Let’s be honest, we do not treat frontend code the same way we treat backend code. And it shows. We talk about applying rules of clean code, about keeping it simple, about writing unit tests. Yet, when it comes to writing frontend code, we skip all those rules that we usually self impose. We convinced... Read more
We’ve all have been there: trying to become more productive and improve the way we work. If you are looking for a way to limit the “work in progress” answers received from your colleagues and achieve better results, here is a tool you can experiment with: the Kanban board. What is the Kanban board A kanban... Read more
Is technical leadership important? Even in a modern, agile / lean / software craftsmanship company? My experience says it is not only important but the key to the improved performance of developers. Whether we’re talking about a team technical lead, a software architect, a CTO, or an informal leader, I often see the need to understand their... Read more
This article has first appeared in Today Software Magazine. Why Spock? When we first started working on our project at work, we searched for an easy-to-use tool that would help us write readable and concise tests. We chose Spock, because in combination with Groovy it provided exactly what we needed: readable BDD-style tests that we... Read more
Grzegorz (Greg) Albrecht, speaker at Product Leaders 2017, got interviewed by our colleague, Steliana Moraru, Event Manager. Read on to discover his professional experience, lessons learned and challenges met along the way. Steliana: You have a professional background that spans from product manager to startup founder to venture partner. Share with us a... Read more
One way of learning new things about your coding style and about yourself is by doing a daily code kata. It can be like a simulation of a year-long software development project, with all the ups and downs happening in a much shorter time scale (a few iterations). More on that below. I encourage you... Read more
The complete interview can be found on InfoQ. Adrian Bolboacă, Organizational and Technical Coach and Trainer at Mozaic Works, got interviewed by Ben Linders, InfoQ, about different types of tests, writing sufficient and good acceptance tests, criteria to decide to automate a test, and how to apply test automation to create executable specifications. Testing techniques... Read more
This is a guest post by Ralph Roosmalen Scrum versus Waterfall. Management 1.0 versus Management 3.0. Automated Testing versus Manual Testing. Estimation versus No Estimations. SAFe versus LeSS. So many different opinions on all kind of topics and it seems like people always want you to choose between left or right, up or down etc. When... Read more
Richard Omollo, UX Designer Booking.com and speaker at Product Leaders 2017, just got interviewed by our colleague, Monica Obogeanu, product manager at Mozaic Labs. Read on to discover his professional experience, lessons learned and challenges along the way. Monica Obogeanu: Snooping through your LinkedIn profile, I noticed you have a wide & varied experience. Please tell... Read more
The 5th edition of I T.A.K.E Unconference, the only technology agnostic event in Central and Eastern Europe, is taking place in Bucharest, Romania, 11-12 May. With a line-up of more than 30 international speakers, 6 keynotes, 6 parallel tracks, a technical Open Space and many opportunities for coding, the event brings together top-notch software crafters who lead the change in... Read more
As practitioners and trainers using Kanban, we insist on a few changes in perspective that it requires in order to be effective. One of them is capacity planning. Kanban, like Scrum, assumes that the capacity of the team 1 is fixed in the short term. This leads to the question: how can we use the current... Read more
This is a guest post by Thomas Sundberg What makes one specification a bad specification and another specification a good specification? What is the fundamental difference between two specifications? Software is special One important difference between physical things and programs is that physical things are complicated to test. Physical things usually need special tools to... Read more
One of the first techniques I learned as a beginner Product Owner was user story mapping. I immediately found it was easy to understand and apply. What took a while longer was appreciating its true power – identifying all the situations where it can be applied. In the eventriX team, we use it to keep... Read more
One of the dangers of writing user stories is that they can get pretty big if there’s no one on the team to point it out. The scope of a user story becomes broader than it should be. In the following article, I’m going to walk you through the reasons why you should aim for... Read more
The post was first published in Today Software Magazine, no. 55 This article aims to answer a set of core questions about software architecture, providing answers that come from modern software architecture thinking. Its inspiration came from: conversations with Rebecca Wirfs-Brock and Simon Brown architecting the eventrix.co product, running “Architectural Katas” countless conversations with architects... Read more
We are committed to champion software excellence and challenge the current practices. Our aim is to constantly improve: business, product, and teams. That’s why, in this last month we carefully selected pieces of advice, practical ideas for you & your team to improve and grow. For you to easier access them, we present you the... Read more
In 2009, Bucharest was on the pair programming tour of the first software journeyman: Corey Haines. We want to support and continue this tradition. We’re opening up our office for anyone who has a connection with software development and wants to travel and learn more. We’ve done this informally in the past, with people we... Read more
Our colleague, Adi Bolboacă, had a session at Agile Talks #17, a community event where we constantly make a contribution. Find out more about from the below presentation, containing topics on: cross-functional teams habits and their importance group decisions estimates scaling The video material is here. If interested in the above topics, set a meeting... Read more
While developing the first MozaicLabs product, eventrix.co, we wanted to use our full experience in agile, lean and software craftsmanship. Here’s a list of things we’ve adopted: A kanban process to have a steady flow of features and to allow improvements A technical strategy Continuous delivery and automated testing from day 1 Impact mapping to create... Read more
Over the past 6 months, I’ve been working with a customer who develops hardware appliances. They were facing a challenge with complaints from users about one of their products, which appeared a few months in. Needless to say, the cause of such bugs requires long and thorough investigation. Context The hardware appliance runs a real-time OS, which... Read more
