Five for Friday – 8/11/2023

The countdown to the Iowa State Fair is finally over. Whether you prefer your butter deep-fried on a stick, or in the form of the famous Butter Cow, you can find it at the fair. The deep-fried butter on a stick may have been retired, but there are plenty of other food-on-a-stick options, plus concerts and just the general enjoyment of people watching. The end of the fair marks the end of summer in Iowa, with kids heading back to school later this month. So enjoy your summer before it ends, and check out these great blog posts.

• I've heard many ideas for improving your daily standup meetings (meetings are for making decisions, not for status reports). If you agree that “the standard daily standup is outdated and ineffective,” you can find some alternatives in Standups are Outdated.
• I generally believe that computers (and by extension automated tests) will only do what you tell them to do (case in point, ChatGPT can't do Calculus), but there’s room for Debunking the Big Lie that Test Automation Can't Find Bugs. After all, automation is just another tool. The key is how you use it.
• If software testers felt threatened by the advent of test automation, test automation engineers are now feeling the threat posed by AI-generated test code. According to Jason Arbon, AI Broke Test Automation. My take on AI is similar to my take on test automation: AI is just a tool. AI won't take your job, but people who leverage AI will.
• 20 years ago this month, I started my career in IT. I've been an employee, contractor, and consultant for countless companies. I've had great onboarding experiences with companies that had a well-organized process, and I've experienced companies with a bad or non-existent process. If you're looking to improve your onboarding process, I recommend checking out this Employee Handbook Template from Open Org.
• What is Developer Experience? If you want to improve your developer experience or just want to find out what that means, there are lots of things to check out in this blog post. Maybe you've heard of developer relations and want to know What is Developer Relations? Or maybe you're like me and you don't know the difference. Check out why DX is the new DevRel.

Thanks for reading!!

Special thanks to Alan Page, who shared several of these items on his own “Five for Friday” posts in the past few weeks. Whether it takes me a week or a month to read something, it's still new to me and worth sharing.