My Profile Photo

Skylar Watson

"The biggest communication problem is we don't listen to understand. We listen to reply"

  1. Build Visibility and Remote Teams

    Working in a global team presents a lot of challenges around co-location with regards to build status visibility. When working remote, you don’t always have the luxury of hardware like strobe lights. Or even co-workers alerting you when an incident transpires. The Virtual Team Survey Report cites the pace of decision making as one of the most significant challenges faced by global teams. Being able to react to a build issue quickly starts by understanding a problem has occurred. …

    • on CI

  2. Outcome Metrics in a Microbrewery

    In the early stages of co-founding a microbrewery, there was a lot of focus on process improvement. How can we reduce material and operation cost while maintaining consistency for consumers? Identifying the outcomes above was only the beginning, we needed to understand how to get there; a journey we were eager to venture down. …

    • on metrics

  3. Effective Communication Through Sentiment Analysis

    Being able to articulate our thoughts and ideas efficiently is a crucial part of our daily lives. When we’re unable to communicate our messages efficiently, we begin to decrease our effectiveness in our collaborations. In fact, according to Queens University, “39% of surveyed employees worldwide say people in their organization don’t collaborate enough.” By becoming more aware of how we’re collaborating with our peers, we enable our relationships to foster. …

    • on communication metrics

  4. Getting Trapped by Combinatorial Testing

    As developers, we want our unit tests to fail for a single reason. When we’re unable to achieve this, we spend countless hours or days fixing tests that failed by side-effect. Part of the reason this schism happens is that testing scenarios are written at the wrong level. Many developers and organizations suffer from this and are stuck in a trap of the ‘traditional” testing model (inverted pyramid.) …

    • on junit testing

  5. Single Method Unit Tests

    Often, I’ve found myself coming across unit tests that appear to be testing all scenarios within a single method. Common places I seem to find these types of tests are: Mappers, Repositories, and Factories. If the code was truly test driven, then there may be absolutely nothing wrong with the solution. The question that I’d propose: Could we improve the readability and maintainability by having each scenario in a separate test? …

    • on junit

  6. Continuous Integration Build Status

    I’m writing this entry to expand on issues of failing builds and responsibilities that team members should consider owning. The following definition may be useful for those who aren’t familiar with the term Continuous Integration. …

    • on CI

  7. Setting up a Windows Git Server using SSH

    In this article we will install Git on our client and server, setup SSH, push our project to our server, and finally allow our client(s) to clone our repository. For the purpose of the scripts below; I’ve installed Git in C:\Git and CopSSH in C:\ICW. …

    • on git