Wireless Logic
Group lead for Software Engineering teams, practices, tooling and delivery processes.
Steve Bennett - Engineering Leader
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Latest posts
Can One Team Do It All?
Once you’ve worked on a few different software projects, you notice that different processes tend to work better for some and not others. For example, you may have experienced the pace and immediate feedback of working on a brand-new capability, made possible by the seeming lack of process and a focus on writing “just enough” code to make the feature a reality. In a different…
Stash
Responsible for UK Engineering, Operations Tooling, Identity Verification, Authentication, User Profiles, Subscription Tier Management and Fraud prevention.
I'm new to Engineering Management, what books should I read?
There are so many great books that I could recommend for a new manager. Narrowing down the list has been challenging! We’re fortunate that much is written on the practice of management. In addition to that, many Engineering Managers have detailed the specifics of working with technology teams. However, this makes it difficult to know what to focus on first. I’ve picked the first 10 I…
I'm new to this, what do you recommend?
Recently I was asked what resources I would recommend for someone moving from an engineering role and taking on a management role. Many people become a manager without clear training and development plan in place from their employer. “Congrats - you’re now a manager. Good luck!”. In this environment, finding your own sources for development is critical, yet, there’s so much…
Are you ok?
Life is weird right now. It’s like nothing I’ve ever experienced before and everyone reading this is likely to have undergone significant changes to the way they live, work and play. I started at Stash a week before the UK lockdown was announced. Stash took the decision the week before to move all their staff to remote work, so for the first time I’ve been through a remote…
On Leaving Alfresco
This week, after over 3 and a half years, I left Alfresco. The decision to leave was a difficult one, but ultimately, it’s the right move for both the company and me. My connection with Alfresco goes back further than the recent years working for the company. Back in 2010, while working at Yell, I was part of a team tasked with creating a knowledge base based on (the now deprecated) Alfresco…
Getting better feedback
In many organisations, the request for feedback comes as part of a performance review cycle. During this process, an individual will review their goals, assess their career development plan and reflect on feedback from their peers. As humans, we have a bias to want to be near people that look and work as we do. This bias means that we tend to notice when people act or behave differently from the…
Comparing the performance of agile teams
Recently I got into a conversation about measuring the performance of Engineering teams. The teams in question are following the Scrum framework and have decided to use story points for estimating the complexity of the work. In the conversation, we were talking about the validity of measuring individual team performance and whether one should use this data to compare the performance across teams.…
9 months! Really?
It’s been almost nine months since my last blog entry. I’ve never been a prolific writer as you can see this in the gaps between posts. I think I’ve found the reason why. Recently I came across the article Speed Matters by James Somers. Right there, in the second paragraph of the article, Somers summed up exactly my relationship with this blog: “If every time you write a…
Removing Facebook (again)
Late in March 2018 I decided to delete my Facebook account. This isn’t the first time I’d decided to do this. In 2014, as Facebook turned 10, I decided to put my own usage of the social network on pause . This didn’t last too long and only a few months later I’d decided to reactivate my account. In 2015, in another attempt to reduce my usage of Facebook, I removed the apps…
Career Paths and Circles
I’ve been spending a fair amount of time recently reworking our career paths. Our current documents are heavily based on the work by Radford , which defines 6 levels for each job family. Whilst our career path was very well defined and comprehensive, we are finding that the documentation is a little incomprehensible and causes difficulty as people try to self-assess their position on the career…
Owning your mistakes
I believe that one of the most powerful things you can do as a leader is to own your mistakes. Nobody is perfect, and therefore it’s inevitable that you will make mistakes. Often, holding a leadership or management position means that these mistakes are magnified and have a impact on many more people. So why admit your mistakes? Wouldn’t this be showing a weakness? Wouldn’t it show that your…
The Power of Sensible Defaults
Choosing the “best tool for the job” is a mantra that many software engineers repeat when asked to explain their choice of tool, language or framework. In some cases, this choice is right, however far too many times in my career I’ve seen “best tool for the job” loosely translate to whatever was top of Hacker News this week. The unintended consequence of always choosing the “best tool for the job”…
Lead Dev London 2017 Field Report
I was fortunate enough to spend the last couple of days at Lead Developer 2017 in London. The conference has been described as a leadership and management conference dressed up as a technical conference. It’s one of my “must-attend” conferences of the year. There were some clear themes from the talks this year, with perhaps the strongest message coming across that as technical leads and managers…
Career Development Planning Questions
Part of the role of an Engineering Manager is to help others to achieve their career aspirations. However, it’s not always easy for people to articulate the direction they hope their career will take them. For some, it can be difficult to describe their ideal future role, or to answer that “where will you be in 5 years time?” question. I have struggled with this question too. I…
Finding great places to work
Early today I tweeted this, and I thought it was worth giving a little more detail as to what was underlying this pithy sound-bite. Over the last year, I’ve changed companies twice. At the start of 2016 I left eBay and started a new role with Marks and Spencer. Later in the year I left Marks and Spencer to join Alfresco. In both cases, I’d become frustrated with my current company and thought that…
Books from 2016 - Part Two
This is part two of my review of books I’ve read in 2016. Part One can be found here . My complete “Year in Books” can also be found on Goodreads . Continuous Delivery: Reliable Software Releases through Build, Test, and Deployment Automation by Jez Humble, David Farley # Quite simply, this is a must read for any modern software engineer, or for anyone associated with building…
