our posts tagged “communication”

Back in September 2020, our own Eric Wagoner wrote about his first experience with Cypress, touching on its ease of setup, easy to read and write syntax for JavaScript developers, and some of the team-related benefits of incorporating Cypress testing into a project. Since then, we’ve continued to work with several clients using Cypress - whether building out a testing infrastructure from scratch or helping them expand their tests and testing capability. We’ve learned a lot over the past few years working with Cypress and in this post, I’ll share some of the biggest benefits we noticed both from a QA and development perspective.

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We recently were a part of a project with what was, in many ways, a typical successful startup. The company makes hardware for a niche market, powered by their own firmware and driven by a suite of web applications running both on a server and locally as Electron apps. They make a great product that is disrupting the space and they’re growing rapidly, both in company size and number of users.

What started as a small integrated team has spun up to several groups overseeing various aspects of the product and as that happened the developers became somewhat siloed from the QA folks. Each group had its own process for keeping the quality high in the face of rapid growth, namely thorough unit tests on the development side and a series of step-by-step documents used by a number of testers to manually go through every page and every button of the web applications. Releases were coming quickly and the testers were spending hours upon hours methodically testing only to have to start all over again when another release came out of development. They were overworked and almost overwhelmed, and called Infinity for help.

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Here at Infinity, one of our core precepts — coined by former Infin-ite Shawn Moore — is the notion that “tickets are free”. The idea is that you should never waste time wondering “should I make a ticket for this?” Instead, just make the damn ticket! In the immortal words of John Blutarsky, “it don’t cost nuthin’.”

With an opening paragraph like that, you’re probably expecting some sort of listicle of all the ways adopting our “tickets are free” credo will help make your software development efforts better and turbocharge your coders to new heights of productivity. That is not what you’re gonna get, however. Nope! Instead, I’m going to talk to you about how tickets are free… because they’re not free like beer, but instead are free like puppies. And then I’ll share ways to make sure your freely created tickets are usefully propelling your project forward, instead of bogging it down.

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Are you trying to bring modern development practices to a …less-than-modern software development environment?

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When working with non-technical clients, often their preferred means of exchanging structured data is via spreadsheets. Using a custom tool is not always practical due to cost or training time constraints, and using a type of document that doesn't have its own standard editor (such as XML or JSON) will generally result in having to deal with malformed files on a regular basis, since these files are often edited by hand.

Excel is the only program for managing structured data that is widely used by both technical and non-technical people, and being able to leverage that structure can make the whole data exchange process much smoother, even though it can be frustrating at times.

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I joined Infinity a little over two years ago. Came from a much more traditional corporate culture. A culture contained in traditional brick-and-mortar buildings. You could stop by a coworker’s cube and bump into folks in the lunchroom. Infinity has no brick-and-mortar home. We’re a distributed workforce with our ~25 people spread out all across the US. Each of us works from our home. Our water cooler is an IRC channel called #general.

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Any industry that relies on "communication" is at risk of failure, or partial failure, due to mitigated speech versus direct speech. That failure can be as simple as a missed deadline, or as catastrophic as a complete failure of the project.

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