{"id":997,"date":"2016-09-15T12:58:39","date_gmt":"2016-09-15T19:58:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/angryweasel.com\/blog\/?p=997"},"modified":"2016-09-15T20:28:24","modified_gmt":"2016-09-16T03:28:24","slug":"roles-and-boxes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/angryweasel.com\/blog\/roles-and-boxes\/","title":{"rendered":"Roles and Boxes"},"content":{"rendered":"

The fine folks at the Ministry of Testing<\/a> keep promoting my blog posts, so the least I can do is give them a link and a shout out. I\u2019m looking forward to talking about \u201cTesting without Testers\u201d at Test Bash Philadelphia (preview here<\/a>) and about my role on the team.<\/p>\n

This morning, I passively listened to The Bach Bros talk in a webinar about roles and what they mean, as I was curious to get their take. The punch line of the talk was the introduction of \u201cRole grams\u201d \u2013 which are shapes that describe who does what, what they\u2019re doing, and who owns it. Nothing earth-shattering, but a workable model.<\/p>\n

For the last 14 months, I\u2019ve been a manager on an engineering team responsible for deployment and quality. As I\u2019ve put it before, I am responsible for everything that happens between the time code is checked in (or slightly before, as I also added a few git hooks) to the time it is deployed to our production servers. Given that context, my role is a big blob of stuff. One could say that my \u201crole\u201d is Director of quality and infrastructure, and within that role, I take on activities<\/em> of tools, engineering productivity, builds, quality, and testing. Certainly, you could say that each of those are roles I take on as part of my job \u2013 that model just doesn\u2019t work as well for me. My role \u2013 the part I play as an actor on my product team, is one where I need to look at the entire ecosystem of check-in, CI, build, test, and release as one thing. I look at all of that as a system \u2013 how quickly and efficiently can I move a developer check-in to something that shows customer value. I have to view the system to know which parts are bottlenecks, and which parts need speeding up, or slowing down in order to increase overall system efficiency.<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s a low-tech view of my role. \"20160915_120808\"<\/a>I\u2019m not locked in my box \u2013 in fact, since I\u2019m the \u201cquality guy\u201d (label, not role) on my team, I spend most<\/em> of my time working across the team on improving the testing done by other engineers on the team. I also have a small team of dedicated testers (these people have a testing \u201crole\u201d), who focus almost entirely on exploratory testing driven by trends in customer feedback and areas where I think we need additional breadth coverage in order to reduce risk.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s an evolving role, but one I enjoy, and one that I think will become much more common in the coming years.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The fine folks at the Ministry of Testing keep promoting my blog posts, so the least I can do is give them a link and a shout out. I\u2019m looking forward to talking about \u201cTesting without Testers\u201d at Test Bash Philadelphia (preview here) and about my role on the team. This morning, I passively listened…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_kad_post_transparent":"","_kad_post_title":"","_kad_post_layout":"","_kad_post_sidebar_id":"","_kad_post_content_style":"","_kad_post_vertical_padding":"","_kad_post_feature":"","_kad_post_feature_position":"","_kad_post_header":false,"_kad_post_footer":false,"_kad_post_classname":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-997","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-allposts"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/angryweasel.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/997","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/angryweasel.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/angryweasel.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/angryweasel.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/angryweasel.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=997"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/angryweasel.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/997\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/angryweasel.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=997"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/angryweasel.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=997"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/angryweasel.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=997"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}