The Mind of Steve

3 C's: Curiosity, Care and Context Like surely every team of software engineers in the world, my team has been discussing, exploring, integrating, benefiting from AI over the past year. I am working on a series of posts for the coming weeks, exploring our successes and lessons. As their manager, I have reassured countless times that their jobs are not in danger, that we need their intelligence, insights and skills to make the best use possible of the new AI power and direct it toward our many system challenges and company goals. Almost as an aside in our meeting the other day, one team member summarized what the Human Dev brings as: Initiative, Diligence and Wisdom. His almost-throwaway comment in a larger discussion stuck with me and got me thinking. Today, I want to rephrase and slightly broaden his terms in this reflection. Why are none of the Devs on my team at risk of losing their jobs to AI? Because they bring at least three key traits that the team and the company needs, and...

QA Strategy part 2 - Q.U.E.S.T In Part 1 of my musings on a QA Strategy , I described my new assignment, with a QA team added to my direct reports. Since I had never had to lead and manage such a team before, I set out to craft a QA Strategy document, both for my team and ideally to be adopted by the whole company. I wrote of my possible pillars and the process of distilling them down into a more concise and workable set. As a reminder, I emerged with these five general principles to guide my QA decisions: (1) Quality is a shared responsibility (2) All quality activities should produce information that is measurable, visible, and actionable (3) Automate repetitive verification; use people for exploration and critical thinking (4) Test according to business and technical risk (5) Learn from production and feed those lessons back into development My whimsical streak emerged at this point. These guiding principles are fine, but can I shape them into a fun acronym to help them stick in my ...