Books from 2016 - Part One
At the start of 2016, I made a resolution to read more. I managed to do this, and read more this year than I’ve been able to do in recent years. Most of my choices have been leadership or management books, or those related to sport. It’s also been mostly non-fiction. Over the coming posts, I’m going to share the books I’ve read this year, and my thoughts on them. Part one,…
Micro-Frustrations
What are the little things that annoy you in your current role? What are the things, that when they get in the way, make your job just 10% more difficult than it needs to be? If your workplaces have been anything like mine, I bet there’s at least one thing that you can come up with that annoys you. Even if it is something little. Let’s look at an example. These are the kind of annoyances…
Engineering Managers Slack Team
🗣 Calling all Engineering Managers! 🗣 # Engineering Management can be an incredibly lonely place. This is especially true if you are new to the role. You’ve probably moved from a role where the 1’s and 0’s were the key thing you were worried about. You focussed on the technology, and obsessed over the product. You measured your output in features, bug-fixes or commits. At the…
An API for Teams
“In computer programming, an Application Programming Interface (API) is a set of routine definitions, protocols, and tools for building software an applications A good API makes it easier to develop a program by providing all the building blocks, which are then put together by the programmer.” – Wikipedia Anyone writing code will already be familiar with APIs. Whether it’s the API…
An updated Joel Test
Wow. Next month it’ll be 16 years since the original publication of the Joel Test . In case you’re not aware of the Joel Test, it’s a simple 12 question check for evaluating how good a software team is. It’s not meant to be exhaustive, and scoring is simple - 1 point for each question you can answer yes to. If you’re scoring 10 or lower, you’ve got serious…
Alfresco
Leading a team of 70+ Engineers to deliver the Alfresco Digital Business Platform, which brings together Content, Process and Governance Services to enable some of the worlds largest enterprises to improve the efficiency of their businesses. The Platform Engineering team is accountable for delivery of the platform and services on which applications (both in-house and external) are built.
Living in the Echo Chamber
Yesterday was a momentous day in British history. It was the day after the EU Referendum, and the day we all found out that the people of Britain had voted in favour of leaving the European Union . I’ve never been affected by the result of an election as much as I was yesterday. Britain felt different, and I didn’t feel part of it. I voted Remain, but it’s not the way I voted which I feel…
What are Acceptance Criteria?
How do you know when something is “Done”? What do you use to measure “completeness” of the thing you are doing? In agile development, User Stories are often used to define the thing to be done. The user story outlines the goal that a user wants to achieve, and the reason why a user wants to achieve this goal. It provides the who, what and why for the thing to be done. User…
Marks and Spencer
Engineering manager looking after 16 developers in the shopping (marksandspencer.com) area of M&S Digital. Responsible for pastoral care, career development and mentoring of primarily back-end developers working on applications supporting the marksandspencer.com platform.
Developing without a Safety Net
Recently, an article about the changes to the development process at Yahoo caught my eye. In a move to improve quality, speed and efficiency, Yahoo removed the “QA Team” from their development process. According to the article, the change resulted in an increased focus on automation. Checks previously completed by “error-prone” humans were now done by code. If the checks…
Navigation and Pair Programming
I’ve become a bit of a fan of pair programming over the years. I enjoy working through problems with another developer, as I find it usually leads to a deeper understanding of the problem, the domain and the improves the quality of the code that is produced. I also almost always learn something. Pair programming is the name of a development practice where two developers work together to solve a…
My guide to technical telephone interviews
Such is my life at the moment, I started writing this article on my smartphone whilst commuting home from work. The reason for this? I’m busy at the moment because my team is hiring. I spend most of my time in the office reviewing CV, speaking to recruiters, headhunting candidates, and, of course, conducting interviews. I’ve written about what I look for in a good CV, so I thought it…
Book Review: Extreme Programming Explained
I’m lucky enough, at least in my opinion, to work in a team that values extreme programming practices. It’s not true of every team at eBay, but it’s a growing trend. Extreme Programming (XP) is something I’m comfortable with, and I hope to help other teams see the benefits, and start to put some of the practices into play. As part of helping other teams, I thought…
Screening technical CVs
Recently I’ve been spending a great deal of time screening technical CVs. What struck me during this process is generally how bad engineering CVs are. There are some great candidates with fantastic, concise and to the point CVs, yet these are few and far between. In the main, I’ve found that I’m faced with a multi-page document, which, despite it’s size, tells me little…
Stop mocking me
Unit testing can be hard. And it gets harder when you have to test code with with external dependencies. The way you deal with this will depend on whether you are a classical or mockist programmer . Most people don’t exist at the extremes, but instead are somewhere along the line. This isn’t a bad thing. Being pragmatic in your decisions shows that you’re a mature engineer .…
The future for manual testing
Is being a manual tester a dead-end career as @jsonmez says in his video response for Simple Programmer? I’m a developer and I’ll admit that I’ve looked down on testers in the past. It’s not something I’m proud of. I was wrong. The argument that you need to be a developer to progress with a career in technology is harming our industry. Videos and comments like the…
Thinking about Senior Engineers
What makes a person a Senior Software Engineer? Is it their technical knowledge? The amount of languages, libraries or development techniques they know? Or maybe it’s just an indicator of the number of years experience they have? In so many cases, you become a Senior engineer through a combination of these reasons. The best “Senior” engineers I’ve worked with have got there…
You can keep your bug-tracker, just use it less!
