that to my attention 🫶 thinkinglabs.io/articles/202...

How many environments should we have? In my humble career, I have seen a whole range of environments used, going from two to ... five/six 😳 The orgs having only two environments are generally doing better 🤷 I guess the fewer environments, the more attention to quality. MTTR will be reduced too

X: When deploying in test things break for other teams. Y: The problem is we only have shared test environments. The problem is not shared test environments. Production is messy, anyway. If we cannot handle messiness in test, production will be downright chaos. It is a skills and practice problem.

Released @thinkinglabs/aws-iam-policy v3.2.1 A TypeScript DSL for handling AWS IAM Policy documents programmatically instead of using JSON strings. Specifically designed to be used with the Pulumi provisioning tool. www.npmjs.com/package/@thi...

Published: So, Yes, Trunk-based Development! Now What? We are sold on the idea of practising trunk-based development. However, all the articles we read on the topic leave us with tons of questions. This is an attempt to answer these questions. thinkinglabs.io/articles/202...

Continuous Integration does not require executing the whole damn automation test suite all the time at every integration. Of course, in that case, it is hard to have fast builds.

Today, pushing TBD could be considered to be career limiting. I've been thinking about that a lot ... ... Nobody wants to hear that **GitHUB Flow** is just one of three major forms of TBD: trunkbaseddevelopment.com/styles/.

I got the feedback the tone of the post is a bit hard, accusing, even condescending. Is it? #genuinequestion

Additionally, a branch is a little kingdom the dev feels is theirs to control. I think many also fear losing that turf.

Yes, and then the kicker is in the conclusion… ‘Adopting trunk-based development is not the first step. It is step 20 on a journey most teams have not even embarked on.’

Published: Why do Teams think Single-branch Development Does not Work? Despite research showing that Continuous Integration indirectly leads to better quality and stability, implying the practice of trunk-based development, teams believe this cannot work for them. thinkinglabs.io/articles/202...

Published: Why do Teams not practice Continuous Integration? Everyone in the IT industry agrees that Continuous Integration is a required practice to realise quality and stability. Yet, few teams have truly implemented Continuous Integration. Why is that? thinkinglabs.io/articles/202...

Published an update to: On the Benefits of Trunk-based development Added the missing: - enables incremental software engineering skills - encourages refactoring - this has worked for regulated industries and large IT systems thinkinglabs.io/articles/202...

We don't do politics here. Yeah right. You are lying to yourself (and believe it). Business is politics!

Published: On the benefits of trunk-based development Whenever we suggest trunk-based development, we are called unprofessional and belittled. How can we possibly produce quality? But in all honesty, for trunk-based development teams, quality is the highest concern. thinkinglabs.io/articles/202...

No comment 🤷 #socrates2025

There is no such thing as a target architecture thingy. We can only try something and coarse correct. We should eradicate this "target architecture" thinking from our vocabulary. Really! It is not helpful, and it creates the wrong expectations.

Doing otherwise somehow remembers me the waste. effort and delays I find in big pull-requests reviews and long lived branches merge as opposed to TBD /cc @tdpauw.bsky.social

Published: The Struggle of Public Speaking Sometime in 2022, the lovely people of FourScouts invited me to share my experiences with public speaking, including the challenges and rewards. thinkinglabs.io/articles/202...

I seem to have a difficult relationship with the French conferences except for @flowcon.bsky.social 🤷

When a team of six tells is they practice scaled trunk-based development, chances are what they are really doing is GitHub Flow with too many branches living for too long. Probably they are nowhere close to trunk-based development.

Genuine question, does the fingerprint auth on Windows actually work, like it always unlocks on first try? 🤷

Published an update: On the Evilness of Feature Branching - But Compliance? A recent conversation on LinkedIn nudged me to add more lean alternatives to using Pull Requests to satisfy compliance. thinkinglabs.io/articles/202...

Founders on LinkedIn trolling software developers because they "don't need us anymore" put me in mind of tourists waving at old sea captains watching from the harbour as they paddle further and further out to sea in their self-made rafts and we quietly adjust our rescue fees.

Software engineering has this in common with having children: The labour before the birth is painful and difficult, but the labor *after* the birth is where we actually spend most of our effort. — SRE book

Typical complexity problem: it had to be experienced. It cannot be (fully) explained in advance.

I just attended a conference in the US. We had one speaker detained and two others turned away at the border.

How can we convince people of the benefits of trunk-based development? Here’s the obnoxious truth. We can’t! 🤷 They don’t believe it until they try it, see it, feel it. Only then they’ll understand the benefits and see how much more simpler the process becomes unlocking a myriad of possibilities.

Anything that the Government gets wrong, the private sector excels at showing how much more wrong is possible. — @swardley.bsky.social No comment 😬🙈🤷

#cartoon #wallstreet #beurs (via www.lectrr.com)

Published: my notes of @flowcon.bsky.social #flowcon For the list of topics, see thread 🧵👇 thinkinglabs.io/tags/flowcon

The slide deck for “Non-Blocking Continuous Code Reviews” at FlowCon France @flowcon.bsky.social #FlowCon How a novice team found ways to improve delivery performance. Key takeaway: Features arrive in production even before a review started. thinkinglabs.io/talks/2024/0...

"Our bottleneck has developed a bottleneck"

It’s amusing how GitHub implicitly admits there is a problem with Pull Requests but adds another layer of complexity through Merge Queues to solve the symptoms instead of tackling the root cause, ie. the pull request itself. Stacked Diffs is another such thing 🙄 github.blog/engineering/...

Getting ready for a day of training and hands-on workshopping on trunk-based development. Remember: Friends don't let friends work on long-lived feature branches! 👋 @tdpauw.bsky.social

NEW: The Trump administration pulled funding for research to protect pregnant women from domestic violence, citing it as a “DEI” initiative.

A branch is a promise to have a merge conflict later, instead of now.

Teams practising trunk-based development have significantly less technical debt than teams practising feature branching with PRs. Why? …

We are agile you know! Yes, I can see that. You have a lovely kanban board beautifully decorated with sticky notes. It is pretty. But, tell me, why does the Review column look like a nuclear explosion happened?

Quality control departments sprouted. They took quality control away from everybody else, which was of course entirely wrong, as quality control is everbody’s job — Deming, Out of the Crisis Quality is everyone’s responsibility!! Not just QA. Deming was telling that since 1950 when helping Japan

It's confirmed. LinkedIn is the Instagram for business 🤷 You spend hours or days writing a bloody article, which barely delivers 20-something reactions in a couple of days. You post a fucking picture of a sticky note. It brings a whopping 130 reactions within a day. WTF!

No comment 🤷

Congrats @nativewired.com for keynoting @agilecambridge.bsky.social 🎊 agilecambridge.net/keynotes