While the team was gone

This is a draft of what I’ve gone through while the team was gone. Some members came back, some are still in exile. It’s a draft, but if I’ll not write it down, tomorrow will be here too quickly, and the insights will fade away.

Stuff learned while the team was gone:

• QA needs a totally different skillset. Yes, I knew it long ago, but although doing my best, I couldn’t think of half the scenarios she is checked on a regular basis.
• Managing the bugs yourself teaches you more than expected. Deserted corners of the APP, edge cases, complicated scenarios, and time to time, some really critical issues.
• Handling the bugs quickly leaves you with a clear mind. If it’s not a complicated development process, better: fix, upload, and have a clear board ASAP.
• Reliable automated testing is critical. Automation goes without saying, but without the experienced QA, it becomes critical.
• Some people just don’t tell you how hard they work. She did so much Sisyphean work on the automation, that It’s amazing she had time to do everything else.
• The automated testing ecosystem is critical and it must be reliable, stable, and without all the Sisyphean work mentioned above.
• Sometimes you are appreciated only when people see something else. And yes, I’m patting myself on the back.

Stuff done while the team was gone:

• Most important: Maintain continuous personal contact by pre-scheduled 1o1 meetings with all the team members. I’ve done it before, but now it became extra-important. Even if sometimes there was nothing to talk about. I thought there will be plenty of stuff to learn from their experience, but it seems to become mostly a safe place to release steam about an unhealthy environment and have some personal conversations.
• Maintain continuous team meetings. Even if there is nothing work-related talk about. Plenty of time for expressing their unhappiness from the situation, and some fun games.
• Being engaged in long boring and irrelevant meetings. As a dictator, my daily meetings were very short and precise. They started precisely on time and ended as soon as possible. But since I had no team, I joined in the dailies of the dark side, and they manage their time differently 😉
• Have an empty (bug) bord principle: Since I was the researcher, the programmer, the QA, and the deployer, there was no sense in keeping open bugs. The morning routine included all the steps and left the board clear.
• Been the Foreign Minister, Minister of the Interior, Ambassador, and A Diplomat at the same time. There was no one else to answer all the questions or handle the issues.
• Complete some important unfinished tasks. With no management tasks or code reviews to do, there was time to complete open tasks left by the team members.
• Develop and deploy some new features that were so important they were worth the risk of been deployed without additional QA.
• Stabilize the automated testing framework. Once the IC is starting to return, the most important task I’m going to promote is the shift from the QA developed automation system, into integrated code automated QA.

Some other stuff done:

• Firebase/Firestore app: Cool. instant DB, instant data listener, instant deploy. instant authentication and more.
• TypeScript: Takes out all the fun from JS, but totally worth it. Except for some unreadable long syntaxes.
• React hooks with TypeScript: Bread and butter.
• Material-ui: Nice, but I’m not convinced yet.