I recently published an article on my blog titled “You don’t need a bug tracker” . This article was also syndicated on DZone . Following the publication I received some feedback on it’s contents. I’d like to take this opportunity to clear up a few things. The title # I’m aware that the title is inflammatory. It’s also a little disingenuous. Of course, our…
You don't need a bug-tracker
If you’re writing software, chances are you use some sort of issue tracking tool. Or to be more precise, you most likely have a bug tracker. Jira, Bugzilla, heck, even an Excel spreadsheet. If you’re diligent every time you find a bug you’ll create a ticket in the tool. Most bug-tracking tools will guide you to add a severity and assign a priority. The aim of classifying a defect…
Øredev 2014 - Day Three
I’ve finally got round to adding my notes from the final day of Øredev 2014. It’s taken a little longer than I anticipated due to travel and work commitments. You can find the rest of my notes in part one and part two . Opening Keynote: The most human human - Brian Christian # Brian opened the final day of Øredev with a talk focussed on the Turing test and the different approaches that…
Øredev 2014 - Day Two
This is the second in a three part series giving an overview of the sessions I attended at Øredev 2014. Part one of the series can be found here . Opening Keynote: Getting comfortable, being uncomfortable - Keavy McMinn - Github # Day 2 started with a Keynote for Keavy McMinn, a self-described maker from Github. Keavy has a passion for fine art and used the keynote to walk the audience through…
Øredev 2014 - Day One
I attended Øredev 2014 to present a talk with Ben Kelly on the relationship between testers and developers at eBay. The details of the talk we gave can be seen here . Whilst at the conference, I took the opportunity to attend a number of other sessions. Øredev is a conference with a wide range of talks covering topics such as agile development, Java, .Net, testing, user experience and front-end…
Waiter, there's test in my dev! - Øredev 2014
This week I completed my first talk at a major developer conference, Øredev in Malmö. I found it both nerve-racking and exciting in the lead up to the talk, but once I got started I soon settled in and concentrated on the content. I was extremely fortunate to be able to do this talk with Ben Kelly , an experienced tester and fellow development team lead. His experience of doing these kind of talks…
Setting goals for effective iterations
All agile teams building software do it every day. The time might vary. Ours is at 9.45am. Some do it just before lunch, others at the end of the day but if you’re working in an agile team, it’s likely that you have a daily stand-up. As an estimate, I think I’ve attended over 1000 daily stand-up meetings over the past 5 years. With all the agile teams I’ve worked with in…
A tester in development
Ben has superpowers. He’s no different to any of us in that way. I consider my superpowers to be in the area of agile team development. Other engineers on my team have superpowers in mobile web. Another lists javascript whilst someone else counts algorithms and data structures as theirs. Ben’s superpowers are a little different. They’re something which sets him apart from the…
Putting Facebook on Pause
In the week that Facebook turned 10, I decided to rethink my own use of the social network. I’ve been a Facebook member since 2006 at a time when you needed an academic email address to join. Eight years ago my Facebook friends contained other academics and alumni. Following Facebook’s decision to open up registration my lists swelled with family members, co-workers and old…
Life at hibu
This post has been sitting in my drafts folder for almost a year now, and the relaunch of my blog is a great opportunity to get it out there. I’ve made some edits to make it more relevant to today, but the main points still stand. About 18 months ago I decided to leave hibu. This was a difficult decision to make as I got on well with my colleagues and especially with my team.
eBay
Agile team lead, with line management responsibility for 6 engineers. Active coder, practicing TDD, ATDD, and pair‐programming. Delivering software through a mixture of Scrum, XP and Lean engineering. Acting as team coach for people development, and process improvement through introspection and adaptation.
Yell
Technical team lead for agile product delivery team with line management responsibility for 3 engineers and Scrum team delivery. Accountable for Yell.com releases, managing multiple team integration, deployments and experiential testing.
BT
Graduate software developer building Windows client applications using C#, Java and Eclipse Rich Client Platform. Managed summer internship students investing the development of Android apps using Agile and XP techniques.
Engineering Managers Slack
An open community for Engineering Managers, Team Lead, Tech leads or any other role which involves managing people working in technology. Find out more
Lead Dev London Meet-up
I’m one of the hosts of the London Lead Dev Meet-up. We aim to deliver at least 4 meet-ups per year with speakers talking on topics relevant to Engineering Leaders of all levels. Find out more