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Unnecessary Unit Tests

January 12, 2024

Latest Posts

Entwicklungspraxis August 21, 2023

The Fifth Ideal: Customer Focus

Hi, “The VPN should not be operated by you [Sysadmins].” After this sentence, I saw startled faces. It slipped out of me. During the weekly Jour Fixe between the developers and admins. It came to the question of what our priorities are. It hit a nerve. Probably not because the participants are emotionally attached to the VPN. Probably not because the statement is wrong. No - it’s more likely because it’s so unconventional for the team.

Marcus Held

Entwicklungspraxis August 14, 2023

The Fourth Ideal: Psychological Safety

Hi, Last week, emotions were running high. One of my clients achieved something extraordinary. They have successfully operated a product for 10 years. Highly profitable. But the project was not started by trained developers. It began as a side product. The initial developers were career changers. Highly interested, motivated, engaged, and experts in their domain. And they accomplished something that fails in 9 out of 10 cases. Their product is actively used. Customers happily pay for it. It solves a real problem. In a niche that hardly any other company can occupy.

Marcus Held

Entwicklungspraxis August 7, 2023

Improvement of Daily Work: The Third Ideal

Hi, In Chinese, there is a famous saying: “The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now.” We know this in software development too. We keep complaining about the mistakes we made back then. “Should do that someday.” This is a sentence that comes up in every second retrospective. Technical debt is piling up. “Should do that someday.” The daily usually takes too long. “Should do that someday.”

Marcus Held

Entwicklungspraxis July 31, 2023

The Second Ideal: Focus, Flow, and Joy

Hi, When was the last time you lost track of time? Just keep going. Without it being hard. With full concentration. You shut out everything around you. You forget to eat. You delay going to the toilet. For me, it was the last time I was designing backendhance.com . I was totally absorbed. And it was so satisfying. I build my website with Hugo. And it’s super fast. Should the header be a bit larger? font-size adjusted. I click on my browser to view the change and BAM it’s compiled.

Marcus Held

Entwicklungspraxis July 24, 2023

The First Ideal: Locality and Simplicity

Hi, I once developed a backend with just two engineers. It was the backend for Sunrise Village . I joined the team already in the pre-production stage, together with my then colleague. For over three years, we were the backend team. The other teams were larger. We had up to 8 frontend developers, a similar number of artists, two game designers, product owners, product managers, and 2 test automators. Even the fact that there were only two of us was actually too many. We kept it that way for risk minimization - in case one of us was unavailable.

Marcus Held