I'm Niklas Sundbaum! I write about software engineering, agile, management and leadership in various permutations.
Speed is a key feature of successful development teams and organizations. As software developers, it is our job to turn abstract visions and ideas into something that users can touch, feel and use, the faster the better.
1:1s can be the most dreaded meeting of the week, both for managers and employees. But they are also one of the most important tools in a manager’s toolbox. Properly and consistently executed, 1:1s hold the keys for going from decent to great relationships with your reports. And having a good working relationship with your team members truly makes your life so much easier as a manager. It allows…
During recent years, I’ve come across (and worked with) three basic variations of the Tech Lead role. While the essence of the role remains relatively constant, each flavor adds some interesting characteristics and comes with its own pros and cons.
So, what is a Tech Lead and why do we need one? As with most roles within our field, there is a fairly wide spectrum of definitions. However, most people tend to agree that the role’s primary focus is to take responsibility for the technical quality of deliveries within a defined area and that it includes a mix of programming, architecture, project management and leadership. It is usually not a…
Over the years, I’ve seen way too many engineers get off to a bad start during their onboarding process. And even though the evidence is very much anecdotal, I think it is fair to say that the onboarding phase is one of the riskiest parts of an employee’s lifecycle at a company. Get it wrong, and you risk losing your hard earned recruitment or have them create a mess in your team that you’ll spend…
“This code base is a mess, we need to spend more time on refactoring”. Chances are, you’ve heard this complaint from developers in your team on more than one occasion. Probably even said it yourself a few times. And while most of us can sympathize with a statement like this, the analysis usually doesn’t go much deeper than that. Way too often, the next step is simply to put your noise cancelling…
When joining a company as a technical manager, one of the major challenges in front of you is to learn the details of the technical platform(s) that you are responsible for. You are most likely not coding any more, or at least not making any major contributions to the code base, and with your days filled with meetings and other management duties, it can be a real challenge to find the time to…
In my opinion, one of the best, and perhaps also one of the most underappreciated, developments in our industry the last couple of years is the State of DevOps report and its companion book, Accelerate, that presents the findings and the research behind it in more detail.
Recently, I decided to dig a little deeper into consumer driven contracts and more specifically the Pact framework. In essence, consumer driven contracts are about having consumers of a service define their expectations (i.e. contract) on that service in terms of tests that can be executed on both the consumer and the service provider side. Such tests can then be run as part of the CI build of the…